THE WAY I HAVE TAKEN THIS ANSWER:
Ans.
“Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight
With wings of gentle flush o’er
delicate white,
And taper finger catching at all
things
To bind them all with tiny rings;”
Keats’s
attitude towards nature developed as he grew up. In the early poems, it was a
temper of merely sensuous delight, an unanalyzed pleasure in the beauty of
nature. “He had away”, says Stopford Brooke, “of fluttering butterfly-fashion, from one object
to another, touching for a moment the
momentary charm of each thing… he would let things flit in and out of the brain not caring to ask anyone to stay
and keep him company, but pleased with them and his game of life.” His attitude
was one of unthinking pleasures and enjoyments without thought.
…..“To laugh a while at her so proud
array;
Her
waving streamers loosely she lets play,
And
flagging colours shine as bright as smiling day.”
Sensuousness
is the key to Keats’s attitude towards nature. He looked with child-like
delight at the objects of nature and his whole being was thrilled by what he
saw and heard. The earth lay before him tilled, spread out with beauties and
wonders, and all his senses reached to them with delight and rapture.
Everything in nature for him was full of wonder and mystery-the rising sun, the
moving clouds, the growing bud and even swimming fish.
“Adieu!
the fancy cannot cheat so well
As
she is famed to do, deceiving elf!”
The
lines also reveal Keats’s idea that our imperfect nature is not framed to enjoy
the eternal joy and beauty for long. In Ode to a Nightingale Keats in his attempt
to share the eternal joy and happiness of the nightingale, escapes into the
idyllic woodland where the bird sings. The escape brings him the bliss he ever
longs for, but he cannot enjoy the imaginative reverie in which state alone he
can enjoy this bliss. When Keats is recalled from the world of the
nightingale’s song to the actual world, he realizes that fancy cannot make a
man forget the realities of life so thoroughly as it is believed to do. In
other words, the illusion produced by fancy or imagination is after all,
evanescent.
“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled
is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?”
As
a poet Keats is enchantingly and abundantly sensuous. His poetry has rarely
been equaled in descriptions of the beauties perceptible to the senses. Ode to
a Nightingale amply illustrates Keats’s sensuousness -his delight in the
sights, sounds, colours, smell and touch. He will ‘taste’ wine “cooled a long
age in the deep-delved earth”, he will ‘see’ the beaker “with beaded bubbles
winking at the brim” and “purple-stained mouth”, he ‘hears’ the nightingale
singing in “verdurous glooms”, and the flies buzzing “on summer eves”, while
his ‘smell’ is gratified by the “soft incense” that “hangs upon the boughs” and
the fragrant flowers at his feet. In other words, the poem offers a rich feast
for all the senses.
“There
is a place beyond that flaming hill,
From
whence the stars their thin appearance shed;
A
place beyond all place, where never ill
Nor
impure thought was ever harboured;”
Keats
says, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us. Poetry should be
great and unobtrusive - a thing which enters into one’s soul and does not
startle it” to make beauty, says Bradley, is his (poet’s) philanthropy. He must
be unselfish; by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of
helping by his desire to help in another way.
Hence there is no didacticism in Keats as there is in Wordsworth. There
is no moralizing in The Eve of St. Agnes as there is none in King Lear; in
both, the poets leave their works to speak for themselves.
“Ite domum impasti,domino iam non vacat, agni,
Go
home unfed, my lambs, your master now has no time for you,”
Keats
often says that the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others,
and must do good but he must do so by being a poet- not by being a teacher or
moralist. He must have a purpose of doing well by his poetry, but he must not
obtrude it in his poetry-that is, he must not show, that he has palpable design
upon us. One of the most striking notes of romantic poetry is that of
supernaturalism. Just as the romantic poet looks backward from the present to
the distant past, so he looks beyond the seen to the unseen. His imagination is
lured by the remote, shadowy and the mysterious among the romantic poets.
Coleridge felt the spell of the supernatural the most, and his Ancient Mariner
and Christabel are two of his important poems which dealt with ‘supernatural’.
Keats dealt with the supernatural in his La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and in that
little poem he has condensed a whole world of supernatural mystery.
“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I
have been half in love with easeful Death.
