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 e . . .
The fifth stanza takes on a darker tone, as the speaker is now blind to the flowers that were previously all around him. As Hamlet said death was “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns” Keats explains that he could easily kill himself in the “ecstasy” of the nightingales song. So Keats’s “Ode to nightingale” defines mankind as being capable of unique emotional responsiveness. mbrace poetry in an attempt to attain greater creative expression, which maybe the nightingale itself embodies. ” or whether he himself is “wake or sleep”. Then the word “forlorn” tolls “like a bell” ending Keats’s brief fantasy of “easeful death” and he sees that what he imagines as an easy escape, “Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf", is really inescapable. And when you put Keats’s theme of “easeful Death” into much larger terms like this, one could almost say that in the prospect of death there would be a guarantee of eternal equality, as death obliterates all social hierarchy. This is unlike both “Ode to Indolence" where the speaker rejected all artistic effort, “For poesy!-no,-she has not a joy” and in "Ode to Psyche" he was willing to embrace his own creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures in “in some untrodden region of my (the speaker’s) mind”. Keats ends the ode with the nightingale flying farther away from him (the speaker), he laments that his imagination has failed him, “Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades”, and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale's music was "a vision, or a waking dream. And he even says that if he were gone the bird would “sing”. 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 makes the speaker “half in love with easeful death”. As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken and unable to remember whether is he “awake or sleep”. The “Ode to a Nightingale” is the first of Keats’s odes where the speaker has found a form of outward expression that transforms the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy's "viewless wings" at last. The way Keats invites us to think of man in plural in the third stanza, “where men sit and hear each other groan”, embraces the idea of how “hungry generations tread”; a clear commentary on how ordinary people took mass demonstrations in Keats’s time, protesting against an inept government that was ignoring literal starvation of its people.
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Acceptance Essays
