Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats- Essay

 

Ode to a Nightingale

-        John Keats

John Keats is one of the major Romantic poets. He wrote six major odes in 1819. He wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” between 26 April and 18 May 1819. It describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature. It is a profound meditation on mortality, beauty, and the momentary nature of human experience. The poem follows a strict rhyme scheme of ABABCDECDE in every stanza.

Three main thoughts are recurring in the ode. 1. Keats’ evaluation of life; life is filled with tears and frustration. 2. Keats’ wish that he might die and be rid of life altogether. His preoccupation with death can be seen here. 3. The power of imagination or fancy. Keats does not make any distinction between the two and he rejects wine for poetry, the product of imagination.

At the beginning of the poem, Keats is in a state of drowsiness. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains.” He is enchanted by the song of the nightingale. He is envious of the imagined happiness of the bird. It “Singest of summer in full-throated ease”. Next, Keats longs for wine which would take him out of himself and allow him to join the bird. The wine would put him in a state in which he would no longer be himself. He is aware that life is full of pain, that the young die, the old suffer. But wine is not needed to enable him to escape. His imagination will serve the purpose.

In the darkness, the poet listens to the nightingale. Now, Keats feels, it would be a rich experience to die, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”. He confesses that 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 was heard in ancient times also by emperor and peasant. Perhaps even Ruth, a character from the Old Testament heard it.

The concluding stanza brings back Keats to consciousness. He knows that he cannot escape with the help of the imagination. He writes, “the fancy cannot cheat so well.” The singing of the bird grows fainter and dies away. The experience he has had seems so strange. He is not sure whether it was a vision or a daydream. This poem conveys that neither life nor death is acceptable to Keats and it appears that he “belongs nowhere”.

Keats enriches the poem using many allusions. He refers to Lethe, the river of forgetting that flows through the underworld; Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses made by Pegasus’ hooves which brings inspiration; dryads, the spirit protectors of the forest; Bacchus, god of wine and debauchery; Ruth and the corn-field is a reference to the book in the Bible; hemlock, the poison that killed Socrates; Flora, the Roman goddess of nature.