Analysis of �Ode to a Nightingale
by John Keats
Presentation
Mode
John Keats (1795-1821)
John Keats was born in Moorgate, London and was the son of a stable worker and had three siblings. His father died in an accident in 1804 and his mother died of Tuberculosis in 1810. In 1818 Keats he was becoming ill with tuberculosis. His younger brother too died of Tuberculosis upon his hands. In 1819 he wrote a series of great odes of which one was the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The other four odes were Ode to Psyche, Ode to autumn, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy. During this time his illness steadily worsened. He died in Rome and is buried in a Protestant cemetery in the city. Keats’s writing took place only during the last five years of his life but he is considered to be one of the greatest English poets.
About the Poem
The poem depicts on a speaker standing in an imaginary forest, listening to a beautiful song of the nightingale bird. This provokes a deep and meandering meditation by the speaker on time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering. 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, the speaker is isolated as the nightingale flies away, and the speaker is unsure of whether the whole experience has been a dream.
Overview
Scanning the poem for basic details.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques:
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.
Deep-end Analysis
The speaker obviously suffers from physical and psychological pains. He feels like he is poisoned or drunk with some kind of drug. His miserable situation is compared with the Nightingale’s happiness and he is happy about the ecstasy of the bird singing in a picturesque natural setting. It seems to be paradoxical that the speaker feels pain while he says he is happy. Can happiness bring pain and drowsiness?
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.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques:
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 Provencal 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:
Deep-end Analysis
The speaker wants to be intoxicated by wine or beer and join the happiness of the bird in the forest. The description of drinking and of the world associated with wine is idealized. He compares the quality of happiness gain through quality wine, outdoor dance and song with the zest that he would get by entering the fantasy world of the nightingale. His necessity to leave the world without any notice indicates that his present state of life is not a happy one.
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 Provencal 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:
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques
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 plasy 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.
Deep-end Analysis
Poet claims that he wants to be hidden in the fantasy world of the Nightingale quite forgetting the human world which is a dwelling to sorrow. He claims that the world where the bird lives in has no such sufferings. He may speak of the bird at a symbolical level considering the bird as a symbol of pure happiness. The speaker realizes the transient and impermanent nature of human world which is immersed in sorrow, despair and unhappiness.
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 plasy 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.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques:
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.
Deep-end Analysis
The speaker realizes that intoxication with wine would not help him to leave his ill-state of mind. Therefore, he seeks to enter imaginative world through poetry; he sees his analytical thinking slows him down. However, he seems to be successful; by looking at the latter part of the stanza we can see his ideas are brimming with poetic essence. He enters the world of the bird and sees faint light he had been looking for is with the nature. (but darkness is also there: but here there is no light,)
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.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques:
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.
Deep-end Analysis
In the fantasy forest, he uses his senses to feel the beauty of nature as it is dark. Though the happiness is there, death lurks in and haunts his life: the use of words like ‘embalmed darkness’, ‘fast fading’ and change of seasons foreshadow the coming stanza about death. Though he describes about spring which is full of flowers, he hints about the change of season at the end, suggesting the impermanence of everything.
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.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques:
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.
Deep-end Analysis
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.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
Techniques:
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.
Deep-end Analysis
Poet understands his mortality and the nature of human beings who die giving their space to the next ‘hungry generations.’ He views the song of the Nightingale is something unchanged and passed through many a generation; hence he attributes bird an ‘immortal bird.’ The bird’s joyous song has been heard by in the past in the series of three images: emperors and clowns, Ruth and fairies in fairy lands where no human exists.
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.
Deep-end Analysis
Vocabulary:
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?
Deep-end Analysis
The poet realizes his isolation in the human world. He disillusioned from his fantasy of escaping his suffering through his world of imagination. He considers the bird as a ‘deceiving elf’ and considers the bird as an ordinary bird who flies away to the next valley with its song. His visionary experience has improved his vision of life. However, the speaker is in a state of delirium whether he was day dreaming or he has truly had a journey to the world of Nightingale.
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?
Overall
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