Introduction
In John Keats’ Ode to a nightingale and in Alfred Tennyson’s Crossing the bar, we can observe their ideas about death. Both poets are in the later stage of their lives and they are starting to see death as something closer every day. The influence of the era they had to lived in will be decisive in their positions. “Each author will manage to approach his questions and thoughts of death in a more concrete manner. Both poets need to understand the end towards which their lives are heading.”(1)
On the one hand, representing the ideals of romanticism, Keats is able to find a way to scape from that situation, and manages to feel relieved .Poetry is the weapon he uses to do so. But on the other, we see how Tennyson, as a Victorian poet, does not find any other comfort than asking their relatives not to suffer because of his death. He is more concerned thinking in the mysterious journey he is about to begin. (12), (13)
Keats’ Ode to a nightingale
1st Stanza
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
2nd Stanza
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
3rd Stanza
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30
4th Stanza
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
5th Stanza
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
6th Stanza
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
7th Stanza
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70
8th Stanza
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80 (18)
Context
“Written in May, 1819,it was first published in 'Annals of the Fine Arts' in July of the same year. Referred to by critics of the time as "the longest and most personal of the odes," the poem describes Keats' journey into the state of Negative Capability(“state of intentional openmindedness that has many parallels in other writers' literary and philosophical stances”) (16). The poem explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being the most personal to Keats, making a direct reference to the death in 1818 of his brother, Tom”.(3)
“Interestingly, in both the original draft and in its first publication, it is titled 'Ode to the Nightingale'. The title was altered by Keats's publishers. Twenty years after the poet's death, Joseph Severn painted the famous portrait 'Keats listening to a nightingale on Hampstead Heath'”.(6)
Charles Brown, a friend with whom Keats was living when he composed this poem, wrote,:
“In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale”.(7)
“It might give us a better understanding of the poem to know that, at the time of writing, Keats was in a poor state of health and probably suspected that he had contracted tuberculosis. At that time tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called then, was a virtually incurable disease that had spread in epidemic proportions throughout Europe. His brother Tom had died of tuberculosis only months before”(8)
“In retrospect, after the event, Keats describes his experience as a somatoform (bodily) dissociation, an out-of-body experience, or what parapsychologists term an OBE. Others might call it a "near-death" experience. During a critical illness, such as a heart attack, the self may appear to rise out of the dying body and to rush down a tunnel towards a light, only returning to the body when its trauma ceases. Both out-of-body and near-death experiences, available to a very large percentage of the population, are widely documented by those who had them and by other observers. A typical OBE begins when sensory input is disrupted, sometimes by drugs. The mind then feels itself float upwards out of the body to a height that has been termed "bird's-eye" or tree-high. Often the ascent may seem like traveling through a tunnel towards a bright light. Experiencing itself being divided into two, or having a dissociated double, the self may feel itself near death. Afterwards, when the mind returns to the body, the person recalls his experience, not as a dream during REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, but as vivid or wide-awake dreaming.” (21)
“Keats did not write "Ode to a Nightingale" as testimony about an "out-of-body experience"; it would not be recognized or named for more than a century. On the other hand, neither does Keats appear to invent this dissociative event or to copy it from other poets. Anyone can meditate, one fine, warm morning, about escaping from the harsh world of humanity into the countryside and its healing natural beauty.”(21)
“A major concern in "Ode to a Nightingale" is Keats's perception of the conflicted nature of human life, i.e., the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness of feeling, life/death, mortal/immortal, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection” (7)
“The composition and publication of Ode to a Nightingale is a soothing moment in a life marked with tragedy and rejection. Although simple, it is virtually an ideal story of creation and publication; a natural, unconcerned, and instantaneous exit from the poetís mind to paper and from the poet to a public audience”(5)
Ode to a Nightingale follows the romantic principles , showing “a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature”.(20) Stressing “strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature”.(20)
“Incapable of finding a reconciliation for the contradictions of life, Keats does not accept the transience of all earthly joys with resignation, trying to seize his best moment. On the other hand, he tries to find something which can give the illusion of permanence in a world of flux and change.” (25) “After having considered an intoxication of wine as a way to forget the world, Keats resorts to poetry for oblivion in the surrounding beauty of the woods. He longs for death, the only means to fix an intense sublime moment for ever and prevent it from changing.” (25)
“The whole ode is grounded on the contrast between the poet’s awareness of the transience of human life and his aspiration to some form of permanence: the poet makes several attempts to escape from the world of pain, death and transience (through wine, poetry, death....), but nothing is able to defeat this sorrow.” (25)
Poem analysis:
At first Glance
When we read the poem at first, the first thing that we notice is that the poet is trying to scape from the painful reality. Then we realize how the poet finds relief hearing a bird's singing. Later he does not consider it enough relief and tries to reach the nightingale's beauty by merging with it using his imagination. But then something is wrong, he starts to realize that his condition of human being is a huge obstacle and then he wakes up. He has failed to reach the perfect state of evasion. He does not know if it has been a dream or he actually has been able to hear that song.
