“Ode to a Nightingale”
An
Explication
and
Commentary
By
Daniel J. Travanti
English 540
Summer 1975
After a first reading, “Ode to a Nightingale” seems to be a depressing lament and a negative statement. But after studying it carefully, I’m convinced that the poem is a delicate balance of contrasting views. Its message is certainly not a joyful celebration of the immortality of the nightingale’s song, but neither is it a despondent expression of melancholy. In these eight stanzas, Keats builds a case for the claim that the song, symbol of all art and natural beauty, lives forever, while its producer and individuals who hear it must eventually die. The immorality of the song is happy thought, but man’s temporality is regrettable—perhaps.
Immediately, Keats catches us up in an irony. He begins,
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…”
There is pain, but it is not out of regret or envy of the song he hears. It comes from sheer ecstasy, from, he tells the nightingale, “being too happy in thine happiness,–“. The listener’s joy is not pure. It hurts so that it even reminds him of death: “as though of hemlock I had drunk” and “Lethe-wards had sunk.” Clearly, this is an expression of one of Keats’s favorite views. Good and evil, pleasure and pain, joy and melancholy in the real word always go hand in hand. In “Ode to Melancholy” Keats sums up:
“Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine….” (11. 25-26)
The nightingale is a “Dryad”; that is, a wood nymph and therefore a divinity and immortal; and so beyond Keats. He longs to be able to join the happy bird:
“In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless…”
Such a union in such a place would release the speaker, but he doesn’t know how to get there. He can think only in simple earthly terms of the way to achieve forgetfulness and to get to a better place. At first he calls for wine, the traditional vehicle to mental oblivion:
“O, for a draught of vintage: that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth. . . .”
It must be the finest, and have in it the taste of all that is joyous and rejuvenating, of “Flora and the country green” and laughter and song. The wine is a symbol of that swooning or slumbering state wherein the poet comprehends inspired visions. In “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats acknowledges the debt:
“yet I must not forget
Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet:
For what there may be worthy in these rhymes
I partly owe to him . . . .” (11. 348-50)
Precisely what it is about this condition that gives the poet deep insight is a mystery, so Keats stretches the metaphor by attaching symbol to symbol. The wine must be full of “the blushful Hippocrene,” of the waters of that fountain which was held sacred by the Muses and which they regarded as one of their sources of inspiration. The mystery is identified in mythology—another of the contrasts of which Keats was fond. An earthly brew is combined with an imaginary opposite, the real and the imagined existing simultaneously to remind us of our dual natures.
The speaker thinks still, to this point, that he would like to drink and disappear with the nightingale “into the forest dim.” To what purpose? To drown utterly in his ecstasy. He realizes that he can feel only to a certain degree as long as he is actually in time on earth. But if he can fade out of time into another realm, perhaps he will reach the heights of joy and sublime awareness—and immortality—that the nightingale attains. Perhaps, too, he can thereby escape earthly woe, “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human existence. Men live in pain, grow old and die, and mere thinking is sorrowful. Worst of all, Beauty and Love fade and pass—too quickly…Having lapsed in reason for a moment, the poet reconsiders.
He will not seek this transcendence with wine, after all, because he knows that won’t work. He will fly instead “on the viewless wings of Poesy,” viewless because his flight now is strictly a fantasy. Just by having the thought, he realizes, he is already with the nightingale and “tender is the night” just because he is there. Though it is dark and he cannot see, he can imagine everything. Through his sense of smell incense, flowers, and the night itself can be anything he wants them to be. By distilling essences in poetic musings, Keats re-creates for us the spell that is cast upon him.
