Ode to a Nightingale

Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: a note of an escapist?// Do you think that Keats’ poem is a
journey from despair to hope?

John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale is a poetic journey—a journey from despair to hope,
and from hope to despair again. But a significant point to be noted is that whereas he rejected the
initial despair, he readily accepts the last. Said differently, though Keats with his escapist nature
rejected the world of actuality in quest for a Utopian world, the process of his journey involves
the evolution of his intellectual self to prompt him to realize the vanity of that Utopia, leading
ultimately to the acceptance of the world of actuality. Hence Cleanth Brooks observes that “the
world of the imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality, yet at the same time
it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast”.

Keats’ despair is occasioned by the sad mutability of the human world; it is no less
caused by his own life. while Keats was composing the poem he was steeped in despair, caused
by the death of his brother Tom (December 1, 1818) and his own physical illness (he too was
diagnosed with TB in 1819) that made him too conscious of the inevitable mortality of human
life. But he was filled with hope while he was encountering the sweet song of the nightingale,
“his prime symbol for the imaginative power that will take him on his journey”.

Here Keats is found to celebrate the power of wine to temporarily release him from the
shocking actualities of life. It is but an evidence of his frantic attempt to forget the world of sad
reality. The most significant point here is that though the poet is ready to undertake a journey in
the magical realm of the nightingale with which he has identified himself, he cannot become
completely forgetful of the ills of the mundane world; rather, he realizes that the nightingale, like
Shelley’s skylark and unlike that of Wordsworth’s, is quite unaware of the vinegary
disappointments of day to day reality.

Through the poem we see the gradual awakening of Keats’ sole self that helps him have a
realization that unlike himself the nightingale is immortal. The immortality of the bird contrasted
with the inevitable mortality of the human beings. Immediately the poet returns to his sole self;
he will no more body forth the imaginative realm of the nightingale, nor will he remain confined
into it. Rather, the word “forlorn” sounds like a bell “To toll me back from thee to my sole self”;
it makes him aware of the bleak landscape of human existence:

Truly, the poet finds “no adequate recompense” for the inevitability of human life in “the
power of the imagination”. Hence, though he concludes the poem with an unsettled question,
“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”, it does not
only record Keats’ retreat from the ideal realm of the nightingale that he created by means of the
time machine of poetry but helps him voluntarily to embrace reality with its ever present note of
despair. That is why in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats’ flight in the imaginative realm of the
nightingale is not to be interpreted form the traditional perspective of his escapism but from the
perspective of a kind of journey that involves the evolution of his self leading ultimately himself
to accept life what it is.

Analysis of Ode to a Nightingale by JOHN KEATS: A Commentary on Art and Life

In Ode to a Nightingale John Keats’ Romanticism stresses strong emotion and the
individual imagination as the ultimate critical and moral authority. It is a ‘richly meditative ode’
as Prof Hereford calls it. The whole poem is built on the “thought of the contrast between the
Joy, beauty and apparent permanence of the bird song and the sorrow and transience of beauty
and joy in human life”. The song fills him with a desire to escape from the hard reality of life
into the world of love and beauty, into the world of visions and passions, into the world of the
blessed. Thus nightingale’s song in the poem symbolizes the beauty of nature and art.

Keats’s poetry is soaked in the beauty of the Earth as ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’. The
contrast between the sordidness of the reality and the beauty of the ideal world, between the
mortality of the life and immortality of nature, between the imperfection of real life and the
beauty of imagination is the recurring theme of his poetry. The song of the Nightingale increases
the poem a mood of deep delight which becomes painful in its intensity. He has drunk in the rich
music of the Nightingale’s song; his whole being is full of it. Hence he likes to take the help
wine which must be cooled in a cellar for a long time. He wishes:

