Sheila Oltra Malfeito

According to Melani in Academic Brooklyn analysis of “Ode to a Nightingale”[4], at the beginning the nightingale is a real bird but later it becomes a symbol, as we will see through the poem.

2^nd Stanza

Now, the poet is thinking about a “world of imagination and fantasy”. (Melani)4 According to the analysis made by Melani in Academic Brooklyn, he is asking for a wine, but he does not really want to get drunk. He wants to get some qualities that a specific wine can give him in order to go with the bird, to join the bird.

A vintage is a wine made in a particular year, so he is not asking for a simple wine but for a wine with specific characteristics. He wants a wine with the taste of “Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburntmirth!”. All these characteristics are associated with nature and when he says “Provencal”, he is referring to Provence, “an area in the south of France associated with song, pleasure and luxury” (Melani)2. Therefore, he wants a wine which let him reach and experiment the qualities of nature, song, pleasure, which we can compare with the nightingale. The nightingale is also associated with happiness and song, so he wants to get these qualities through the wine to join the bird and to be like him.

Then, when he says “the blushful Hippocrene”, he is making a reference to a “spring sacred to the Muses, located on Mt. Helicon. Drinking its waters inspired the poets”. (Melani)3 We can interpret this as if he wants to be inspired and get some characteristics of these Muses like singing and dancing to be, as I have said, as the nightingale.

These qualities of the wine he wants are appealing different senses, so we can see an example of synaesthesia in Keats’s imagery. In his imagination he is “combining the trait of one sense” as it is taste (the taste of wine) “to other senses” like sight (“Flora and the country green) or movement (Dance). (Melani)[5]

3^rd Stanza

In the third stanza he returns to the real world, a world of pain. He wants to forget this world of “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” that the nightingale has never known. He wants to escape the real world so he says “fade far away, dissolve”. He wants to leave a world where mortality does exist and young people die, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”. Here, where he is talking about the death of young people, I think he is referring to the death of his young brother Tom who had died a year before he wrote this poem because of a disease, probably tuberculosis, the same illness that his mother had suffered1.

The world in which he lives is really different from the world of the nightingale. The real world for him is a world of problems, illnesses and mortality. However, the nightingale does not know any of these things, the bird lives without sadness and despair and without worrying about death. He simply sings happily without being aware of all this.

4^th Stanza

He returns to the world of imagination. In the first four lines of the stanza, he still wants to join the bird, but not through “Bacchus”. “Bacchus is the Roman god of wine” (Melani)3. Then, according to the Academic Brooklyn’s analysis, he rejects the previous way of reaching the bird through wine and, now, he tries another way “the viewless wings of Poesy”. He contrasts the way he uses now to join the bird, Poesy, to “the dull brain perplexes and retards”. He prefers to use poetry which is associated with feelings and emotions than brain which is associated with reason and rationality. To leave the real world and reach the world of fantasy he needs to follow his feelings and emotions, not his reason, because I think his reason cannot understand this imaginative world.

According to Melani’s analysis in Academic Brooklyn4, in line 5, it seems that he has joined the bird “Already with thee!”. Later, he describes how the world he has reached is. In this world “there is no light”, I think he hoped to see the light of the moon and the stars, but this world is dark. Darkness has connotations of frightening, worrying, death4. He can only see some light when breezes blow the branches “Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown/ Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways”.

5^th Stanza

According to the analysis in Academic Brooklyn4, as it is dark in the world he has reached he cannot see, he must use his other senses. Then, I think he can use touch to notice the flowers that are at his feet, smell to notice the incense. He feels these sensations as if he were seeing all these things.

I also think that “Embalmed darkness” might be associated with death because embalmed means a preserved body, it is a way to preserve a body when a person dyes, and at the same time darkness may have connotations of death, according to the analysis mentioned before. So, he realises that even in this world death exists. With these words he is preparing us for the next stanza where he is going to talk about death.

Following the analysis of Melani, it is spring when he writes the poem “And mid-May’s eldest child”, when most plants begin to grow as it is “musk-rose”. Even though it is spring, he is anticipating summer since the first stanza when the nightingale is singing and the poet says “singest of summer”. Now, in the fifth stanza, he refers to “flies on summer eves”, he is anticipating the summer4. I think he is anticipating it because he wants it to come. He wants it to come because in summer days are longer and it has many more hours of daylight than spring. As in that world of imagination it is dark and it is still spring, he wants it to come now to have more light.