More in depth analysis
“The ode consists of eight stanzas, each containing ten lines. The rhyme scheme (ababcdecde) has a link to the Sonnet form, with each stanza uniting a Shakespearian quatrain (abab) with a Petrarchian sestet (cdecde). This stanzaic prosody is characteristic of Keats's Odes, and may well have evolved from his intensive work and theory on the sonnet form (see, for example, 'If by Dull Rhymes our English Must be Chained')”.(3) “The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. "Nightingale" also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except "To Psyche," which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in "Nightingale" is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats's most basic scheme throughout the odes.” (4)
“The opening lines of the poem make use of heavy vowel sounds to slow them down (eg. "heart," "aches," "drowsy" and "numbness"). Hemlock, the effects of which are used as a comparison to the symptoms Keats is now experiencing, was the state poison of Ancient Greece, which is another link to Keats' obsession with the myths and legends of that time. "Opiate" is another drug that Keats describes as having similar effects as the song of the nightingale”.(3)
Stanza I: “The poet falls into a reverie while listening to an actual nightingale sing. He feels joy and pain, an ambivalent response”(7). “He feels numb, 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 envy 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 some unseen plot of green trees and shadows”.(4) “Birds have always made ideal symbols of poets and poetry, first, because like poets they sing, and second, because like poets they fly; that is, they soar above earthbound men and seem to exist in a kind of Platonic realm of perfect and unchanging beauty. It is in response to this beauty, Keats tells us in the first stanza of the ode, that he feels numbed to the everyday, sensual world of experience and change, and one with the serene and ageless loveliness of the bird's song” (22)
Keats seems to be enjoying the situation without any kind of envy. It is an ideal way of finding relief since he already knows that the time of his death is near. At first he seems the resign himself with that situation, just hearing the nightingale singing seems to be enough for him. We cannot really guess how the poem will continue, he has found a way to evade himself from the suffering of life. Although he is aware of his fate, he does not want to renounce to one of the pleasures in life. The happiness in nature seems to be contagious. And he finds himself, in some way, related with the nightingale, since both, poetry and bird, can see life from a different point of view, from a more general and higher perspective. (4), (7), (22)
Stanza II: “Wanting to escape from the pain of a joy-pain reality, the poet begins to move into a world of imagination or fantasy. He calls for wine. His purpose is clearly not to get drunk. Rather he associates wine with some quality or state he is seeking.” (7) “Keats longs to follow the nightingale into that realm, and thinking first of alcohol as the agent of change, invokes the spirit of wine in one of his most ardent and sensual passages” (22)
He is now aware that he could reach a new level of evasion. For that purpose, Keats knows that he will have to leave his physical body to merge with the nightingale. Throughout centuries, poets have always resorted to alcohol as a tool to reach further levels of inspiration and evasion, but Keats is looking for a deeper way of evading reality. (22), (7), (23)
Stanza III: “His awareness of the real world pulls him back from the imagined world of drink-joy”. (7) “He explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: "the weariness, the fever, and the fret" of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth "grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," and "beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes."”(4) “The mention of the youth who "grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," for example, might well be an allusion to Tom Keats, the younger brother whom the poet nursed through his long, last struggle with consumption. But the bitterest of all man's sorrows, as it emerges from the catalogue of woes in the third stanza, is the terrible disease of time” (22) “”..disease of time which the song of the nightingale particularly transcends, and the poet, yearning for the immortality of art, seeks another way to become one with the bird.(22)
It is here when he realizes that human beings have a disadvantage compared with all the other living beings in the world. The human being has consciousness, knows that he is nothing but a prey waiting for a known hunter. Death is something all human beings are aware of, that is what makes it so difficult for him to merge with the nightingale. He does not know how will overcome this problem in order to reach that degree of happiness. (7), (22), (23)
The ability to think is nothing but a terrible tool that reminds us every single day our fate and make us impossible to enjoy nature and life as any other animal would do.
