Ode to a Nightingale

W. J. Neatby's illustration for Ode to a Nightingale

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written in May 1819 in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London. According to Keats's friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near his home in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem that describes Keats' journey into the state of Negative Capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems, and it explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats.

The nightingale described within the poem experiences a type of death but it does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination. The presence of weather is noticeable in the poem, as spring came early in 1819, which brought nightingales all over the heath. Many critics favor "Ode to a Nightingale" for its themes but some believe that it is structurally flawed because the poem sometimes strayed from its main idea.

Background

Of Keats's six major odes of 1819, "Ode to Psyche" was probably written first and "To Autumn" written last. Somewhere between writing these two, Keats wrote "Ode to a Nightingale".^[1] According to Keats's friend Brown, Keats composed the Ode in just one morning: "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale."^[2]

The exact date of "Ode to a Nightingale" as well as "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is unknown, as Keats himself only dated the poems as 'May 1819'. However, he worked on the four poems together and there is a unity in both their stanza forms and their themes. The exact order the poems were written in is also unknown, but they form a sequence within their structures. While Keats was writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the other poems, Brown transcribed copies of the poems and submitted them to Richard Woodhouse.^[3] During this time, Benjamin Haydon, Keats's friend, was given a copy of "Ode to a Nightingale", and he shared the poem with the editor of the Annals of the Fine Arts, James Elmes. Elmes paid Keats a small sum of money, and the poem was published in the July issue.^[4]

Structure

"Ode to Nightingale" was probably the first of the middle set of four odes that Keats wrote following "Ode to Psyche" as implied by Brown. There is further evidence in the structure of the poems because Keats combines two different types of lyrical in an experimental way: the odal hymn and the lyric of questioning voice that responds to the odal hymn. This combination of structures is similar to that in "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and, in both poems, the dual form creates a sort of dramatic element within the poem. The stanza forms of the poem is a combination of elements from Pretrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets.^[5]

When it came to vowel forms, Keats incorporated pattern of alternating historically "short" and "long" vowel sounds in his ode. In particular, line 18 ("And purple-stained mouth") has the historical pattern of "short" followed by "long" followed by "short" and followed by "long". This alteration is continued in longer lines, including line 31 ("Away! away! for I will fly to thee") which has five pairs of alternations. However, other lines, such as line 3 ("Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains") rely on a pattern of five "short" vowels followed by "long" vowel and "short" vowel pairings until it ends with a "long" vowel. These are not the only combination patterns present, and there are patterns of two "short" vowels followed by a "long" vowel in other lines, including 12, 22, and 59, which are repeated twice and then followed up with two sets of "short" vowel and then "long" vowel pairs. This reliance on vowel sounds is not unique to this ode, but is common to Keats's other 1819 odes and his Eve of St. Agnes.^[6]

The poem also incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, a repetition of vowel sounds, in a conscious pattern as found in many of his poems. Such a reliance on assonance found in very few English poems. Within "Ode to a Nightingale", an example of this pattern can be found in line 35 ("Already with thee! tender is the night") where the "ea" of "Already" connects with the "e" of "tender" and the "i" of "with" connects with the "i" of "is". This same pattern is found again in line 41 )"I cannot see what flowers are at my feet") with the "a" of "cannot" linking with the "a" of "at" and the "ee" of "see" linking with the "ee" of "feet". This system of assonance can be found in approximately a tenth of the lines of Keats's later poetry.^[7]

When it came to other sound patterns, Keats relied on double or triple caesuras within approximately 6% throughout the 1819 odes. An example from "Ode to a Nightingale" can be found within line 45 ("The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild") as the pauses after the commas are a "masculine" pause. Furthermore, Keats began to reduce the amount of Latin based words and syntax that he relied on in his poetry, which in turn shortened the length of the words that dominate the poem. There is also an emphasis on words beginning with consonants, especially those that begin with "b", "p" or "v". These three consonants are relied on heavily in the first stanza, and they are used syzygially to add a musical tone within the poem.^[8]

In terms of poetic meter, Keats relies on spondee throughout his 1819 odes and in just over 8% of his lines within "Ode to a Nightingale", including line 12:^[9]

and line 25:

To Walter Jackson Bate, the use of spondees in lines 31–34 creates a feeling of slow flight, and "in the final stanza . . . the distinctive use of scattered spondees, together with initial inversion, lend[s] an approximate phonetic suggestion of the peculiar spring and bounce of the bird in its flight."^[10]

Poem

The poem begins suddenly, marked by use of heavy sounding syllables ("My heart aches" line 1), as it introduces the song of a hidden bird. Immediately, the narrator is overcome with such a feeling that he believes he has either been poisoned or is influenced by a drug. It is soon revealed that the source of this feeling is a nightingale's song, which the narrator empathises with^[11] and has paralyzed his mind:^[12]