6^th Stanza

In this stanza, he talks about death. When he says he has been “half in love with easeful Death” he means that he has desired many times to die because it would be a relief to his suffering, because, at that time, he had showed the earliest signs of the illness which was common in his family1. There, he imagines death with no pain and joyful, so it says it “seems rich to die” “in such an ecstasy”.

As Melani4 says in her analysis, at the end of this stanza he realises that death is not a relief from pain but it means not to exist any more. So, if he dies, he would have listened the bird singing in vain because he would not be able to listen him after death. In this stanza he refers to the nightingale’s song as a “high requiem” which is “a song for the repose of dead” (Melani)3. The nightingale would continue singing after his death and he would “become a sod”. After reading this analysis by Melani4, I think he has changed his mind about the nightingale’s song from a “singest of summer” in the first stanza to “high requiem” in this stanza when he realises that he could also die here and that this death would not be such a relief as he had thought.

7^th Stanza

After being aware of his own mortality, in this stanza he says that the nightingale is immortal, “immortal Bird!”. He contrasts his mortality with the nightingale’s immortality. Here the nightingale becomes a symbol as it was said in the first stanza. In the first stanza, he calls the bird “light-winged Dryad”, and it was interpreted as a personification of nature, the bird representing the beauty of nature. (Analysis by Melani)4; I think it is not the bird what is immortal but what the bird represents. In this stanza, the bird might symbolize the nature and “immortal” might symbolize the “continuity of nature” (Melani)4. Nature continues even after we die.

Then, he contrasts the bird that neither suffers nor dies with human beings “hungry generations” who do suffer and die. I think “Hungry” may represent the difference between them, humans suffering from hunger. When he says “generations” he is still insisting on the continuity of nature against the death of human beings. So, I see this as if humans have new generations, when some die, others are born, but each one is a different person, however, nature is still the same.

In her analysis Melani explains that to show this continuity of nature the poet makes three references to the past. The “emperor and clown” in ancient times probably heard the nightingale’s singing as well as “Ruth” from the Old Testament and also in “faery lands”. The last one is not a human past. He says “charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery land forlorn”. “Forlorn” is referring to the “faery lands”. These lands have been forgotten. They might have existed in a world of fantasy. These “perilous” and “forlorn” lands may be associated with pain, the pain he mentions at the beginning of the poem, “he is trying to escape from that pain”. (Melani)3

8^th Stanza

In the previous stanza he is referring to the “faery lands” when he says “forlorn”, and, now, he repeats this word to refer to the world of fantasy in which he has been with the nightingale. This word awakes him from that world and he comes back to the real world and the bird flies away.

The poet says that the imagination (this world of fantasy) and the bird “deceiving elf” have deceived him. (Melani)4 This entire world has not been as he had thought, so he wants to forget it “forlorn”. He also changes the way he calls the nightingale’s song from “high requiem” in stanza 6 to “plaintive anthem”. Now it is a sad song which faints I think because he has come back to the real world and the nightingale is gone.

In the last two lines he is in a state of Negative Capability. It is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.[6] He is confused because he does not know whether he has had a vision or a daydream. The music is gone and he does not know whether he is awake or asleep. This transitory vision or daydream he has had might have made him think about the nature of reality, and about the death. He might have learnt that the world in which he would like to live might not be the way he thought it would be.

“Ode to a Nightingale” was written in May 1819 in Hampstead. After the death of his brother Thomas, on 1 December 1818, he returned to Hampstead to live with his friend Charles Brown1 where he wrote this poem4. In the period from 1818 to 1819 was the period when he produced his best works, his odes, and he reached his maturity. The death of his brother influenced him to write this ode. It is “the more subjective and personal poem” by Keats (Ford, 320). He described the state of Negative Capability, as I have said on the interpretation. The themes of this ode are basically nature, transcience and mortality1. He struggles between the real world and the ideal world, between mortality and immortality.