Stanza IV: “The speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through alcohol ("Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards"), but through poetry, which will give him "viewless wings." He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the branches”.(4) “Here the metaphoric significance of the bird seems most clear. Like the nightingale, poesy, too, has wings, though because poesy is more insubstantial than the bird, more purely a thing of the spirit, its wings are viewless (cf. the "unheard melodies" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"). Yet the poet maintains the tension, the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, by immediately referring to the dull brain that "perplexes and retards," that pulls man back from the heights his fancy and intuition would help him to scale. This conflict lies at the heart of the poem” (22)
Now the poet has already found an appropriate way to follow the nightingale's steps. Poetry will survive and remain among us forever. He is now aware that a part of him could overcome fate. There are more similitudes between poetry and a bird than between a mere human being and an bird. But even having found what he was looking for, he is still aware of the difficulty of the situation given the differences between both beings. When he is about to reach the desirable level of evasion, a strong and evil force, the consciousness, prevents him from achieving his goal. (22), (4), (7), (23)
Stanza V: “The speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess them "in embalmed darkness": white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, "the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves."”(4) “Because the poet cannot see in the darkness, he must rely on his other senses” (7)
“while the spirit is roaming in regions of pure light, the body remains below in darkness, and the body has its legitimate claims. The sensual pull of the world is nothing to be despised” (22)
The poet's body is some kind of burden which will not let him to feel a complete evasion experience. It is a human characteristic , we are imprisoned in our flesh. We can try to find ways to evade ourselves from reality but our physical existence will always make us return to reality. Keats is aware that human beings cannot enjoy of a complete evasive experience since we will always have disadvantages compared with other living beings. Although Keats tries to justify this characteristic of the human being, we can sense how frustrating must be for him not to reach a higher state of mind. This can be considered as a tragic moment. From here, Keats' state of mind will be returning irremediably to its original situation. (22), (23)
Stanza VI: “The poet begins to distance himself from the nightingale, which he joined in imagination in stanzas IV and V. Keats yearns to die, a state which he imagines as only joyful, as pain-free, and to merge with the bird's song”. (7) “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. Surrounded 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 forth. 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.”(4)“Perhaps death is the answer; perhaps death will transport him to the realm of the nightingale. After all, death, like wine and poetry, takes a man out of himself and conducts him into the region of pure, unchanging spirit.” (22)
Keats thinks as death as a possible solution for his problem. He knows that since he is chained to his physical body he cannot reach the nightingale's freedom. Here is where he starts to think then in death as something not so bad, but it would be preferable if death came softly, so he did not suffer in the process of leaving his body. But, on the other hand, Keats is aware of the terrible fact that he would not be able to hear the great singing of the nightingale without the human physical ability of hearing. Quite a dilemma is now facing Keats. Death and freedom in the realm of the nightingale, or life with pain but with the good things our senses can provide us? (7), (4), (22)
Stanza VII: “Keats moves from his awareness of his own mortality in the preceding stanza to the perception of the bird's immortality. On a literal level, his perception is wrong; this bird will die. Some readers, including very perceptive ones, see his characterization of the bird as immortal as a flaw.”(7) “Interpreting the line literally may be a misreading, because the bird has clearly become a symbol for the poet”.(7) “He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over "the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."”(4)
As the sing of the nightingale has always be heard and will always, Keats seems to begin to understand the insurmountable obstacle human being is unable to overcome. Nightingale's fabulous singing has survived throughout centuries, but a human being will last only a few years and nobody will be aware of his existence. Therefore, he will have to rely in his most beloved tool to last forever, poetry.(4), (7)