“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-stainèd mouth;”
But unfortunately the poet cannot escape from the world of “the fever and the fret” as it is a
place,
“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 tomorrow”.
Then finally, by the help of the poetic imagination, he makes himself able to fly in the world of
the Nightingale.
In the darkness of the forest the nightingale sings spontaneously his world is one of
“shadow numberless and verdurous glooms’. Though he cannot see what flowers are at his feet
but in this ‘embalmed darkness; guess sweet, where with the seasonable month endows”. As he
is a seeker of beauty he finds beauty abounds. He gets the scent of ‘white hawthorn’, ‘the
pastoral eglantine’ and ‘Fast fading violets’ and that of musk-rose, ‘full of dewy wine’.
In such an ecstatic condition Keats wants to pass away slowly and he is in love with
easeful death:-
“Now more than even seems it rich to die/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain”.
It is natural culmination of Keats imaginary world. As he seeks beauty, he seeks the death
frantically. He wishes the painless death in order to completely annihilate his consciousness. He
knows however that to die would mean the loss of the richness of Nightingale World. Here he
suddenly remembers what death means, and the thought of it frightens him back to earth and his
own humanity.
Keats however asserts that the song of the bird is an immortal one. It is the voice of
romance, the voice of history. According to Calvin “the poet contrasts the transitory of human
life with the permanence of the song of the bird”. It is the permanence of beauty as represented
by the song of bird. But he is fully aware of the fact that –
“The Fancy cannot cheat so well,/ As she is famed to do, deceiving elf”.
Keats thus differentiates between life and art: Human beings die, but the art they make
lives on. Such of the vision or a dream is indeed bliss of our troubled soul.
 Keats as a poet of sensuousness in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

The poetry of John Keats has always been recognized as displaying a characteristic
sensuous of language. Sensuous poetry is that which is intensively concerned to activate and
appeal to our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. All his senses are keen and respond
quickly to the outer world and his sensitive soul vibrate to every kind of sensuous impression.

In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Keats is enchantingly sensuous. He is proverbially known as a

poet of ‘light feet, dark violent eyes, and parted hair, soft dimpled hands, white neck, creamy
breast’ However One day, while sitting idly, the song of a nightingale enters his heart which
‘aches’ with excess of happiness. The song seems to touch his heart: -

‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense…’

Keats’ sensuousness makes him feel that he has become oblivious of everything after
having sunk into ‘Lethe’---the mythological river of forgetfulness. Nightingale is turning the
whole atmosphere surcharged with its sweet song. Nightingale is singing in profuse strains with
the delights of summer, thereby increasing sensation of the sensuous poet--- Keats

Keats’ perception and deep relish of delicious things of sweet taste, smell and sound are
exquisitely expressed in this poem: -

‘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 sun-burnt mirth.’

Keats’s sensuousness encourages escapist tendency in him. Hearing nightingale’s song

he wants his consciousness to be merged with the bird. He wants to escape to an ideal world of
eternity where ‘weariness, the fever and the fret’ are unknown; where there is no ‘grey hairs’;
where youth never ‘grows pale’; where beauty never dawns; where love never fades. The sight
sensation of reality pains him and intensifies his escapism.

Keats’ escapism continues with his wish of flying away to the world of Nightingale’s
song ‘on the viewless wings of poesy’ in spite of hurdles put forward by reason and intellect. He
already has sublimated to the idyllic woodland where nightingale sings.
 But where the poet really is present is with no light. The ‘starry’ light is entering only
when the breeze shakes apart the leaves and branches of the trees which shut out moonlight and
the zigzag openings through the ‘moss’ covered trees. Disregarding all obstructions the song of
the nightingale still is audible to the sensuous poet--- Keats.

The sense of touch and smell is emphatically observed when the poet says: -

‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet/ Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough./ But, in
the embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.’

Though darkness forbids the views, he can recognize ‘grass’, ‘thicket’, ‘fruit—tree wild’,
‘hawthorn’, ‘pastoral Eglantine’, ‘Violets’ and ‘musk—rose’ with their distinct sweet fragrance.
He can hear the ‘murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.’

The poet is hearing Nightingale’s song which has made him ‘in love with easeful Death’.
Escapism again predominates in the poem. He invokes peaceful death to make him free from
misery of life. An embalmed state of luxury is death to the poet—the luxury that transcends his
soul from state of consciousness to state of semi—consciousness to state of unconsciousness.

Suddenly Keats cries out ‘forlorn’. Indeed he is in solitude. The poet comes back to his
own world of realities through so many flights into so many imaginative worlds. His cry
‘forlorn’ represents that the truth of real world and beauty of imaginative world is fused. Hence
this imaginative journey to the world of music and joy reveals to him the ultimate truth. The last
question is very significant: - ‘Was it a vision, or waking dream?/ Fled is that music: - Do I wake
or sleep?’

According to Middleton Murry, this question brings out the tension between ‘time and
eternity’, ‘joy and sorrow’, ‘mortality and immortality’, life and death. This poem advocates the
confusion in Keats’s mind about reality and unreality has merged with reality and sometimes in
this poem. And this is the ultimate truth that Keats wants to convey to us.