Regarding Consciousness: Keats Is Fully Awake
Regarding Consciousness: Keats Is Fully AwakeJohn Keats's, "Ode to a Nightingale," is a poem in which the author is continually drifting between reality and fantasy. The fantasy is so strongly fueled by a persona that seeks to escape solitude and the weariness of reality, that in the end he questions, "-Do I wake or sleep?" (80). Yet by asking these questions, the author gives away the answer, for these are questions that can be asked only upon reflection. Thus, the event he ponders upon, his flight with the nightingale is already passed, and he sits in thoughtful consciousness. The imagery in the first two stanzas that the author creates is beautiful and almost serene, belying the speaker's need for escape and his yearning for death. Words, such as "drowsy numbness," "hemlock," and "dull opiate" serve to reinforce the speaker's call for "a draught of vintage..." and the want of loss of consciousness through intoxication. This need to lose consciousness transi
Keats indicates the end of the imaginative journey by using the word "forlorn," at the end of the seventh stanza, and again in the beginning of the eight. In stanza three, the speaker recalls all the cruelties and banalities of life where even the nightingale's song of ". summer in full-throated ease" could not drown out the groans of his fellow man. Stanza seven follows the speaker's transition from the imagined world back down to the real world. These are rhetoric questions in which the speaker and author are already aware of their awakened state. As he acknowledges the bird's song fading into the distance, his thoughts quickly turn back to his reality and mankind with recollections of certain figures; "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!/ the voice I hear this passing night was heard/ by emperor and clown/ through the sad heart of Ruth" (61-66). The beauty and wonders of his imaginative flight with the nightingale is continuously grounded by the awareness of his own frail mortality. At the end of the last stanza, the speaker asks, "Was it a vision or a waking dream/ Do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). This repetition serves to reiterate the speaker's melancholy of having to part with the idealism of imagination, and the melancholy of again, having to come to life. In doing so he is able to fuse the two realms in which he constantly drifted, recognizing and separating the various morbidity and beauties of the external world, and the conscious need to interact with that world. However, this state of wishful thinking is interrupted by the speakers own unwilling thoughts towards the very reality he wants to escape. However, the speaker realizes the consequence of death just as he admits to longing for it.
Common topics in this essay:
Ode Nightingale,
stanza speaker,
stanza six,
stanza six speaker,
real world,
imaginative flight,
flight nightingale,
wake sleep,
six speaker,
|
Acceptance Essays