Call’d
him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To
take into the air my quiet breath;”……
Ode
to a Nightingale is an escape into the dreamland cast up by Keats’s romantic
imagination. The poet hears their song of a nightingale. The song fills his mind with intense joy
which borders on pain. Drunk with the delight the nightingale brings him he
longs to escape to the cloudland of the
nightingale’s song to forget the anguish caused him by “the weariness, the
fever and the fret” and the evanescence of youth, beauty and love. At first he
seeks the aid of wine to escape from reality, but the next moment he gives up
the idea of taking wine as a means of escape into his dream world, and mounts
on the viewless wings of poesy to land on the nightingale’s romantic bower. The
song of the nightingale perches him on the height of his happiness and he wants
to “cease upon the midnight” painlessly with the nightingale still singing to
him. The paradox gets resolved when he says that Melancholy
“Dwells
with Beauty, Beauty that must die;
And
Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding
adieu.”
There
are, thus, a variety of topics introduced in the flow of thoughts that
constitute the related-poem, but to think that it has no central theme or
unifying motif is to betray indifference to the wonderful power of poetic
imagination that sustains the entire ode and the unique artistic design that
gives an undeniable coherence to its structure. It is true that Ode on a
Grecian Urn concentrates only on the pictures of the urn, their effects and
significance; and Ode to Autumn is dedicated on the opulence and beauty of
Autumn, without much philosophic reflexion, but Ode to a Nightingale, in spite
of being more passionate in mood, more complex in psychological probe and more
full of sudden twists and turns of thought by way of dramatic reactions to what
may follow, does not in any way forfeit its unity of appeal…But of, his escape
to the dreamland of his own doesn’t endure long - Reality soon asserts itself
and sets his excursion to the cloud land of the nightingale’s song at naught.
He is stranded on the hard shores of reality and left to lament. Ode on
Melancholy dwells primarily on two fundamental experiences of human life, the
experience of joy and the experience of pain. Paradoxically enough he says that
real melancholy is there in all that is joyful and beautiful.
“Save what from heaven is with the breezes
blown
Through
verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”
Though
Ode to a Nightingale should be read as a poem of escape, we cannot ignore the
reflection of human experience in it. Indeed the poet escapes to the romantic
bower of the nightingale to quite forget the ills and evils of life which the
bird “among the leaves hast never known”.
The poem reflects the tragic
human experience that human life is a tedious tale of sorrow, of hopes baffled
and efforts disappointed. In this world few
men live up to old age, and even
those who are fortunate to live up to that age are struck with paralysis
agitans, and with a few grey hair on their heads , they hobble along trembling
and tottering. Youth is transient and
repeated shocks to premature death. The world is so full of miseries that no
thinking man can reflect on human life, even for a single moment, without being
filled with despair. The lot of man is
misery even for the best and fairest. The charms of a loveliest woman fade away
very soon, and the love of a woman for her lover does not last longer than a
single day.
“Swelter in quiet waves
of immortality”
The
realization that happiness in this world is but an occasional episode in the
general drama of pain is too much for them to bear. So to forget their own
painful experience and that of others they escape to the ideal land of their
imagination. Thus Wordsworth escapes to Nature, the vast world of flowers,
trees, mountains, valleys etc; Coleridge to the mysterious world of the supernatural
and the Middle Ages; and Shelley to the Golden Millennium of the future.
“Think
what a present thou to God has sent,
And
render him with patience what he lent;
This
if thou do, he will an offspring give
That
till the world’s last end shall make thy name to live.”
We
read Ode to a Nightingale primarily as a poem of escape, Ode to a Nightingale
is a glory of Romantic poetry, and escapism is the distinctive feature of
Romantic poetry. The Romantic poets are all fed up with the hard stern
realities of life – “its din and bustle, fever and fret”.
“… the fancy
cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”
The
allegory in Endymion relates the ‘divine essence’ with concrete, sensuous
loveliness but by the time we reach Hyperion his conception of beauty has
widened. In the first place, beauty has become the symbol of power born of
perfection, which explains the victory of the new creation of Gods over the old
one; secondly, beauty has become blended with sorrow in the picture of Thea.
“But
saintly heroes are for ever said
To
keep an everlasting sabbath’s rest,
Still wishing that, of what they’re
still possessed,
Enjoying but one joy-but one of all
joys blest.”
The
treatment of Keats’s poetic growth will be only half-sided if we omit to trace
the influence of other poets on the development of his poetic genius. Keats was
educated almost exclusively by the English poets. In the early part of his
poetic career the influence of Spenser was immense. “It was the Faerie Queene”
says Brown a friend of Keats’s later years, “that first awakened his genius.”
“Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better
than all treasures
That
in books are found,
Thy
skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!”
