Monday, January 26, 2009

I Swear I Didn't Write It

Between the first three words of "Ode to a Nightingale," "My heart aches," and its last, "sleep," John Keats describes a brief personal escape from an existence whose suffering he can no longer endure. The "I" who speaks eight times in this perfect eight-stanza lyric is Keats himself, not a surrogate persona. Ambiguity, irony, and even implication have no place here, but biography does. Keats' letters show that he certainly believed the poet possessed "negative capability," the self-nullifying power to enter other things and speak as and for them. "Ode to a Nightingale" depicts one such experience. True enough, Keats leaves his "sole self" (72) to join with the nightingale in verse that briefly realizes, in human language, the ageless beauty of its unintelligible song.

In "Ode to a Nightingale" A major concern 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. In this ode, Keats focuses on immediate, concrete sensations and emotions, from which the reader can draw a conclusion or abstraction.

John Keats is known for his vibrant use of imagery in his poetry. Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. Examples of Synaesthetic Images are, TASTING of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!O for a beaker of the warm South, (stanza II). Here the poet TASTES the visual ("Flora and the country green"), activity ("Dance"), sound ("Provencal song"), and mood or pleasure ("mirth"); also the visual ("sunburnt") is combined with a pleasurable emotional state ("mirth"). With the beaker there is finally something to taste, but what is being tasted is temperature ("warm") and a locationJohn Keats presented in his poetry many issues, such as nature, existence and the soul. All of these aspects relate directly to the human spirit. The spiritual nature of Keats poetry concerns itself with exploring human emotions and understanding nature. ("South").

In this ode, The poet falls into a reverie while listening to an actual nightingale sing. He feels joy and pain, an ambivalent response. the poet has beautifully fused pain with imaginary relief or the unconscious joyous things of nature and art. To escape from pain of reality, he begins to move into the world of imagination. When he hears the nightingale, he yearns for fine wine from south France, not to get drunk but to achieve a state of mind, which will give him the pleasure of the company of the beautiful nightingale, “that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:”(II, 19-20) However, the poet realizes that he does not require wine for being with the bird, so chooses the route of flying to her through his poetry. “ Away! Away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy…………..And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays”(IV, 36,37).

In Stanza VI, Keats yearns to die, a state which he imagines as only joyful, as pain-free, and to merge with the bird's song. The nightingale is characterized as wholly blissful--"full-throated ease" in stanza I and "pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!" (lines 7-8). The inner pain and grief engulfing the poet is revealed in a very subtle manner. He also realizes that death means he could no longer hear the bird song and will be non-existent. Suddenly the beautiful bird song seems to him more like “requiem”(VI, 60), a song of death.

John Keats presented in his poetry many issues, such as nature, existence and the soul. All of these aspects relate directly to the human spirit. The spiritual nature of Keats poetry concerns itself with exploring human emotions and understanding nature.

2 comments:

  1. Funny title, and I like how one of your links points to echeat.

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  2. In the first part of your post the author said that irony and implication are not included in Keats' poem. Is it not ironic that the nightingale can just fly away, potentially into the heavens and it is just as mortal as Keats? I do not recall the speaker of the poem explicitly saying that it is Keats himself, isn't that an implication? I liked the writing on the sensations evoked by the imagery.I think the speaker asked for wine to get drunk and not just to feel "buzzed", he wanted to the world to leave him and to escape to a new world where he can fly like the bird. Once the bird stops singing or the speaker cannot hear the song anymore is that due to his death or the birds death? I liked the last section about the connection between emotions and nature.

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