birds
Both John Keats, in "Ode to a Nightingale," and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," use a bird as a central motif of their poem. However, these creatures are definitely not birds of a feather; their function within their respective works reflects the vastly different themes of the two works themselves, as well as the psyches of the men who wrote them. This paper will discuss both Keats' and Coleridge's symbolic use of birds, and analyze what they represent within their differing contexts. John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem of both despair and strength. It was written less than a year after the death of the poet's beloved brother Tom from a long, wasting bout with tuberculosis. Keats himself was not in good health either (he would die of tuberculosis himself less than two years later) and he had almost sole care of his brother in Tom's last days. In addition, the orphaned Keats suffered from acute financial worries, his finances being tied up by the trustee of the family will who considered Keats a wastrel. This plunged the poet into a demeaning cycle of borrowing from and taking up residence with supportive literary friends. Keats scholar Fred Inglis adds that "Anxiety over money disrupted [K
At the end of the poem, the nightingale flies off into the woods, and Keats is left alone, the music fled. Indeed, the degree of their guilt, because it was conscious and motivated by circumstances, is far greater than that of the Mariner" (Radley, 60). She says, "Throughout the account given by the old mariner, the Wedding Guest [has been] hostile here to the things that matter, that is, to the "really real" experiences of the Mariner . In both cases, the magic of a winged creature suggests to the poet an opportunity for inner transformation. The Mariner's real sin was not appreciating God's creation -- of going through life with blinders on, caring only about the superficial. However, through the shrieking wind an albatross blows onto the ship. The cosmic love moral, as we may call it-- He prayeth well, who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast. Its very appearance seems like such a miracle that the sailors "hail it in God's name" (Coleridge, line 66). According to Paul Magnuson, quoting Coleridge's friend and mentor Wordsworth, "The Ancient Mariner" was consciously written as sort of an exercise, "to follow the emotions of a man who in a delirium believed himself under a curse and persecuted by supernatural forces" (Magnuson, 50). Possibly Virginia Radley's explanation -- that it was a careless, immature act -- makes the most sense in the context of the rest of the poem.
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Acceptance Essays
