Critical Note: Ode to a Nightingale Essay

The verbaliser responds to the beauty of the nightingales breed with a some(prenominal) happiness and ache. Though he seeks to fully identify with the bird to fade away into the forest faint-hearted he k at presents that his own human consciousness separates him from nature and precludes the kind of deathless happiness the nightingale enjoys. premier the intoxication of wine and later the viewless wing of Poesy seem reliable ways of escaping the restrict of the dull brain, plainly finally it is death itself that seems the only possible means of everyplacecoming the fear of time.The nightingale is immortal because it wast not born for death and cannot conceive of its own passing. Yet wi honey oilt consciousness, humans cannot devour beauty, and the speaker knows that if he were dead his perception of the nightingales call would not exist at all. This paradox shatters his vision, the nightingale flies off, and the speaker is left to wonder whether his experience has been a truthful vision or a false day-dream. Referred to by critics of the time as the longest and most personal of the odes, the poem describes Keats journey into the defer of Negative Capability.John Keats coined the phrase Negative Capability in a letter to his brothers and defined his radical sentiment of writing that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching by and by particular and reason Keats poems be full of contradiction in termss in meaning (a drowsy numbness hurt) and emotion (both together, sane and mad) and he accepts a double nature as a creative insight. In Nightingale it is the apparent (or real) contradictions that allow Keats to create the sensual feeling of numbness that allows the commentator to experience the half-swooning emotion Keats is trying to capture.Keats would have us experience the emotion of the language and pass over the half-truths in silence, to live a life of sensations rather than of Thoughts . Thus, Ode to the Nightingale is more feeling than a persuasion poem. Keats often deals in the sensations created by words rather than meaning. Even if the precise definition of words causes contradiction they can still be used together to create the right ambience. Negative Capability asks us to allow the atmosphere of Keats poems to surround us without picking out individual meanings and inconsistencies. That I faculty drink, and run the world unseen Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His beginning thought is to reach the birds state through alcoholin the second stanza, he longs for a draught of vintage to transport him out of himself. precisely after his meditation in the tierce stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being charioted by Bacchus and his pards and chooses instead to embrace the viewless wings of Poesy. The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingales harmony and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic practice of medicine even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingales music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known The poet explores the themes of nature and mortality.Here, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age is set against the fadeless renewal of the nightingales fluid music. Man has many sorrows to escape from in the world, and these Keats recounts feelingly in the third stanza of his poem, a number of the references apparently being drawn from firsthand experience. The mention of the youth who grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies, for example, might well be an allusion to Tom Keats, the younger brother whom the poet nursed through h is long, last struggle with consumption.But the bitterest of all mans sorrows, as it emerges from the catalogue of woes in the third stanza, is the terrible disease of time, the fact that Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. It is the disease of time which the song of the nightingale particularly transcends, and the poet, impetuous for the immortality of art, seeks another way to become one with the bird. Even death is terribly final the artists die scarcely what remains is the eternal music the very song heard today was heard thousands of years ago.The poet exclaims forlorn the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self The dream into which the poet falls carries him deep into where the bird is singing. But the meditative trance cannot last. With the very first word of the ordinal stanza, the reverie is broken. The word forlorn occurs to the poet as the adjective describing the remote and magical world suggested by the nightingales song. But the poet s uddenly realises that this word applies with greater precision to himself.The effect is that of an abrupt stumbling. With the new and shuddery meaning of forlorn, the song of the nightingale itself alters it becomes a plaintive anthem. The song becomes fainter. What had before the powerfulness to make the sorrow in man fade away from a harsh and bitter world, now itself fades and the poet is left alone in the silence. As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speakers experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep thus Adieu he fancy cannot cheat so well. The art of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speakers language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. In Nightingale, he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expressio nthe nightingales songis spontaneous and without physical manifestation.This is an odd poem because it both conforms to and contradicts some of the ideas he expresses elsewhere, notably the famous concept of Negative Capability,. This can be taken several ways, but is often linked with the statement he made If a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel. While Keatss begins his poem with a drowsy numbness mental strain the poem that follows is anything but numb. But the opening ties in with the words that end the poem Fled is that music Do I wake or sleep? Life is or may be a dream a very Shakespearean image but, dreaming or awake, perception and empathetic participation are rooted in Keatss own consciousness. It is only in dreaming, Keats says, that we can become conscious of, and structured with, the life around us. Thus, Keats heads towards Negative Capability in the poem. Keats is not as great as Shakespeare but he has the same po wer of self-absorption, that wonderful sympathy and identification with all things, that Negative Capability which he saw as essential to the creation of great poetry and which Shakespeare possessed so abundantly.