Stanza VIII: “The bird has ceased to be a symbol and is again the actual bird the poet heard in stanza I. The poet, like the nightingale, has returned to the real world. The bird flies away to another spot to sing. The bird's song becomes a "plaintive anthem" and fainter” (7).” 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 dream." Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.”(4)
Everything is over now, the nightingale flew away, the intense feeling of evasion is nothing but a mere memory. Such happiness and freedom does not belong to the human side, we realize how, as the nightingale goes away, it does all hope as well. Once back to the physical world, Keats has nothing but the feeling of have dreamt a beautiful song. Imagination does not work, neither does death, what kind of hope can the human being have? Maybe it was all a dream, maybe it was all an illusion provoked by drugs. But after coming back from such fantasy, Keats is now more aware than ever than the human being will have to look for alternative methods if they want that something of their existence can defeat that disease called time. (3), (4), (7), (22)
Themes:
Mortality: “Keats's speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life” (4).”Both the third and sixth stanzas contain references to mortality. The third stanza discusses the death of his brother, Tom, while the sixth expresses Keats' own fear of death. "Half in love with easeful death," found in the sixth stanza, shows his fear, not of death, but of a slow, painful one from Consumption (the illness was common in his family, and by this point he had already begun to show the earliest signs of the disease). "Soft names," on the following line, is almost like the communication between two lovers. "Seems it rich to die" demonstrates the level of ecstasy he is experiencing, that a man so much in love with life would welcome death. The stanza finishes on an anti-climax with the deliberately clumsy "sod."”(3)
“The meaning of this poem is in its perfect expression of the imperfect reality of experience. The fundamental flaw between the morbid banality and ecstatic beauty of life is too universally understood for this poem to enter the world with any conflict.”(5)
Keats will see death from two points of view. On the one hand, he knows it is a fearful fate that every single human is awaiting. What he does regret the most about death here is not its existence but our consciousness about it. We are condemned to suffer until our last day due to the fact that we know there is no scape. Here Keats only wishes his death not to be painful.(3) But on the other hand, death is seen as something that could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a tool to reach that unreachable state of mind the human being has been always looking for. But death may not be so useful if we have to renounce to the good things our senses can make us feel. We may sometimes think of our body as an useless instrument when it comes to reach higher states but it is then we realize of its importance as well. There must be another option. (5), (22)
“The poem fuses "real melancholy" with "imaginary relief" (Leigh Hunt) to adequately express the double life of human experience. The poemís movement through the different modes is achieved through a loose stylistic perfection; a dream-like experience of intoxication done with intense stanzaic regularity. Ode to a Nightingale not only waxes and wanes between these realms, it vibrates deeply with a true look at what Keats in his life has endured, and foreshadows the death to come.”(5)
Personal Opinion
I had to read the poem several times to really understand it and enjoy it completely. I chose it because I thought it was the ideal way to show the romantic point of view of death and time. It has shown us how Keats did not just surrender to fate waiting for death, but he tried to find relief in such common thing as the sing of a bird. He is completely sure that there are things that can last and survive forever. He is not just simply waiting for his moment to come, he will contemplate life as something completely undiscovered and mysterious where although we human beings have such great burdens as consciousness and the awareness of death, we can, however, enjoy the happiness of those things or living beings who are actually free from human misfortune. I have really enjoyed the poem's existential depth and it has made me think over themes such time life or the insignificance of our existence. We have to find some meaning in our lives in order to continue our daily fight. If we just surrender and think continuously about our death we are condemned to suffer until our last day. Therefore, we must find sense in this nonsense called life If we want to reach our last stage of life sanes.