Now
his imagination invests the nightingale with immortality with the result that
it ceases to be a bird to flesh and blood and becomes a thing of beauty, a
voice of romance, regaling the ears of kings and clowns, and women in distress
and captivity from time out of mind.
“But Oh: how unlike marble was that face,
How
beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s
self.”
In
Spenser’s fairyland, he was enchanted, breathed in a new world and became a new
being. It is significant that Keats’s earliest composition is the Imitations of
Spenser, written probably in 1813; and Spenser never lost hold upon his
imagination. There was indeed an essential kinship between the two poets, and
that brooding love of sensuous beauty, that frank response to charm of nature
and romance, that luxuriance of fancy and that felicity of expression to which
the Faerie Queene owes its irresistible fascination, were soon to be re-echoed
in the poems of Keats. He also came under the influence of Chatterton. Early in
1815, he came under the influence of Chapman’s translation of Homer. The early
works of Milton, and of the poems of Fletcher and of William Browne, while his
delight in the seventeenth-century Spenserians remained inextricably blended
with his admiration for the most prominent of Spenser’s living disciples, the
charming and versatile Leigh Hunt. Spenser and Hunt gave a great impetus to his
spirit of romanticism. “Keats was introduced by Leigh Hunt,” says Elton, “to
the enchanted gardens of romantic poetry.” -He saw “beautiful things made new.”~~………………..
A
marvel of English lyrical poetry, Ode to a Nightingale is one of the greatest
odes Keats wrote. It illustrates all main features of Keats’s poetry, namely,
his concept of Beauty, his Sensuousness, his Meditation, his Hellenism and his
Verbal magic. The Odes of Keats are not
only sensuous, but also deeply meditative. Ode to a Nightingale 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 the
transience of joy and beauty in human life, which lends a deep philosophic
interest to it. It embodies the thought
that however distressful the human condition is, man still possesses the
capacity to respond to immortal beauty and thus to establish communion with the
unchanging world beyond flux and mutability.
“Qual
in colle aspro,al imbrunir di sera
L’avvezza
giovinetta pastorella
Va
bagnando I’herbetta strana e bella
Che
mal si spande a disusata spera
Fuor
di sua natia alma primavera,…”
(As, on a rugged hill, when twilight darkens,
The young shepherdess, familiar with the place,
Keeps watering a strange and beautiful little plant
Which feebly spreads its leaves in the unfamiliar clime,
Far from its native fostering springtime….)
Thus
in different ages men of different classes and social positions - “emperor and
clown”, Ruth, captive princess -had, in certain fleeting moments, glimpses of
this unchanging world of beauty. The poem also contains the reflection that
death means the denial of sensory experience. In the Ode 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
same that oft-time hath
Charmed
magic casements opening on the foam
Of
perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
It
is true that his poetry does not express the revolutionary ideas of his time,
as Shelley’s poetry does. But for, Keats was not a revolutionary idealist like
Shelley, nor had he Shelley’s reforming zeal. Keats was a pure poet, who
expressed in his poetry the most worth-while part of himself and this
worst—while part of great poet must follow the bent of his genius:-he has his
own vision of life, and he expresses it in his own way. Wordsworth has a
spiritual vision and he expresses it in simple style; Shelley has an idealistic
vision and he expresses it in musical verse; Keats had the artist’s vision of
beauty everywhere in nature, in art, in the deeds of chivalry, and truth were
identical………~~
“…the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull
droopingly, in slanting curve aside
Their
scantily-leaved and finely tapering stems.”
This
was the profoundest and innermost experience of Keats’s soul, and he expressed
it most emphatically: “Where swarms of minnow show the little heads/Staying
their wavy bodies against the stream.”The very idea of joy and beauty make one
melancholic because the duration of joy and beauty is very short. They must die
one moment or the other. Thus we see that in Ode on Melancholy, Keats is purely
realistic and there is no question of making an escape into a different world.
The poem deals with purely human emotions of pain and joy.
For
Keats, therefore, senses were creative as they set Imagination into play and
what the imagination gasped as beauty was also Truth. Thus the Ideal was only a
sublimation of the real. He sums up the whole matter in one of his letters: “Adam’s dream will do here and seems to be a
conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human
life and its spiritual reflection…The Prototype must be hereafter.” Shelley soared above the earth in
search for the light that never fades but Keats contemplated the dark earth
against the polar light of heaven, the two being the opposite sides of the same
coin.