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (lines 5–10)

The song encourages the narrator to give up his own sense of self and embrace the feelings that are evoked by the nightingale. No longer a poison, the narrator wants to experience more of the feeling and escape from reality:^[13]

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

* * * * *

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim: (lines 11–13, 19–20)

The narrator uses metaphorical wings to join the nightingale. It is at this moment that the poem moves into a deep, imaginative state, and the narrator cries out:^[14]

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! (lines 31–35)

The state that the narrator wants is seemingly a state of death, but it is one that is full of life. The paradox expands to encompass the night, a tender presence that allows some light to shine through:^[15]

tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (lines 35–40)

In the new state, the narrator's senses change. He loses his sense of sight, but his ability to smell, taste, and hear allow him to experience the new world, the new paradise that he has entered:^[16]

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;(lines 41–45)

The narrator describes a world of potential, and empathizes with the creatures of that world. He is soon called to the sounds of insects just as he heard the nightingale before. This is then replaced by a new sound:^[17]

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath; (lines 51–54)

The narrator has blinded himself to better connect to the nightingale. This theme appears before, in the blind John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, where Book III describes the nightingale's song coming out of darkness. the world is no longer present in the poem, as the imagination has taken over. What separates life and death, self and nothingness, are removed:^[18]

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod. (lines 55–60)

Death serves as a muse within the poem. It is, to the narrator, soft and comes upon the narrator as he composes the poem. The narrator seeks death, wants to die, and wants to be with the nightingale because he is currently experienced the height of life and anything else would not be worth experiencing. To live after that point would be a living death to the narrator. He desires to like the narrator, able to constantly give himself up in song and transcend life and death. However, he soon realizes that he is different from the nightingale:^[19]

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown: (lines 61–64)

The world of imagination are not a place that a man could ever live in.^[20] This knowledge causes the narrator to become disheartened as the imaginary world is destroyed. The narrator cannot have the imaginary land. He is not just separate from the bird, but from poetry and imagination in general. The narrator mourns in the final lines of the poem as he realizes that he has been abandoned by his art:^[21]

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? (lines 71–80)

Themes

"Ode to a Nightingale" describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature. In the words of Richard Fogle, "The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual: inclusive terms which, however, contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and commonsense reason, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream."^[22] Of course, the nightingale's song is the dominant image and dominant "voice" within the ode. The nightingale is also the object of empathy and praise within the poem. However, the nightingale and the discussion of the nightingale is not simply about the bird or the song, but about human experience in general. This is not to say that the song is a simple metaphor, but it is a complex image that is formed through the interaction of the conflict voices of praise and questioning.^[23]

On this theme, David Perkins summarizes the way "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" perform this when he says, "we are dealing with a talent, indeed an entire approach to poetry, in which symbol, however necessary, may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry, any more than it could with Shakespeare, but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions".^[24] However, there is a difference between an urn and a nightingale in that the nightingale is not an eternal entity. Furthermore, in creating any aspect of the nightingale immortal during the poem the narrator separates any union that he can have with the nightingale.^[25]

The poem relies heavily on the process of sleeping and discusses both dreams and the act of awaking. Such uses are not unique to Keats's poetry, and "Ode to a Nightingale" shares many of the same themes as Keats's Sleep and Poetry and Eve of St. Agnes. This further separates the image of the nightingale's song from its closest comparative image, the urn as represented in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The nightingale is distant and mysterious, and even disappears at the end of the poem. The dream image emphasizes the shadowiness and elusiveness of the poem. These elements make it impossible for there to be a complete self identification with the nightingale, but it also allows for self-awareness to permeate throughout the poem, albeit in an altered state.^[26]

Midway through the poem, there is a split between the two actions of the poem: the first attempts to identify with the nightingale and its song, and the second discusses the convergence of the past with the future while experiencing the present. This second theme is reminiscent of Keats's view of human progression through the Mansion of Many Apartments and how man develops from experiencing and wanting only pleasure to understanding truth as a mixture of both pleasure and pain. The Elysian fields and the nightingale's song in the first half of the poem represent the pleasurable moments that overwhelm the individual like a drug. However, the experience does not last forever, and the body is left desiring it until the narrator feels helpless without the pleasure. Instead of embracing the coming truth, the narrator clings to poetry to hide from the loss of pleasure. Poetry does not bring about the pleasure that the narrator original asks for, but it does liberate him from his desire for only pleasure.^[27]