In the spring of 1819, he wrote five odes, “quite free from the rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate with the idea of an ode”. “Ode on Psyche” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are “inspired by the old Greek world of imagination and art”. “Ode on Melancholy” and “Ode to a Nightingale” are “inspired by moods of the poet’s own mind” and “Ode on Indolence” “partakes in a weaker degree of both aspirations”. (Colvin[7])

“Ode to a Nightingale” was first published in “Annals of the Fine Arts” in July 18191 and, then, in 1820 it was published in “Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems” with the other four odes[8]. It usually appears besides “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.

Keats first works were his poems, but they were not as successful as his odes. These earlier poems were influenced by Edmund Spencer (Ford, 317). After these poems and before his odes, he wrote his letters in which he started using his Negative Capability and he will continue using it in his odes.

Keats was born in 1795 and he died very young, he was only 25, and he wrote this poem only two years before he died. He is included in the Romantic period[9]. Romanticism is an intellectual and artistic movement which took place in Europe between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This movement was a reaction against Classicism (Ford, 209). “Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis, they preferred freedom of personal expression than the strict rules of literacy forms and logic of the neo-classicists”[10]. This movement aroused in the context of the French and American Revolution and, in that moment, there was also the Industrial Revolution[11]. These revolutions and the Germanic movement Sturm und Drang influenced Romanticism. Sturm und Drang or “Storm and Stress” was a movement which took place between the 1760s and 1780s, the writers of Sturm und Drang defended the free expression of their emotions[12]. They “shared that distrust of French absolutism and admired the absolutism of natural world and the unconstrained, spontaneous enthusiasm of the individual in response to nature (...) Nature was seen to be good, while society was a corrupting force” (Ford 213, 214).

We can see in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” the emotional and imaginative expression, and he also sees the nature as a refuge from civilization. He thinks the world in which he lives is not as good as the imaginative world represented by nature, the world in which the nightingale is. He creates a world of imagination and shows us his feelings and emotions.

John Keats died when he was so young that he achieved his fame after his death. In his last poems, he shows his maturity even though he was very young. So, we have to take into account that he lost his parents when he was a child, his brother died young because of a disease, too. He could not afford a good education, so he learnt through the writing of his works[13].

Therefore, I think Keats achieved to be an important poet even though he did not expect it before he died. In his tomb it is written “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”9. I think Keats transmits his feelings and emotions to our society in such a way that many people nowadays could identify with him. He creates a world to escape from the world he lives, a world of illnesses and mortality. This world is the same world in which we live nowadays, so he and his poems are related to our days. He is showing a situation in the past that will continue in the future, in our days. He wanted to escape from this world as many people nowadays want because of illnesses and many other problems.

I have chosen this poem because I think the themes it deals with, like nature and mortality, and the expression of his feelings are very important in the Romantic period and nowadays, so it is better to understand him. What I like most is that through the expression of his feelings we can try to put ourselves in his place and to catch the sense of the poem. I have enjoyed a lot reading it and elaborating the paper.

Ode to a Nightingale

1.

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,
  But being too happy in thine happiness,—
    That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
          In some melodious plot
  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
  Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
  Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
          And purple-stained mouth;
  That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
    And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3.

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 gray hairs,
  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.

4.

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,
  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.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
  Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
  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.

6.

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 mused rhyme,
  To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
  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.

7.

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
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
          The same that oft-times hath
  Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
  To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
  As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
  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?

Retrieved from <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale>

Bibliography

Colvin, Sidney. John Keats. 23 Nov 2007. < http://www.john-keats.com/biografie/chapter_vii.htm > (The Odes)

Ford, Boris (ed) The New English Pelican Gid to English Literature. 5. From Blake to Byron Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1982 (1957)

Melani, Lilia. Brooklyn College. 23 Nov 2007. <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/

english/melani/cs6/keats.html>

<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/ode.html>

<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/nighting_voc.html#I>

<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/nighting.html>

<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html#image>

23 Nov 2007 <http://www.wikipedia.org/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_Capability>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang>

<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale>

23 Nov 2007 <http://englishhistory.net/keats/contents.html>

23 Nov 2007 <http://www.uv.es/~fores/mainframeuvp.html>

23 Nov 2007 <http://aulavirtual.uv.es/dotlrn/classes/c006/14217/c08c006a14217gA/wp-slim/display/24923561/24923639.wimpy>

23 Nov 2007 <http://poemaseningles.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Keats>