Nightingale

David Christopher.
Student Number: 198480.
British Literature: II.
ENGL 3502 (18.352) Section V.
October 4th, 2002.

Poetry Analysis 1: John Keats’ “Ode to A Nightingale”
John Keats’ in his “Ode to a Nightingale” examines the therapeutic effect of poetry on the imagination and the harsh reminder of reality that such flights of imagination stimulate by contrast. Using extensive imagery, verse, meter, and sibilance, Keats successfully creates a lyrical opiate of the mind which enjoins the reader to accompany him through his dreamy experience and its oscillation back into lucidity. Images of Bacchic revelry and Greek mythology facilitate the reader’s descent into the author’s dream-state and commune with nature. No matter how lost in nature the author becomes, however, his ecstasy is constantly interrupted with moments of lucidity that the reader experiences through the images and form of the poem. Keats concludes with specific images of death and a lamenting of his own mortal condition as he says farewell to the nightingale and questions the reality of his experience.

The first stanza is a microcosm for all the techniques the author will use throughout the poem to create the feeling of sliding into an ecstatic dream-state. He immediately mentions his opiated state of mind as a “drowsy numbness” (Keats) brought on by the song and environment of the nightingale. He uses the image of sliding “Lethe-wards” (Keats) to give the reader the sense of a descent into the fantasy dreamworld but also to introduce the first interruption to the ecstasy as he moves toward death. The mythological Greek image of “Lethe-ward”(Keats) is complemented by metaphorically describing the nightingale as a “dryad.”(Keats) The imagination of the reader further descends into the dreamworld. The nightingale itself as it “singest of summer in full-throated ease” (Keats) is merely a vehicle by which the author engages the imagination to ascend into the dreamy state of opiated reprieve from his anguish. Combined with the dreamy sibilance replete in these lines such as “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains” (Keats) or “Lethe-wards had sunk” (Keats) and the smooth rhythm of the iambic pentameter, Keats manages to create both an image and feeling of the sense of ecstasy one experiences in the dreamy moments of transition between being fully awake and fully asleep.
Keats’ use of images from ancient Greek mythology and religion is pervasive. The ideas used in stanza one to help the descent into the dreamworld are extended by the mention in stanza two of his desire for a “draught of vintage” (Keats) or a “beaker” (Keats) full of bubbling wine from the Hippocrene. Not only is the Hippocrene the Greek image of a ‘fountain of the muses on Mt. Helicon’, it is used in conjunction with the idea of summer mentioned in stanza one, the nighttime world of the nightingale, and the desire for deleterious wine to create an emotion that is distinctly one of Bacchic revelry as described by Euripides in his classical works.
In stanza four, Keats actually mentions Bacchus as the mind of the reader has now been conditioned to expect his presence from stanza one and two. The personification of the “Queen-moon” (Keats) is obviously an allusion to the Greek deity Artemis, and is a strong contrast to the very concrete description of the image of the moon in Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known.” All of these images from the author’s imagination, in which the reader is sharing, strongly remove the reader from the world of reality and into the imagined world of communing with nature typical of Bacchus and the ancient Greeks.

Building on the image of revelry in nature, the author now begins to revel himself in his imagined surroundings. Stanza five is highly reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The image is one of being surrounded by the blackness of night, with a warm summer breeze relaxing the senses and being enchanted by the scents of a summer forest and the carefree, siren-like song of the nightingale against an otherwise silent and sleeping natural setting.
In the “embalmed darkness,” (Keats) the author is actually blind, but rich in imagination and his escape from reality is complete. Using imagery, he again allows the reader to engage in his experience. The reader is equally blind to the scene but can access it through images that have a universal emotional appeal.
Access to the pain-free world of the imagination created by the nightingale, however, can be intruded upon. In stanza three the descent and participation in a dreamy state of mind that the author has been creating to this point abruptly oscillate back to the world of reality. Here, Keats takes note of the difference between the world of the nightingale and his own. He asks the nightingale to “forget What . . . (it) hast never known.” (Keats) The mortality of youth and world of disease that is “full of sorrow”, “Where Beauty cannot keep” (Keats) is exclusive to man’s reality. The irony of forgetting what he has never known suggests that the nightingale, in this sense, is really the author’s imagination, part of which is a painless world of immortality, and another part of which is vividly aware of harsh reality. The stanza maintains the use of sibilance and meter, however, and, in turn, maintains some of the dreamy quality previously established. As such, the imagination and reality are shown as not mutually exclusive, but that reality imposes on the dream-state as an ever-present interruption.