Responding to this emphasis on pleasure, Albert Guerard, Jr. argues that the poem contains a "longing not for art but a free reverie of any kind. The form of the poem is that of progression by association, so that the movement of feeling is at the mercy of words evoked by chance, such words as fade and forlorn, the very words that, like a bell, toll the dreamer back to his sole self."^[28] However, Fogle points out that the terms Guerard emphasizes are "associational translations" and that Guerard misunderstands Keats's aesthetic.^[29] After all, the acceptance of the loss of pleasure by the end of the poem is an acceptance of life and, in turn, of death. Death was a constant theme that permeated aspects of Keats poetry because he was exposed to death of his family members throughout his life.^[30] Within the poem, there are many images of death. The nightingale experiences a sort of death and even the god Apollo experiences death, but his death reveals his own divine state. As Perkins explains, "But, of coure, the nightingale is not thought to be literally dying. The point is that the deity or the nightingale can sing without dying. But, as the ode makes clear, man cannot – or at least not in a visionary way."^[31]

With this theme of a loss of pleasure and inevitable death, the poem, according to Claude Finney, describes "the inadequacy of the romantic escape from the world of reality to the world of ideal beauty".^[32] Earl Wasserman essentially agrees with Finney, but he extended his summation of the poem to incorporate the themes of Keats's Mansion of Many Apartments when he says, "the core of the poem is the search for the mystery, the unsuccessful quest for light within its darkness" and this "leads only to an increasing darkness, or a growing recognition of how impenetrable the mystery is to mortals."^[33] With these views in mind, the poem recalls Keats's earlier view of pleasure and an optimistic view of poetry found within his earlier poems, especially Sleep and Poetry, and rejects them.^[34]

This loss of pleasure and incorporation of death imagery lends the poem a dark air, which connects "Ode to a Nightingale" with Keats' other poems that discuss the demonic nature of poetic imagination, including Lamia.^[35] In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—he uses an abrupt, almost brutal word for it—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination.^[36]

Critical reception

During the early 20th century, F. R. Leavis wrote, "One remembers the poem both as recording, and as being for the reader, an indulgence."^[37] Fogle responds, "I find Mr. Leavis too austere, but he points out a quality which Keats plainly sought for. His profusion and prodigality is, however, modified by a principle of sobriety."^[38] Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren see the poem as "a very rich poem. It contains some complications which we must not gloss over if we are to appreciate the depth and significance of the issues engaged."^[39] Around the same time, Rudyard Kipling referred to lines 69 and 70, along side of three lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, when he writes "In all the millions permitted there are no more than five—five little lines—of which one can say, 'These are the magic. These are the vision. The rest is only Poetry.'"^[40]

According to Walter Jackson Bate, "Ode to a Nightingale" is among "the greatest lyrics in English," and the only one written with such speed: "We are free to doubt whether any poem in English of comparable length and quality has been composed so quickly."^[41] Perkins believes that "Although the "Ode to a Nightingale" ranges more widely than the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poem can also be regarded as the exploration or testing out of a symbol, and, compared with the urn as a symbol, the nightingale would seem to have both limitations and advantages."^[25]

In "Two odes of Keats's". William C Wilkinson suggests that "Ode to a Nightingale" is deeply flawed because it contains too many "incoherent musings" that failed to supply a standard of logic that would allow the reader to understand the relationship between the poet and the bird ^[42]. However, Herbert Grierson believed Nightingale to be superior to "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to Psyche", arguing the exact opposite of Wilkinson as he stated that "Nightingale", along with "To Autumn", showed a greater amount of logical thought and more aptly presented the cases they were intended to make ^[43].

Notes

References

• Bate, Walter Jackson. The Stylistic Development of Keats. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.
• Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
• Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1993.
• Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn. "The Ode to a Nightingale" in Keats's Odes ed. Jack Stillinger, 44-47. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
• Evert, Walter. Aesthetics and Myth in the Poetry of Keats. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
• Finney, Claude. The Evolution of Keats's Poetry Vol II. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
• Foogle, Richard. "Keats's Ode to a Nightingale" in Keats's Odes ed. Jack Stillinger, 33-43. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
• Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Heinemann, 1968.
• Guerard, Albert Jr. "Prometheus and the Aeolian Lyre", Yale Review, XXXIII (1944).
• Hilton, Timothy. Keats and His World. New York: Viking Press, 1971.
• Leavis, F. R. Revaluation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1936.
• Perkins, David. The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959.
• Perkins, David. "The Ode on a Nightingale" in Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays ed Walter Jackson Bate, 103–112. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
• Wasserman, Earl. The Finer Tone. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953.
• Woods, George. English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1916.

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Ode to a Nightingale

• Audio: Robert Pinsky reads "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats (via poemsoutloud.net)
• John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale at the British Library