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Ode To Nightingale

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230 views2 pages

Ode To Nightingale

Uploaded by

amannawaz162
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Ode to a Nightingale is one of the noblest achievements of Keats’s genius.

It was inspired by the joyous


song of a nightingale he actually heard. It reveals almost all the dominant characteristics of Keats’s
poetry.

Keats’s poetry is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous. He himself said, “O for life of sensations rather
than of thoughts.” Unlike Shelley he loved to revel in the luxury of the senses, even of those associated
with sex or feminine body. The Ode to a Nightingale begins with the record of a sensation which it purely
physical. The poet has drunk in the music of the nightingale’s song until his whole being is charged with it
and gives way to a sort of narcotic influence due to the excess and intensity of joy.

Then to rouse himself from the dreamy torpor he longs for a draught of wine that has been cooled
underground for a long time. But with Keats wine brings with it an opportunity for indulging in a luxury
of sensations. The description of wine in the following lines is instinct with sensuousness.

“O for a beaker full of the warm South


Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles, winking at the brim,
And purple-stain’d mouth.”

The whole fifth stanza is a riot of sensuous enjoyment. It appeals to the senses all at once. The bower of
the nightingale is dark, but filled with perfume. Though the poet cannot see what flowers are at his feet
or what blossoms are above his head, he can guess from the scent that the white hawthorn, the
eglantine, the violet and the muskrose are blooming there.

The Ode Is not only intensely sensuous but deeply reflective. It turns on the thought of the conflict
between the ideal and the real-between the joy beauty and apparent permanence of the nightingale’s
song, and the sorrow and transience of joy and beauty in human life, which lends a deep philosophic
interest to it.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

Here, Keats suggests that through art and poetry, one can achieve a form of immortality. The
nightingale’s song has been heard by people throughout history, emphasizing the timelessness of artistic
expression.

The poet is still sensuous, but his sensuousness is now touched with the still, sad music of humanity”,
and shot through and through with the stirrings of an awakening intellect.
The poem vibrates with personal anguish. The youth that grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies is his
own brother Tom Keats who died five months before the poem was written. Beauty’s lustrous eyes are
Fanny Brawne‘s and the new love that cannot “pine at them beyond tomorrow” refers to his own love
that has already become an agony. But though the poem is tense with personal anguish, it would not be
wise to call it a poem of despair.

Among the other elements of Keats’s poetry the Ode illustrates are his love of romance, deep delight in
nature and Hellenism. The voice of the nightingale is the voice of romance and beauty, a voice that is
deathless, in a world where beauty is evanescent and romance fleeting.

The whole spirit of medieval romance and chivalry is crystallized in the poet’s passing reference to the
forlorn princess imprisoned in an enchanter’s castle and waiting for her Knight to come to deliver her.
The description of the woodland scene is rich and vivid and the references to Lethe, Flora, Dryad,
Hippocrene, Bacchus, etc, demonstrate how the Greek mythology appealed to him.

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