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BA ENGLISH LITERATURE
FIRST YEAR - SEMESTER I
CORE I – INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE
UNIT II - POETRY
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
About
Author:
John
Keats (October 31, 1795– February 23, 1821) was an English Romantic poet of the
second generation, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Keats wrote
his first poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, aged 19. He published three
books of poetry in his lifetime. His first
published work, ‘O Solitude!‘ appeared in 1816. He is best known for his odes,
including "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale,"
and his long form poem Endymion. His usage of sensual imagery and statements
such as “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” made him a precursor of aestheticism.
Keats tragically died of tuberculosis at age 25.
About
Poem:
"Ode
to a Nightingale" was written by the Romantic poet John Keats in the
spring of 1819 and published in the Annals
of the Fine Arts. At 80 lines, it is the longest of Keats's odes contains 8
stanzas of 10 lines each (which include poems like "Ode on a Grecian
Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy").
The
poem focuses on a speaker standing in a dark forest, listening to the beguiling
and beautiful song of the nightingale bird. This provokes a deep and meandering
meditation by the speaker on time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering
(something the speaker would very much like to escape!). At times, the speaker
finds comfort in the nightingale's song and at one point even believes that
poetry will bring the speaker metaphorically closer to the nightingale. By the
end of the poem, however, the speaker seems to be an isolated figure—the
nightingale flies away, and the speaker unsure of whether the whole experience
has been "a vision" or a "waking dream."
Poem:
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.
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 Provençal 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
Summary:
1st
Stanza - In the very beginning of the Ode, the poet describes how he finds
himself in a state of oppression and painful lassitude after listening to the
bird’s song as if had taken poison or drugs and was drowning into oblivion. He
is oppressed by its beauty and joy. But he is not at all jealous of the bird’s
cheerfulness, rather he is extremely delighted because of the bird’s
cheerfulness, rather he is extremely delighted because of the bird’s joy.
So,
his “Heartaches”. Human happiness is limited. The poem begins with extreme
straightforwardness and lucidity. His “drowsy numbness” does not result from
any wine or drug but rather it is the result of the extreme delight that he
feels after listening to the bird’s song.
2nd Stanza - No more he wants to
say in the human world. He expresses his intense yearning to run away from the
world of human suffering. He thinks of the romantic association of the origin
country of the wine. He also visualizes a cup full of wine, which has its
association with taste, touch, colour, smell, and sound. All these help him to
disappear with the nightingale into the deep dark of the forest.
3rd Stanza - The bird is not all
worried about the sorrows and sufferings of the humans, it does not know
anything about these and the poet depicts his earnest yearning to run away from
this human world,
“where
men sit and hear each other groan;
where
youth grows pale, and spectre thin and dies;
where
beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,”
Where is only sorrow and
suffering, death and decay? So, this stanza is the reflection of the personal
realization and experience of the poet personal. Actually, Keats witness his
younger brother’s death at a very early age in 1818 and he was well acquainted
with his own ill health. He feels that he can no more be part of all these
burdens of line, he can no more tolerate the misery, premature death, and
brevity of love and beauty. So, he wants the lap of nature to find solace.
4th
Stanza - The poet longs to go to the nightingale’s world “not Charioted
by Bacchus, god of wine and his pards”, but “on the viewless wings of Poesy,
goddess of poetry”. He gives up the idea of getting inspiration from wine, he
needs invisible assistance from poetic imagination. He feels his existence with
the nightingale with the natural world in the presence of the moon and stars.
Actually, after listening to the bird’s song the poet, with the help of his
romantic imagination, tries to enter the nightingale’s world.
5th Stanza - In his romantic
imagination the poet is in the beauty of the forest by the side of the
nightingale. He cannot see the various types of flowers because of the
darkness, but he can feel the fragrance of those flowers. He can feel the
beauty of nature which is in stark contrast with the human world.
6th Stanza - He can easily accept “easeful death” in this
beautiful and ecstatic world with the accompaniment of the nightingale’s song.
It’s an extra achievement for him to die in the midst of “such an ecstasy!”.
So, he invoked the “easeful death” but even after his death, the bird will
continue to sing in such a joyful way Keats’s sentimental and reflective
sensuousness achieves the highest from here.
7th Stanza - Now the poet calls the
bird an “immortal bird”. The bird is not born for death because of its immortal
voice. He brings in the allusion to Ruth the principal character of the “Book
of Ruth”. Ruth was Moabitess and she was the windowed daughter-in-law of Naomi.
After the death of her husband, she moved to her mother-in-law and both of them
traveled to Bethlehem where she wins the love of Boaz, a kinsman of her
mother-in-law through her kindness. Finally, she marries. This stanza is highly
romantic.
8th
Stanza - The poet is suddenly
reminded of his mortal world by the word “forlorn”, which is bringing him back
to his ‘Saut self’, his miseries his sorrows, and sufferings his desolate
condition. Suddenly he comes back to reality. He cannot escape as easily as he
has pretended. The song of the nightingale fades away in the distance, and the
poet returns half dazed, to real life. At the end, the world of imagination is
replaced by a painful real world which is always in stark contrast to the world
of imagination. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and,
that death is an inevitable part of life.
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