The
Nightingale also embodies the age-old human experiences that however
distressful the human condition is, man still possess the capacity to respond
to immortal beauty and thus to establish communion with the unchanging world
beyond flux and mutability. Thus in
different ages men of different classes and social positions-“emperor and
clown”, distressed women, captive princesses-had, in certain fleeting moments,
glimpses of this unchanging world of beauty.
The poem also contains the reflections that death means the denial of
sensory experience.
“Like as a ship, in which no balance lies,
Without
a pilot, on the sleeping waves,
Fairly
along wieth wind and water flies,
And
painted masts with silken sails embraves,
That
Neptune’s self the bagging vessel saves,”
To
conclude, though we should read Ode to a Nightingale as a poem of escape, we
should not neglect the reflection of human experience in it.
“When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou
shall remain in midst of other woe
Than
ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty?’ that is all
Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.” “
The
tale of Keats’s development from his feeble poetic beginnings to the
magnificent odes is open of the great stories of literary history. It is
remarkable that this achievement is contained in four years. The development,
by necessity because of the short period of time, may be incomplete. In Keats’s
work, beginning from 1816 and culminating in1821, we see the growth of a high
poetic intelligence.
“Now
comes the pain of truth, to whom ‘tis pain;
O
folly! For to bear all naked truths,
And
to envisage circumstances all calm,
This
is the top of sovereignty.”
Like
Wordsworth’s lark he is -“Type
of the wise who soar but never roam/True
to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.”But of, this instinctive or sensuous
and intuitional perception of the feelings, joys and sorrows of theirs must be
balanced and steadied by an intellectual self-awareness.
“Blinded
alike from sunshine and from rain
As
though a rose should shut and be a bud again.”
In
the last book of the fragmentary epic Keats presents the transformation of Apollo
through the sudden rushing in of knowledge into his impulsive heart.
“Where
we such clusters had
As
made us nobly wild, not mad;
And
yet each verse of thine
Outside
the meat, outdid the frolic wine-“
Keats’s
concern for Man simultaneously brings in mind. T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats have
got to say about the chaotic state of affairs in the world around us, in their
famous poems The Waste Land and Sailing to Byzantium respectively. Unfolding
deeper mysteries of life, finding the truth of being and the meaning of
existence are as much a rhyme of Keats’s poetry as recurrently we see them
finding place in the poetry of modern poets. He has in him Wordsworth’s
fundamental goodness of human-heart and it is this basic goodness of heart that
generates in us a sense of oneness with Keats. He feels for us and in return we
feel for him and this accounts for his ever-continuing appeal to his readers.
His poetry shows a deep concern for Man, the problems of Man and his pains and
joys. We find much of the same thing in the poets of our times. Another feature
of Keats’s poetry which has also been employed to a much greater degree by
modern poets is Symbolism. Keats has made use of the Nightingale as a symbol of
permanence and immortality and the Grecian Urn as a symbol of artistic
perfection. There are inspired moments when the present beauty of nature with
all its sensuous appeal gives him a fleeting vision of deeper reality. He then
in his imagination passes from the world of time to the world of eternity.
These mystic experiences are indicated in his Ode to a Nightingale. As Keats
hears the song of the nightingale, the barriers of time and space seem to
vanish away. He has imaginatively passed through death, flown on the wings of
imagination to the nightingale, the barriers of time and space seem to vanish
away. He has imaginatively passed through death,- “flown on the wings of
imagination to the nightingale’s immortality”. The nightingale will be singing
on while he will become a sod. “Then”, says Middleton Murry, “with a magnificent
sweep of the imagination, he sees the song and the bird as one. The bird
becomes pure song, and inherits the eternity of beauty.”
Keats
often asked himself the question, “Where are the songs of spring?” Indeed, the
songs of spring do not stay; beauty does not keep her lustrous eyes for long.
So beauty is transitory, fleeting -it remains for a time and passes away. It is
experience of his senses, but his imagination revealed to him the essential
truth about beauty. Though
poetry came naturally and spontaneously to him,” as leaves to a tree”, yet he
felt that poetic composition needed
application, study and thought, and with regard to many passages of his works
he took considerable pains to shape his verse. The observation that Ode
to a Nightingale, unlike Keats’s other odes, has no single central theme is
neither true nor desirable. Keats was a conscious artist and his poetry, apart
from its other qualities, is marked by its artistic workmanship. He wrote
rapidly and many of his happiest phrases came to him in the flush of
inspiration; still he carefully reviewed his work, and made alternations, where
necessary, to give his conceptions the desired shape. “Keats’s sureness of
touch in the corrections of his verse reveals is sense of consummate
artist.”
