Critical Note: Ode to a Nightingale Essay

The talker responds to the kayo of the nightingales cry with a both happiness and ache. though he seeks to fully identify with the bird to fade away into the woods dim he knows that his get hu firearm consciousness separates him from nature and precludes the phase of deathless happiness the nightingale enjoys. First the intoxication of wine and later on the viewless wings of Poesy seem reliable ways of escaping the moderate of the dull brain, but finally it is death itself that seems the only possible military personnelner of overcoming the fear of time.The nightingale is immortal because it wast not born for death and cannot believe of its own passing. Yet with knocked out(p) consciousness, humans cannot make beauty, and the vocalizer knows that if he were doomed his wisdom of the nightingales call would not exist at all. This paradox shatters his vision, the nightingale flies off, and the speaker is go away to wonder whether his experience has been a truthful vision or a false stargaze. Referred to by critics of the time as the longest and most personal of the odes, the poesy describes Keats locomote into the state of contradict Capability.John Keats coined the phrase Negative Capability in a letter to his brothers and defined his new concept of writing that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching by and by situation and reason Keats poems are full of contradictions in meaning (a drowsy numbness anguishs) and emotion (both together, sane and frenetic) and he accepts a double nature as a seminal insight. In Nightingale it is the apparent (or real) contradictions that allow Keats to create the sensual notion of numbness that allows the reader to experience the half-swooning emotion Keats is trying to capture.Keats would have us experience the emotion of the langu age and pass over the half-truths in silence, to lie with a carriage of sensations rather than of Thoughts . Th us, Ode to the Nightingale is more feeling than a thinking poem. Keats often deals in the sensations created by terms rather than meaning. in time if the precise definition of manner of speaking 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 patching out unmarried meanings and inconsistencies. That I might drink, and leave the world unseen Hearing the meter of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first judgment is to reach the birds state through alcoholin the second stanza, he longs for a draught of vintage to transport him out of himself.But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transiency 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 deification of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingales music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, estimate himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music 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 eternal renewal of the nightingales fluid music. while 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 youthfulness who grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies, for example, might well be an allusion to Tom Keats, the younger brother whom the poet nurse through his 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, yearning for the immortality of art, seeks another way to become one(a) with the bird. Even death is terribly final the artists die but what system is the eternal music the very song hear today was heard thousands of years ago.The poet exclaims Forlorn the very word is like a ships bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self The reverie into which the poet falls carries him obscure into where the bird is singing. But the meditative trance cannot last. With the very first word of the eighth stanza, the reverie is broken. The word forlorn occurs to the poet as the adjective describing the distant and magical world suggested by the nightingales song. But the poet on the spur of the moment realises that this word applies with enormouser precision to himself.The effect is that of an abrupt stumbling. With the new and depress meaning of forlorn, the song of the nightingale itself alters it becomes a plaintive anthem. The song becomes fainter. What had in the lead the power 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 put forward or asleep thus Adieu he fancy cannot device 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 seize the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. In Nightingale, he has achieved creative looking at and has placed his faith in it, but that expressionthe 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 colligate 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 pains 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 merged 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 power of self-absorption, that wonderful kindness 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.