Alfred Tennyson’s Crossing the bar
SUNSET and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 5
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark! 10
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 15
When I have crossed the bar. (19)
Context
“During the nineteenth century the things we recognize as the sciences formed and acquired their great cultural authority. The sciences developed in contexts shaped by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the sweeping social and cultural changes of the century. Historians of science over the past forty years have come to see sciences not as something independent and distinct from culture and social life — but as integral to other social concerns and as part of culture itself. “(27)
“Some of the major transformations which occurred across the Victorian period were: the change from "natural philosophy" and "natural history" to "science," the shift from gentlemen and clerical naturalists to, for the first time, professional "scientists," the development and eventual diffusion of belief in natural laws and ongoing progress, secularization, growing interaction between science, government and industry, the formalization of science education, and a growing internationalism of science. The Victorian age also witnessed some of the most fundamental transformations of beliefs about nature and the place of humans in the universe”(27)
“progress and natural laws were intimately related in understandings of nature. Scholars are coming to treat all of these themes as part of related and intertwined cultural processes rather than distinct and independent lineages. At the beginning of the century, the evolution of species, especially man, and the evolution of the earth were generally considered absurd and beyond the bounds of learned discussion. Because of the great interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology today, we tend to speak in terms of the history of evolutionary thought, as if many thinkers struggled in vain to come up with Darwin's theory.” (28)
“During the nineteenth century, the entities we refer to as 'science' and 'religion' both underwent dramatic changes. It would consequently be naïve to expect to be able to find one simple and unchanging relationship between the two. The relationship has varied across time and geography, and from one individual to another. In addition to the historical interest of the nineteenth century debates between science and religion, there is a great historiographical significance. The way in which science and religion have been perceived in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by the writings of late nineteenth-century historians of science and religion, whose influence we have only recently begun to move beyond.” (29)
“At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, religious faith and the sciences were generally seen to be in beautiful accordance. The study of God's Word, in the Bible, and His Works, in nature, were assumed to be twin facets of the same truth.” (29)
“This harmony between science and faith, mediated by some form of theology of nature, continued to be the mainstream position for most men of science, and most interested individuals, right up to the 1860s, at least. But it did come under threat.”(29)
“"Crossing the Bar" reflects the late nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific conflict”(26)
Poem analysis
At first glance
What we realize just after reading this poem for the first time is that it seems some kind of farewell letter, the author seems to have accepted his fate and goes towards his death with no consolation, he is about to cross the border between the known and the unknown. But given the fact that the basis of Christianity were so questioned in that moment because of the scientific progress, he is aware that nothing he has read or hear can prepare him for what he is about to see.
More in depth
“"Crossing the Bar" is an 1889 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson that is traditionally the last poem in his anthologies. It is thought that Tennyson wrote it as his own elegy, as the poem has a tone of finality about it. The narrator uses an extended metaphor to compare death to crossing the "sandbar" between the harbour of life and the ocean of death”.(12)
“The speaker heralds the setting of the sun and the rise of the evening star, and hears that he is being called. He hopes that the ocean will not make the mournful sound of waves beating against a sand bar when he sets out to sea. Rather, he wishes for a tide that is so full that it cannot contain sound or foam and therefore seems asleep when all that has been carried from the boundless depths of the ocean returns back out to the depths”. (13)
“The speaker announces the close of the day and the evening bell, which will be followed by darkness. He hopes that no one will cry when he departs, because although he may be carried beyond the limits of time and space as we know them, he retains the hope that he will look upon the face of his "Pilot" when he has crossed the sand bar”. (13)
“Tennyson's lyric makes its full impression at a single reading. There is no doubt as to its meaning, and this is given with the direct simplicity of the highest art. The imagery is majestic, restrained and entirely clear. The music is so liquid and pellucid that to attempt to set the lyric to music is usually to lower the moving beauty of its melody. The whole poem is an example of art so perfect as to seem spontaneous nature, yet consciously molded in every detail of its construction. This is particularly evident in the music, which depends not only upon the open, liquid sound of the words, but still more on the handling of the meter.” (17)
“The first and third lines of each stanza are always a couple of beats longer than the second and fourth lines, although the line lengths vary among the stanzas.(13)Tennyson employs a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme”.(12)