Through the fifth stanza, the poet has been moving steadily out of the real world and out of the light, into the fantasy world of the nightingale and darkness. But even though he is now in darkness (“Darkling I listen”) and is “half in love with easeful Death,” his wish to die at this point is not morbid or even sad. It seems to Keats that to reach the state of bliss to which the nightingale’s song can transport him as far as the living soul can soar “In such an ecstasy.” At that point, all that is left for him to do is to round out the experience by taking it to the only absolute conclusion, death. Death becomes a welcome escape, not a fearful torment, for then the experience would be complete and stay that way. If, on the other hand, the poet was to come back from such a fanciful flight, the ecstasy would fade and the excitement be lost. The expression is an acceptance of death as a part of life, instead of as its eliminator. None of this means that Keats is saying that it is better to die.
He has been “half in love” with the notion, only partly taken with the idea. By living on, the poet can experience the same ecstasy again, as I believe Keats means to suggest in the final stanza. Here in the sixth it is midnight, the end of the day and symbolically the culmination of the present quest in the ode. In the next to last stanza, Keats himself sings of the nightingale’s good fortune to be immortal, suggesting that he, Keats is not: “No hungry generations tread thee down.” He tells us that the nightingale’s song has been heard “In ancient days” by the highborn and the low (“emperor and clown”); by Biblical figures (“the sad heart of Ruth”); and by strictly imaginary characters “in faery lands forlorn.” The poet’s effort so far has been to join the nightingale in immortality, to escape earthly woes and restrictions, and to soar into that rarefied place of the imagination where one never withers, fades, or dies. The suggestion is that all those listed here who have heard “The voice I hear this passing night” die and are gone forever, but that the song lingers on.
That’s not strictly true, of course. Just as the memory of a certain song keeps it alive in the mind of the listener, so does the reader remember certain emperors and clowns, Ruth, and fairy tale folk. Indeed, Keats’s poetry keeps all those and more alive. Here in the seventh stanza, the poet reaches the climax of his rapturous flight. It is the height of his reverie or its deepest plunge into melancholy. I’m not sure whether the tone is positive or negative. I am fairly certain, however, that Keats meant to be telling us that both sensations are brought about by such contemplations of beauty and such imaginative speculation.
It might be depressing to realize that man can never, in life, enter that realm of perfect ecstasy and bliss where, symbolically, the nightingale lives. On the other hand, it is reassuring—as the poet’s experience in the ode attests—to know that one can fly to such a place in imagination, even if he does have to return to earth. The faery lands are forlorn (but only for a moment) because he cannot enter them truly. But the real world calls the poet back:
“Forlorn: the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.”
The return is not fearful. And not only is it to reality, but to his separate self, which bespeaks a willingness to face the real world courageously. Keat’s energy is up here:
“Adieu: the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu: adieu: . . . .”
He is elevated in spirit and almost bemused by the word “forlorn.” On the contrary, it rings him onward, not out, and he is charged to return to common earth and to bid the nightingale goodbye.
The bird flies on, and it is the song that diminishes, that “plaintive anthem” or mournful hymn of praise or loyalty. Those words suggest that the poet regrets the passing of the song, but also that it will float on to cause others to long and wonder. It is an intractable duality of man’s nature that he is finite and mortal, but strains to feel or be beyond earth’s strictures and immortal. For Keats, all this has been a passing fancy.
He has felt the ache and “numbness” from being “too happy” in the nightingale’s happiness. He has longed for oblivion through wine, that he “might drink, and leave the world unseen.” He has tried to “quite forget” this earth where “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.” By longing and imagining, he does indeed attain the heavenly sphere, despite that “the dull brain perplexes and retards.” And though he cannot see in the physical sense, he feels through sound and smell, and there “more than ever seems it rich to die.” But in the end of all, the poet opts for life.
He realizes and accepts the contrariness of wishing while in reality, that fancy (fantasy) is a “deceiving elf.” Was the song “a vision, or a waking dream?” Was it only an illusion? Is illusion all we have, after all? Was it a wish only? Was the ecstasy real, or is the present state of moderate emotion reality? Simple awareness is answer enough to any of those questions. Life means sleeping and waking, pain and joy, surety and doubt, ugly truth and beauty, evanescence and immorality and, for Keats, the creation of his own special kind of perfection.