Looking Deeper into John Keats 'Ode to A Nightingale'
At one point in John Keats' life as a romantic poet, all his disappointments started catching up with him. Keats contracted tuberculosis after finally finishing his hard work at medical school. He had contracted the fatal disease from his brother Tom, who died from it. Keats then fell in love with a young woman who would never return his love at all. During the late stages of his terrible illness, Keats' poetry becomes more morose, filled with fear and with references to the permanence of his art and signs of death. Helen Vendler, critiquing Keats poetry, writes in her essay:There are lesser and better ways of entering into the existence of other beings. Keats had already explored one mode, which precluded all memory of the world left behind, in his meditation in Nightingale on lyric as pure, spontaneous, nonrepresentational melodious evocative of rich sensations. (390) Keats discusses escaping reality through the use of imagination and the senses. John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a romantic ode of eight stanzas discussing his need to be free from the realities of his life. The first and second stanzas show Keats' inner soul dying from depression as his body dies from the tuberculosis. He is realizing his disap
Martha Hale Shackford also mentions this subject of desire:Keats longed vehemently for some magic potion, a draught that would help the poetic imagination to escape from the brooding sorrows of the world of men, the world of mind and suffering. However, he turns right around and says, "And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne, clustered around by all her starry Fays" (36-37); sending out an enormously beautiful image of a Queen (the moon) surrounded by her beautiful fairies (the stars). , "A Note On Keats 'Ode To A Nightingale'," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. ' The slackening intensity from poison to narcotic to wine is itself a return to an ordinary wakeful consciousness, a sense of the usual reality from which Keats here would 'fade away into the forest dim,' to join the nightingale in its invisibility and enclosed joy; to leave behind the world of mutability, where every increase in consciousness is an increase in sorrow. The people who have already died ("long dead") can hear the songs in their eternal sleep and share the "ecstasy" of the nightingale because now they can do the things they had always wanted. The Nightingale just sings whatever she wants and has the ability to change what she sings and where she flies. Allen Tate believes the nightingale is a symbol in itself:It seems to me that the ambivalence of the nightingale symbol contains almost the whole substance of the poem: the bird, as bird, shares the mortality of the world; as symbol, it purports to transcend it.
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