“What
men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What
mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What
pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
This
is why Keats laid so much emphasis on the ‘negative capability’ of the poet: ‘A
poet is the most unpoetical thing in the world because he has no identity he is
continually filling some other body…it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,
be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated…capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason.’ Again, he is with his fellow human beings to sit with them
and hear their groans. He always has a warm corner in his heart for those
sufferings from “the fever, and the fret” and palsy.
“Sitting
careless on a granary floor,
Her
hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,
Or
on a half reaped furrow sound asleep
Drowsed
with the fume of poppies, while her hook
Spares
the next swath and all its twined flowers.”
In
Ode to a Nightingale, we find that Keats has been deeply grieved by the mental
strains of humanity at large. These strains have resulted from the intricate
complexities of human life. Some are
suffering from palsy, the others are dying young. Everyone has one problem or
the other so much so that “Men sit and hear each other groan.” In nutshell, man
is suffering from so many that the world has become a place, “Where but to
think is to be full of Sorrow”. In order to find relief from the heavy burden
of human worries, Keats wants to fly far away into the world of the Nightingale
who, “Among the leaves hast never known” as to how miserable is the life of man
in the world of reality. The natural beauty of the world of Nightingale also
subdues Keats’s mental strain to a large extent. The happy lot of the
Nightingale also generates a death wish in Keats and he puts it very clearly,
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die”, but finally Keats comes back into
the world of reality with the sound of just one word, ‘Forlorn’, a word that
reminds him of the human lot.
“In the very temple of Delight,
Veiled
Melancholy has her sovereign shrine.”
So,
imagination reveals a new aspect of
beauty, which is; sweeter’ than beauty which is perceptible to the
senses. The senses perceive only external aspect of beauty, but imagination
apprehends its essence, and “what the imagination seizes as beauty (Keats says)
is truth’’.
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,
No
hungry generations tread thee down.”
In
so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are thoughts and reasoning,
they are no more than a means to an end, which end is beauty-that beauty which
is also truth. This alone is the poet’s end and therefore his law (Bradley). Keats was led to this conviction by the
poetic instinct in him. He was more than Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley, a
poet and simple.
“Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though
thou be black as night,
And
she made all of light,
Yet
follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow.”
But
of, Keats’s aestheticism was not only sensuous -it had an intellectual element.
He was constantly endeavouring to reach truth through beauty; he had a
conviction that “for his progress towards truth, thought, knowledge and
philosophy were indispensible, but he felt also that “a poet will never be able
to rest in thoughts and reasoning, which do not also satisfy imagination and
give a truth which is also beauty.”
“And ask no questions but the price of votes.
“
The
ode is an exquisite example of the imaginative adventure of Keats. Nature takes
him away from’the weariness, the fever and the fret of the present world to the
eternity of beauty represented by the song of the nightingale. Here is the
highest nature poetry of Keats, where the inspired imagination of the poet
gives him a fleeting glimpse of eternal beauty.
“Hear melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are
sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes, play on;
Not
to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe
to the spirit ditties of no tone.”
Keats
was a conscious artist in the matter of producing musical effects in his verse.
He consciously used language as Spenser, the Elizabethan poets, and Milton had
used it, employing all its resources to make his verse musical. He frequently
uses alliteration, but it is used with the sure tact of an artist, so that it
contributes to the music of his verse:”the marble men and maidens”, “the
winnowing wind”, “fast fading violets covered up in leaves”. In his Odes,
vowels are artistically arranged so that they do not clash with one another;
they bear the burden of the melody, and are interchanged, like the different
notes of music, to prevent monotony. Many are the devices employed by the poet
to make his verse musical, one of them being to make the sound echo the sense.
“But
as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At
every word,
Methought
I heard one calling, Child:
And
I replied, My Lord.”
The
focus is predominately on the ephemeral character of all that is valuable and
desirable in life. Human sorrow and suffering and loss are mainly due to the
decay and fickleness of youth, health, beauty and love. The quickly perishable
charms of life under the ruthless domination of devouring time only leaves an
inevitable sense of inconsolable gloom and despair. The destructive process in
the life of reality is also expedited by ‘hungry generations’ treading
on the existing beings and things.
“…for
heaven’s smiling brow
Half
insolent for joy began to show:
And
the brag lambs ran wantonly about,
That
heaven and earth might seem in triumph both to shout.”