“The ABAB rhyme scheme of the poem echoes the stanzas' thematic patterning: the first and third stanzas are linked to one another as are the second and fourth. Both the first and third stanzas begin with two symbols of the onset of night: "sunset and evening star" and "twilight and evening bell." The second line of each of these stanzas begins with "and," conjoining another item that does not fit together as straightforwardly as the first two: "one clear call for me" and "after that the dark!" Each of these lines is followed by an exclamation point, as the poet expresses alarm at realizing what death will entail. These stanzas then conclude with a wish that is stated metaphorically in the first stanza: "may there be no moaning of the bar / When I put out to sea"; and more literally in the third stanza: "And may there be no sadness of farewell / When I embark." Yet the wish is the same in both stanzas: the poet does not want his relatives and friends to cry for him after he dies. Neither of these stanzas concludes with a period, suggesting that each is intimately linked to the one that follows”. (13)
“The second and fourth stanzas are linked because they both begin with a qualifier: "but" in the second stanza, and "for though" in the fourth. In addition, the second lines of both stanzas connote excess, whether it be a tide "too full for sound and foam" or the "far" distance that the poet will be transported in death”.(13)
Themes:
Death: “The poem describes his placid and accepting attitude toward death”(13) “Tennyson uses the metaphor of a sand bar to describe the barrier between life and death. A sandbar is a ridge of sand built up by currents along a shore. In order to reach the shore, the waves must crash against the sandbar, creating a sound that Tennyson describes as the "moaning of the bar”(13) The other important image in the poem is one of "crossing," suggesting Christian connotations: "crossing" refers both to "crossing over" into the next world, and to the act of "crossing" oneself in the classic Catholic gesture of religious faith and devotion.”(13)
Tennyson shows the fear of the human kind in a world where everything now seems to have sense thanks to science except death. The poet does not mention directly Christianity in his poem, he does not ask God to welcome him in heaven, he knows that whatever comes after death, it is not known by anybody, since scientifically talking nobody could have never returned to life to tell his experience. He thinks that, if everything has a logical explanation it seems that the existence of a heaven, god, etc is unlikely. But, as something that has not been proved, seen, or studied yet, it is frightening, we all human beings tend to fear the unknown, and so does Tennyson. If science had not made such progresses, Tennyson could have relied heavily on religion and could have found relief in the moral certainty that God and everything involving him existed. But in this stage of his life nothing seemed to be true anymore, every fact was questioned and studied. In this atmosphere, how could Tennyson think of death as a journey to heaven if it had never been proved to be so?. Here we can see the poet's despair facing death in a surrender position due to our ignorance in death matters.
This has been throughout all human history our main concern, is there anything after death? Since the first human beings on earth, we have always wanted to believe in the existence of something. We could not live with the idea that our lives were so insignificant, so the role played by religion was in this point important since has been always trying to keep people believing, and therefore, live happier thinking that their current lives were nothing but a simple step to reach another state.
Unfortunately for Tennyson (and in extension, for all the human kind), science has showed us how all what we thought to be true could be nothing but a mere myth. Even though Tennyson shows signs of fear before what is going to happen, he also says that he would like to “see my Pilot face to face “ in order to know the truth, to know if there is actually somebody there, he has to think that this unlikely story we all have been taught may be not completely false because at this point there is no other thing to believe in. We are terrified by the idea of stop existing, so no matter how questioned religious principles are, we will always try to think of ourselves as an superior being who has more lives remaining.
Personal Opinion
This is just the poem I was looking for to show the damage science had done in people's beliefs. That feeling of powerlessness that was starting to spread all over the world due to the questioning of Christian basis. What I liked the most is the fact that we are all now suffering this problem of the loss of faith and we could adopt Tennyson's attitude as well. Although it has been a long time since this poem was written, we can see how today the vast majority of the population must face this critical moment in the same despair Tennyson did, since our knowledge in some areas has made our hopes in the existence of God to break down. We do not know anything about what is coming next after life (if something is really coming), the only thing we can all be sure about is that we cannot hide our fear from the unknown.
Comparison and evolution between both poets:
Romanticism is well captured in Keats' poem, he tries to react against the scientific rationalization of nature, he wants to merge with the nightingale in order to escape from rationalism and human consciousness.(18) He manages to leave behind all the pain and suffering from real life, he is looking for “something else”, he still has hope to find it. “Keats achieves a spiritual or visionary state through the act of creation, through the act of writing poetry”(23) The lack of knowledge in biological and scientific areas here were essential for the attitude of Keats and the romantic poets. There were a lot of possibilities, you could not just surrender and wait until the inevitable happens, you had to experience life in all ways possible, look for another alternatives to physical reality. There was the certainty that nature was a completely undiscovered world that could surprise and compensate for the pain and misfortune we have to bear in life.
