My View of Keats's intentions in "Ode to a Nightingale"

             My View of Keats's intentions in "Ode to a Nightingale"
             This ode begins with an interesting idea that a sense of "drowsy numbness" can come from sharing the nightingale's happiness of summer too completely. The theme of "drowsy numbness" that the reader has seen before in "Ode to Indolence" has been reprised, but unlike the numbness being a sign of disconnection from experience in "Nightingale" it is a sign of too full a connection. The reader learns of this as the odes speaker says he is to "happy in thy (the nightingales) happiness" in the first stanza.
             As the speaker hears the nightingale "singest of summer in full throated ease" he wishes for a "draught of vintage" that he might "leave the world unseen". But in the third Stanza he uses the inevitability of death and old age, "where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies", as a contrast to the fluid and seemingly eternal music of this "immortal bird". And in the Fourth stanza he denounces his previous "tasting of flora" and says he wishes to reach the nightingale "not charioted by Bacchus and his pards" but by the "viewless wings of poesy". So basically, the speaker (who some might say is Keats himself) wishes to embrace poetry in an attempt to attain greater creative expression, which maybe the nightingale itself embodies.
             The fifth stanza takes on a darker tone, as the speaker is now blind to the flowers that were previously all around him. In "embalmed darkness" he sees the "fast-fading violets" and the "haunt of flies". This stanza to me is describing how the poetic inspiration of the previous stanza has taken over all his senses, in much the same way as "indolence" has before, and then as the ode continues how the nightingale's song
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My View of Keats's intentions in "Ode to a Nightingale". (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 03:23, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/8850.html