Bacchus merits further mentioning as a dichotomous representation. The idea that the fantastical escape-world of the imagination and the harsh world of reality are not mutually exclusive is supported by the choice of Bacchus as an image. Note that in Euripides’ play, one of his major themes was that a balanced mind requires both mental flights of fancy as well as logical thought. Stanza six and seven represent this dichotomous notion well as they are not clear in which world the author’s mind is residing. He muses about his own death and welcoming it, while maintaining the sleepy sibilance and dreamy iambic pentameter. He then pursues a flight of fancy about the travels of the immortal nightingale through the lives of other mortals throughout history and mentions such pastoral fantasy images as “Charmed magic”, “faery lands”, and fancy as a “decieving elf.” (Keats) Clearly the author is lost somewhere between fantasy and reality.
Interruptions to the ecstatic dreamworld are not only by the stanzas as a whole, but as fleeting images of death throughout the poem such as “spectre-thin” (Keats) or “embalmed darkness” (Keats) and as reflected in the structure of the poem itself. I find it interesting to note that the author uses an iambic pentameter to mimic the dialogue of a wandering mind. The meter is very simple and rhythmic and has a distinctly relaxing effect on the reader. However, every eighth line of every ten-line stanza carries only three beats in contrast to the five beats of every other line. The halting contrast of this line within the stanza has an abrupt effect on the relaxed rhythm the reader is otherwise enjoying. The line is a reflection in form of the constant interruption of the dream-state the author experiences by his own imposing lucidity.
It is further interesting to note that in many of these lines the author chooses vocabulary that either directly or through imagery suggests death. In stanza one, the definition of the word “plot” (Keats) includes a connotation to a piece of land set aside for burial. Likewise, in stanza two, the reader might interpret the phrase “purple-stained” (Keats) as an image of a bloodstained cloak as perhaps the one worn by Caesar, again contrasting with the painless immortality of the nightingale.

In stanza two, he pines for some sort of vintage that has been fermented in nature, or a “beaker full of the warm South” (Keats) that he might drink to fade away with the nightingale into the dreamy night. He wants to capture and contain nature in a bottle to be used as some sort of modern medicine that he might drink off and be cured of the pains of his illness. My historical impression of Keats as “Ill with tuberculosis” and “haunted by premonitions of early death” (Rosenthal) is at least remotely relevant here. He is obviously grappling with his mortality and his condition as he struggles through the pain of his disease. As such, he is able to very passionately express his escape from that world (through the nightingale and the environment it represents) to the reader through his images and form, but incessantly returns the reader to the horrors of his reality as he would experience in an oscillating dream-state. He recognizes the medicinal effect of his imagination as it engages in the environment of the nightingale and wants to bottle it or package it for convenient use so that it is available not only when the mind is unexpectedly so able to escape its reality. He proceeds to say that he will fly to the nightingale on “viewless wings of poesy” (Keats) suggesting that he has perhaps found the method by which he can bottle and voluntarily access the dreamy anaesthesia of the experience: through poetry.

The last stanza of the poem is a full combination of the ecstasy of the dream and the reality of mortality. The stanza commences with the lucid word “Forlorn!” (Keats) The author suggests that the word tolls him back from the nightingale and the dreamworld it represents, as perhaps day approaches, to his sole self. He is no longer communing with nature but alone. As the sound fades away, he chooses the blatant death image of “buried deep” (Keats) to describe the final disappearance of the bird’s song. However, the dream world is still present. The smooth iambic pentameter has not been abandoned and such sleepy sibilant phrases as “Past the near meadows, over the still stream” (Keats) are also still very obvious. In fact, the poet concludes by asking the question of perfect summary: “Do I wake or sleep?”(Keats) As such, he has returned the reader indefinitely to that elusive place of ecstasy between slumber and lucidity. He points out in stanza one that he has not actually taken any sort of hallucinogen but feels as though he had. The effect of the nightingale (and its environment, all of which engages the imagination) on the author is tantamount to the effect of the poem on the reader. It is anaesthetic, but only temporarily as the dream is interrupted by harsh reality.


Works Cited
Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” The Heath Introduction to Literature. Ed. Alice S. Landy and Dave Martin. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath Canada Ltd., 1982, 842-845.
Rosenthal, M.L. “John Keats.” Poetry in English - An Anthology. Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, 603.