ODE TO A
NIGHTINGALE
-John Keats
The "Ode to a
Nightingale" is a regular ode. All eight stanzas have ten pentameter lines
and a uniform rhyme scheme. Although the poem is regular in form, it leaves the
impression of being a kind of rhapsody; Keats is allowing his thoughts and
emotions free expression. One thought suggests another and, in this way, the
poem proceeds to a somewhat arbitrary conclusion. The poem impresses the reader
as being the result of free inspiration uncontrolled by a preconceived plan.
The poem is Keats in the act of sharing with the reader an experience he is
having rather than recalling an experience. The experience is not entirely
coherent. It is what happens in his mind while he is listening to the song of a
nightingale.
Three main thoughts stand out
in the ode. One is Keats' evaluation of life; life is a vale of tears and
frustration. The happiness which Keats hears in the song of the nightingale has
made him happy momentarily but has been succeeded by a feeling of torpor which
in turn is succeeded by the conviction that life is not only painful but also
intolerable. His taste of happiness in hearing the nightingale has made him all
the more aware of the unhappiness of life. Keats wants to escape from life, not
by means of wine, but by a much more powerful agent, the imagination.
The second main thought and
the main theme of the poem is Keats' wish that he might die and be rid of life
altogether, providing he could die as easily and painlessly as he could fall
asleep. The preoccupation with death does not seem to have been caused by any
turn for the worse in Keats' fortunes at the time he wrote the ode (May 1819).
In many respects Keats' life had been unsatisfactory for some time before he
wrote the poem. His family life was shattered by the departure of one brother
to America and the death from tuberculosis of the other. His second volume of
poetry had been harshly reviewed. He had no gainful occupation and no
prospects, since he had abandoned his medical studies. His financial condition
was insecure. He had not been well in the fall and winter of 1818-19 and
possibly he was already suffering from tuberculosis. He could not marry Fanny
Browne because he was not in a position to support her. Thus the death-wish in
the ode may be a reaction to a multitude of troubles and frustrations, all of
which were still with him. The heavy weight of life pressing down on him forced
"Ode to a Nightingale" out of him. Keats more than once expressed a
desire for "easeful Death," yet when he was in the final stages of
tuberculosis he fought against death by going to Italy where he hoped the
climate would cure him. The death-wish in the ode is a passing but recurrent
attitude toward a life that was unsatisfactory in so many ways.
The third main thought in the
ode is the power of imagination or fancy. (Keats does not make any clear-cut
distinction between the two.) In the ode Keats rejects wine for poetry, the
product of imagination, as a means of identifying his existence with that of
the happy nightingale. But poetry does not work the way it is supposed to. He
soon finds himself back with his every day, trouble-filled self. That
"fancy cannot cheat so well / as she is famed to do," he admits in
the concluding stanza. The imagination is not the all-powerful function Keats,
at times, thought it was. It cannot give more than a temporary escape from the
cares of life. Keats' assignment of immortality to the nightingale in stanza
VII has caused readers much trouble. Keats perhaps was thinking of a literal
nightingale; more likely, however, he was thinking of the nightingale as a
symbol of poetry, which has permanence.
Keats' evocative power is
shown especially in stanza II where he associates a beaker of wine "with
beaded bubbles winking at the brim," with sunny France and the
"sunburnt mirth" of the harvesters, and in his picture in stanza VII
of Ruth suffering from homesickness "amid the alien corn." The whole
ode is a triumph of tonal richness of that adagio verbal music that is Keats'
special contribution to the many voices of poetry.
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