ODE TO NIGHTINGALE

John Keats (1795-1821)

Keats and Romantic Poetry

One of the major English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy through classical legend. Despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25, he devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. Keats's poetry describes the beauty of natural world and art as the vehicles for his poetic imagination. His skill with poetic sound reproduces this sensuous experience for his reader. Keats's poetry involves over his brief career from this love of nature and art into a deep compassion for humanity. He gave voice to the spirit of Romanticism in literature when he wrote, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination." Twentieth-century poet T.S Eliot judged Keats's letters to be 'the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet," for their acute reflections on poetry, poets, and the imagination.

SYNOPSIS AND SUMMARY OF POEM

Ode: Lyric Poem

Nightingale: European songbird noted for its melodious nocturnal song (बुलबुल)

The poem begins as the speaker starts to feel disoriented from listening to the song of the nightingale, as if he had just drunken something really, really strong. He feels bittersweet happiness at the thought of the nightingale's carefree life.

The speaker wishes he had a special wine distilled directly from the earth. He wants to drink such a wine and fade into the forest with the nightingale. He wants to escape the worries and concerns of life, age, and time.

He uses poetry to join the nightingale's night-time world, deep in the dark forest where hardly any moonlight can reach. He can't see any of the flowers or plants around him, but he can smell them. He thinks it wouldn't be so bad to die at night in the forest, with no one around except the nightingale singing.

But the nightingale can't die. The nightingale must be immortal, because so many different kinds of generations of people have heard its song throughout history, everyone from clowns and emperors to Biblical characters to people in fantasy stories.

The speaker's vision is interrupted when the nightingale flies away and leaves him alone. He feels abandoned and disappointed that his imagination is not strong enough to create its own reality. He is left confused and bewildered, not knowing the difference between reality and dreams.

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb (asleep), as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his drowsy numbness is not from jealousy of the nightingale's happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely: he is too happy that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid (among) some unseen plot of green trees and shadows. In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the unconsciousness of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine that would taste like the country and like peasant dances, and let him leave the world unseen and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known. In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through alcohol but through poetry, which will give him view less wings. He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade (clearing), where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess the in embalmed (maintained) darkness. In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often been half in love with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounding by the nightingale's song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than ever, and he longs to cease upon the midnight with no pain while the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically (delightfully) forth (away/ahead in time). If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would have ears in vain and be no longer able to hear.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not born for death. He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns (rude or vulgar fool/a person who amuses others by ridiculous behaviour), by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over the foam (fizz) of perilous (Fraught with danger) seas, in faery lands forlorn (marked by or showing hopelessness). In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls (costs/prices) like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale's music was a vision, or a waking dreams. Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.

Critical Analysis of the Poem

With "Ode to a nightingale," Keats's speakers begin his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of nightingale's fluid music. Hearing the song of nightingale, the speaker longs flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird's state through alcohol-in the second stanza, he longs for a "draught of vintage" to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being "charioted by Bacchus and his pards" (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in "Indolence," 'the viewless wings of poesy."

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale's music and lets the speaker; in imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to when his meditation causes him to utter the word "forlorn," he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is –an imagined escape from the inescapable ("Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well / as she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf'). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

But in the nightingale's song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace poesy's "viewless wings" at last. The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favour of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, but here there is no light; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he "cannot see what flowers are at his feet. He has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression-the nightingale's song-is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.