Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale: A romantic escapism
Ode to a Nightingale is one of the most quoted poems in English Literature. The Ode was written in 1819. Charles Brown, a friend of Keats suggests that he constructed the particular poem in the whole morning, inspired by the song of a nightingale while sitting under a plum tree. The famous ode is Keats’s attempt in fleeing from the pain and pangs of life,
“My heart aches, and drowsy numbness pains”
Keats is in a state of uncomfortable drowsiness. Envy of the imagined happiness of the nightingale is not responsible for his condition; rather, it is a reaction to the happiness he has experienced through sharing in the happiness of the nightingale. The bird’s happiness is conveyed in its singing.
Keats longs for a draught of wine that would take him out of himself and allow him to join his existence with that of the bird. The wine would put him in a state in which he would no longer be himself, aware that life is full of pain that the young die, the old suffer, and that just thinking about life brings sorrow and despair. But wine is not needed to enable him to escape.
His imagination will serve just as well. As soon as he realizes this, he is, in spirit, lifted above the trees and can see the moon and the stars even though where he is physical there is only a glimmering of light. He cannot see what flowers are growing around him, but from their odor and from his knowledge of what flowers should be in bloom at the time he can guess.
In the darkness, he listens to the nightingale. Now, he feels, it would be a rich experience to die, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the bird would continue to sing ecstatically. Many a time, he confesses, he has been “half in love with easeful Death.” The Nightingale is free from the human fate of having to die.
The song of the nightingale that he is listening to was heard in ancient times by the emperor and peasants. Perhaps even Ruth (whose story is told in the Old Testament) heard it.
“Forlorn,” the last word of the preceding stanza, brings Keats in the concluding stanza back to consciousness of what he is and where he is. He cannot escape even with the help of the imagination. The singing of the bird grows fainter and dies away. The experience he has had seems so strange and confusing that he is not sure whether it was a vision or a daydream. He is even uncertain whether he is asleep or awake.
Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is considered one of the finest odes in English Literature. It reveals the highest imaginative powers of the poet. The poem was inspired by the song of a nightingale which the poet heard in the gardens of his friend Charles Brown.
The sweet music of the nightingale sent the poet into rapture and on into morning he took his chair from the breakfast table, put it on the grass plot under the grass plum tree, and composed the poem. After he had finished the poem he came back with scraps of paper in his hand. Brown rescued the papers and found them to be the poem on the nightingale.
Thus the poem is an expression of Keats’s feelings rising in his heart at the hearing of the melodious song of the bird. The song of the nightingale moves from the poet to the depth of his heart and creates in him a heartache and numbness as is created by the drinking of hemlock. He thinks that the bird lives in a place of beauty.
When he hears the nightingale’s song, he is entrenched by its sweetness and his joy becomes so excessive that it changes into a kind of pleasant pain. He is filled with a desire to escape from the world of care to the world of a beautiful place of a bird.
The poem presents a picture of the tragedy of human life. It brings out an expression of Keats’s pessimism and dejection. He composed this poem at a time when his heart was full of sorrow. His youngest brother Tom had died, the second one had gone abroad and the poet himself was under the suspense and agony of the passionate love for Fanny Brawne.
All these happenings had induced in the poet a mood of sorrow. He could not suppress it. Thus the poet enjoys the pleasure in sadness/ pain and feasts upon the very sadness/ pain into joy. This complex emotion gives the poem a unique charm.
In the beginning, Keats seems to be an immature youth with a melancholic heart urging him to find a means of him to oblivion and escape. On catching the sight of a nightingale and hearing its music, which he assumes to be an immortal voice of happiness, Keats feels that his body is getting numbed. But, he also feels acute pain because he is conscious of his mortality and suffering.
He fantasies of having fantasized about hemlock or ‘some dull opiate’: “My heart aches, and drowsy numbness pain, / my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.” The initial situation of awareness and conflict slowly changes and each anguish out the ode with a corresponding shift in tone.
The tragic awareness of suffering inflicts on him a particular kind of particular use the opposing effect of dullness, which is the effect of desire, is increasing. The awareness is a burden that makes him ‘sink’ gradually towards the world of oblivion.
After describing his plight, Keats acknowledges, rather than envy the bird’s ‘happy lot’ and participates in its permanent happiness. He identifies the bird with a dryad, the Greek Goddess of the tree. He contrasts the mortality and suffering of a human being with the immortality and perfect happiness of the nightingale. Of course, Keats immortalizes the bird by thinking of its race of it as the symbol of its universal and undying musical voice, which is the voice of nature and also of ideal romantic poetry, of the world of art and spirit.
This universal and eternal voice has comforted human beings embittered by life and tragedies by opening the casement of the remote, magical, spiritual, eternal, and ideal. The poet is longing for the imaginative experience of an imaginatively perfect world. At this stage in the poem, the poet is trying to escape from the reality, and experience the ideal rather than complement one with the other. This dualism is to resolve later. Keats begins by urging for poison and wine and then desires the poetic and imaginative experience.
But, as the poem develops, one feels that the numbness and intoxication the poet deliberately and imaginatively imposes upon his senses of pain are meant to awaken a higher sense of experience. The vintage, dance, and song, the waters of poetic inspiration are the warmth of the south together to make a compound and sensuous appeal.
Keats develops a dialectic by partaking in both the states-the fretful here of man and the happy there of the Nightingale and serves as the mediator between the two. After activating the world of insight and inner experience by obliterating that of the sense, Keats is revived into a special awareness of the conflict. With this awareness, he moves into a higher thematic ground moving from the ache of the beginning through the yearning for permanence and eventually exploring the tension to balance the transient with the permanent.
No one can escape into the ideal world forever. Imaginative minds can have a momentary flight into the fanciful world. But, ultimately one has to return to the real world and must accept reality. John Keats is no exception to this. He makes imaginative flights into the ideal world but accepts the realities of life despite its ‘fever, fret and fury’.
The process of experience he has undergone has undoubtedly left him with a heightened awareness of both modes of experience. When the imaginative life wakes, the pressures of ordinary experience are benumbed: and when ordinary experience becomes acute, the intensity of imaginative reality is reduced. And this makes life and experience more complete.
To sum up, Keats soars high with his ‘wings of poesy’ into the world of ideas and perfect happiness. But the next moment, consciousness makes him land on the grounds of reality and he bids farewell to the ideal bird. At this moment, Keats must also have been conscious that the very bird, which he had idealized and immortalized, existed in the real world, mortal and vulnerable to change and suffering like himself.
