![]() Each of the eight stanzas has ten pentameter lines and a consistent rhyme scheme. ![]() “Ode to a Nightingale” is a standard ode. ![]() Read also: Analysis and Study Guide of Ode to Nightingale He is uncertain what is real-the little happiness that he was lulled into or this dull life he was living. The poet returns to the realities of life, somewhat dazed. He bids the bird good-bye and imagines the bird fading away into distant lands. He realises that he cannot escape from the realities of the world as easily as he had desired and pretended to. The closing of the 7th stanza with the word lorlon’ wakes him up from the world of poetry. So the song of the nightingale knows no historical or geographical limits. Its song is the same today as it was heard ages back, by kings and peasants, by Ruth, the Moabite woman in the days of the Old Testament and by princesses in forlorn fairyland in the middle ages of magic and romance. The beauty and joy of the nightingale’s song do not change with the passage of time. The nightingale is immortal in the sense that its song knows no death. The idea of death reminds him strikingly of the immortality of the bird (its song), nature’s music as contrasted with human mortality (change and decay). Soon he realizes the impossibility of the fulfilment of his desire. Thus death would become a boon, a positive, healthy experience for Keats now. It would be a luxurious experience for him because the nightingale is singing in ecstasy and he would die listening to it. ![]() ‘It is rich to die’ in that temporary heaven. The pleasure that he feels is so rich and true that he wants to make this luxurious moment a permanent one. Critics call the Ode ‘a reverie, in spite of the fact that Keats had actually heard a nightingale’s song from ‘their Hamstead home and the bird’s song, had inspired him to write this Ode.’ (Brown’s letter in Keats’s Circle II, 65).” The ending of the poem-Do I wake or sleep-undermines the poet’s song-inspired visionary flight and casts doubt on the whole nightingale episode. If Keats suspects the power of visionary experience in the “Ode to Psyche”, in this Ode he is unable to sustain the ecstasy of that experience till the end of the poem and he is forced to return to the actual world, from the realm of fancy. The bird’s song also reveals how beauty consists of ‘the ecstasy’ (158) of fulfilment as well as the “plaintive note” of disillusion. The poem also highlights the contrast between the raptures of the bird’s song and consecutive reasoning of the perplexing and retarding “dull brain.” Like the “Ode to Psyche” this ”Ode on a Nightingale” extols the autonomous power of imagination which can create ‘beauty as a compensation of the life’s losses’. The nightingale impresses upon him the consciousness of his own mortality and sharpens the contrast between sensation and thought. The poet is transported to a world of eternal joy and immortality, his return to actuality is very shattering. The poet on the viewless wings of poesy moves into ‘the eternal realm of song’ and is able to feel the charm of the embalmed beauty of nature and experience and visualise the magical effect of the song of this immortal bird not only on himself but also in remote times on Ruth, Kings, Clowns and the maidens imprisoned in the castles located on the shores of perilous seas. The poem presents Keats’s ‘unappeased craving for permanence, his failure to escape the mutable world and die into a higher life.’ The speaker (the poet) is overpowered by the spontaneous melodious song of a nightingale, he hopes to follow it into the forest dim, leaving behind the spectacle of human death, suffering, fret, and fever, and die so as to perpetuate the ecstatic moment. “Ode to a Nightingale” is a private poem describing the voyage of Keats into the state of Negative Capability. It quickly became one of his odes in 1819 and was first released the following July in Annals of the Fine Arts. Keats composed the poem in one day, inspired by the song of the bird. A nightingale had constructed his nest close his home in the spring of 1819, according to Brown. “ Ode to a Nightingale” is a poem written in May 1819 by John Keats either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats ‘ friend Charles Armitage Brown, in the garden of Keats House, also in Hampstead, under a plum tree.
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