On the contrary, Tennyson addresses “the growing impotency of organized religion that was present in the Victorian era. Scientific discovery, especially evolution, had found explanations of the dynamics of the universe which debunked what the church offered.”(15) Because of that, he is just facing his imminent death, he knows he is about to cross the bar between the known and the unknown, but he merely says goodbye to his people and asks them not to mourn for him. There is no other way for him to face this situation.(13) Whereas "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality”(7) for Keats, Tennyson represents the mentality of a society where science has found explanations for almost every single fact, leaving a huge wound in the human heart. Tennyson knows there are not other ways to evade himself from what is about to come, everything is known now in the “alive side” so he has accepted his fate in order to go deep into the unknown.
Keats found in death a way to reach certain heights no other way reachable. Tennyson is just a traveler without any idea of how will be the place he is now going towards to. Tennyson is a man who has studied science and evolution, and even “anticipated Darwinian conceptions of evolution and their implications”(25), Fact that makes him even more aware of the non existence of salvation, freedom or any other kind of reality after life. Every fact was now tested and proved, and , therefore, the existence of something higher, of something more spiritual and deeper did not seem to be likely since it could not be proved.
“Tennyson's poetry often deals with the conflict between religious faith and doubt in an age in which, increasingly, the findings of science were calling into question Christianity's traditional assumptions about man's special place in the universe and his special relationship with his Creator.”(26) “In content the poem expresses the matured faith of Tennyson's life, attained after battling with doubt in the arena of his century, facing and accepting, if reluctantly, the last generalizations of science” (17)
This conflict will affect tremendously Tennyson's attitude. He now realizes that maybe, after all, we humans are no so important as we thought, maybe our existence lacks of significance and we have nothing to long for. Maybe we are all here just for biological purposes and just to guarantee the existence of our specie. All these facts will make Tennyson just to stop fighting and just go with the flow.
Awareness of death and NDE (Near-death experiences)
Awareness of death
“Death-related beliefs is one of the best-survived fields of tradition, rich in associations and an interesting source of research as such. The subject of death is among the most widely treated fields in the humanities. There is an enormous and inconceivable amount of tantalogical, psychological, philosophical and religious-historical literature related with death. It can be quite confidently stated that death awareness as a phenomenon in the cultural space of Europe has usually been talked about in connection with a crisis situation (loss of a close person, learning of an incurable disease) or ageing.”(30) “incurable diseases strongly actualise the awareness of death of the sick person” (30)
As the quote says,it is in crisis situation when this kind of thoughts appear. Keats' brother, Tom, died in 1818, and this made Keats to think more about his own death. In addition, “at the time of writing, Keats was in a poor state of health and probably suspected that he had contracted tuberculosis”(8), because of this, he knew that his time was near and therefore, death was one of the main topics in his poetry.
On the other hand, we know that Tennyson “wrote the poem after a serious illness while at sea, crossing the Solent from Aldworth to Farringford on the Isle of Wight.”(12). So he was influenced by illness as well. As in Keats, Tennyson was aware of his poor health at that moment and because of this fact, he knew that maybe he would not be able to overcome illness next time. If there was a way to express his feelings and ideas about what was about to come that was with a poem.
“Awareness of death is actualised by the death of a close person. The effect is the stronger, the more unexpected the death is, increasing particularly in the case of the death of a young person, or unnatural death caused by an accident or violence.” (30)
As the quote indicates, the death of a close person has a great role in making us aware of our own death, as happened with Keats (His brother had died of tuberculosis not long ago).
“This state of mind often involves seeing life in a considerably wider perspective (the so-called view from above). Such a change in perspective is also frequently sensed while saving people or, for instance, following rescue operations on television.” (30)
This idea is interesting as we instantly think about the state of mind explained by Keats when he is about to reach the nightingale. It seems that this kind of experience is not as strange as we can think. Maybe this kind of view was the tool Keats made use of in order to reach that momentary state of mind.
“Those, whose trust to the world is greater, cognise death more painlessly. On one hand it results from the fact that they obviously are more trusting and open to different events, on the other hand they are less oriented to preserving their self-image. Trust to the world is also influenced by whether the person believes that the world as a whole and his/her own existence have some deeper objective and meaning” (30)
Here we find another idea that can be related with Keats' and Tennyson’s situation. We observed how Keats was not at all scared of the idea of death, this can be, as the quote explains, because he trust the world to be something greater and to have more alternatives to what is psychically known. As we have seen, Keats believed in some deeper and higher ideas and therefore, he thought that there were things that could overcome the brevity of live.
On the other hand, we find in Tennyson just the opposite ideas. Given the scientific progress and that everything seems to have an logical explanation now, deeper meaning in life seems to be a nonsense, it is because of this that Tennyson will face death as a more tragic event, he does not trust the world anymore, so death is seen as something which is not likely to improve what he has lived.
“In the case of the vision of death as the complete end, an aspect of one of the main fears – the fear of changes – the fear of the unknown is amplified, because one lacks the vision of afterlife existence.” (30)
This is just what Tennyson fears the most. He is aware of this possibility and it is that what has made him lost all hope. He is completely terrified by the idea of approaching an unknown place that could even not exist at all.
“Death is one of the first and most evident of the unknown experiences for people – the living have no experience of death. Naturally, everything unknown generates fear in us, and on the other hand, is of interest. So the longing for death may be observed as an expression of interest in something unknown and the existence of it as an important component of mental health.” (30)
These both ideas of interest and fear in death can be clearly seen in Tennyson’s and Keats' ideas. Whilst Tennyson approaches death playing the role of the scared human being who is getting closer to the border between the known by science and the unknown, Keats sees death as something that can be interesting for his own experience of reaching higher levels of mind. So, both poets represent the perfect example of both ways of facing this stage.
Poems seen as NDE (Near-Death Experiences)
“A near-death experience (NDE) refers to a broad range of personal experiences associated with impending death, encompassing multiple possible sensations ranging from detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, extreme fear, security, or warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of a light, which some people[specify] interpret as a deity or spiritual presence.[citation needed] Many cultures and individuals revere NDEs as a paranormal and spiritual glimpse into the afterlife.” (32)
“Most of the scientific community regards such experiences as hallucinatory, while paranormal specialists and some mainstream scientists claim them to be evidence of an after life.” (32)
"Dying people look for themes in their lives” “They want to identify what they have learned" (31)
Both Keats and Tennyson are able to find important themes in their lives to deal with in their respective situations. It could be considered as a general view of what all this knowledge has led them to. On the one hand, Keats will deal with such an important themes as the possibility of reaching a higher state of mind, the human physical body and its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to reach that state, and the disease of time as one of the most important problems the human being must face.
On the other hand, what seems to be the main theme looked by Tennyson is the lack of knowledge of the human being in themes such as death, and the loss of hope that the scientific progress has led to.
“They begin the process of saying good-bye to all aspects of this life. They start to let go of things, one at a time. Categories of letting go include activities, signs of independence, roles they have played, and finally relationships.” (31)
This aspect can be clearly observed in Tennyson’s poem. On the one hand, all the roles he had played have been left behind, he is now nothing but a corpse waiting his time to leave this world, nothing he had done during his life matters now, he feels naked, defenseless in front of what he has not been trained to deal with. On the other hand, we can see the final step mentioned by the quote, he says good-bye to his most beloved relatives as he knows that he has not much more time left.
“Another perspective on NDE from a religious point of view can be drawn from what it says about the nature of the world - that information from another time and place, or the same time and place, could be understood from "here". This can be a kind of Déjà vu experience” (32)
On example os this experience can be found in Keats' poem when he mentions in the 7th Stanza how Ruth heard that same sing time long time ago.
“The out-of-body experience (OBE) is part of the NDE, when a brain tries to develop an idea about the present situation. Most of the patients are not able to move away. Therefore the brain will combine sensory impressions and knowledge from the memory into a dreamlike idea of the own situation. Then a person has the sensation to leave the body, to float like a ghost-being above it, to see at it and the surrounding area “ (32)
This could explain Keats' experience, maybe he had an OBE experience while being in his garden and then he woke up and considered it as an attempt to reach a higher level of mind.
Overall Personal opinion
I found it interesting how attitudes and will can change so much depending on the era we are studying. I really liked both poems and I chose them because I have always loved existentialist themes and both poet's ideas were quite clear from the first lines. What really comes to my mind after being working with these poets and themes is that ignorance is happiness, and although it comes at a heavy price, the comfort of knowing (or at least believing) in something is priceless. But that is something we must face. The more we know, the more we condemn ourselves to unhappiness. In overall terms, I have enjoyed working in such themes and I have learned a lot about the mentality in Romanticism and Victorian era thanks to Tennyson's and Keats' poems and ideas.
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