The
Middle Ages have been said to be a vast storehouse of romance, and some of the
romantics freely drew upon this storehouse for their inspiration. Distance
lends enhancement to the view, and so the distant days of the medieval past
made a strange appeal to the romantics. Pater says that the romantic quality in literature is addition of
strangeness to beauty, and this strangeness, the romantic poets-Coleridge,
Scott and Keats, is one of those, who reveled in the past, in which his
imagination, loved to dwell are the Middle Ages and the days of ancient Greece,
with its beautiful mythology.
“A! fredome is a noble thing.
Fredome
maiss man to have liking:
Fredome
all solace to man gives:
He
livis at ease that freely livis.”
In
Ode on a Nightingale, there is sorrow, but Keats, an untiring worshipper of
beauty, would not allow his personal sorrow to interfere with his pursuit of
beauty. In one of his letters Keats writes: “The setting sun will always set me
to rights, or if a sparrow were before my window I take part in its existence
and pick about the gravel.”
“Knowledge enormous make a god of me
Names, deeds, grey legends, agonies
etc.
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain
And deify me.”………
Every
poet is a lover of beauty-but he may have, and often has, other interests and
affections. Shakespeare was interested in the drama of human life and in the
play of human passions. Milton’s dominant interest was religion, though he was
passionate lover beauty. Wordsworth and Shelley had other interests than mere beauty,
but to Keats passion “with a great poet, the sense of beauty overcame every
other consideration”. Beauty was, for Keats, the moving principle of life;
infact, beauty was his religion. He loved beauty in all its forms and shapes-in
the flower and in the cloud, in the song of a bird and in the face of a workman,
in a work of art and in tales of romance and mythology. And all his poetry from
Endymion to Hyperion has one dominant theme- viz. Beauty.
“O
cheeks! Beds of chaste loves
By
your showers seasonably dashed;
Eyes! nests of milky doves
In your own wells decently
washed;
O
wit of love! that thus could place
Fountain
and garden in one place.”
Like
the ancient Greeks, Keats often presents the objects of nature as living beings
with a life of their own. As Leigh Hunt said of him, “he never beheld the oak
tree without seeing the Dryad.” The moon is Cynthia, the sun Apollo. Keats’s observation of Nature is
characterized by minuteness and vividness. Keats’s eye observes every detail,
and presents it with a mature touch. He has the knack of capturing the most
essential detail and compelling our attention. His descriptions of nature are
thus marked by a fine pictorial quality.
Keats
remained untouched by the idea of the Revolution which filled the atmosphere of
Europe at the time; at least from his poetry we do not find any indication of
his interest in the Revolution. Though the contemporary facts of history have
not left any impression on his poetry, he deeply realized and expressed in his
poetry the fundamental truths of life. Keats was a pure poet, and would not
allow any extraneous things like politics or morality to disturb the pure
waters of poetry. And poetry is the expression of the poet’s own experience of
life. Keats as he developed mentally and
spiritually- and his development was very rapid- was searching for truth in his
soul. The earlier hankering for the world of Flora and Pan- for unreflecting
enjoyment of sensuous delights- is past; he now subjected himself persistently
and unflinchingly to life. He faced life
with all uncertainties and contradictions, its sorrows and joys.
“Eheu quid volui mihil floribus austrum
Perditus…”
(Alas, what wretchedness have I brought upon myself!
I have let loose the south wind upon my flowers….)
Ode
to a Nightingale begins by pitting the
poet’s heart-ache against the
‘full-throated ease’ of the nightingale’s song whose joyous melody is symbolic
of the undying beauty of art; and by suggesting a reconciliation of the
contraries by ‘being too happy in thine
happiness.’, but nevertheless the intensity of the contrast between the nightingale’s forest
world and the painful, troubled and decaying human world is brought into sharp focus in Stanza Third: the
nightingale ‘among the leaves’ is completely
free from ~~
“What is love?’tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What‘s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty;
(…..Then come
kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Yoth’s a
stuff will not endure.”)!
The
contrast between the imperishability of the world of art or the emblem of
imagination and the transience of life, is a common theme in romantic poetry
and analogies are frequent in Shelley and Yeats, but what gives greater depth
to, and accounts for the subtler effect of Keats’s presentation of those
contrast is his ironical and paradoxical awareness of the other side of things.
The moment, when Keats listens to the superb spell of the nightingale and
glorifies its song as well as the singer as ‘immortal’, is not measured in
terms of clock-time or calendar-time, it is an ‘eternal moment’ as Foster calls
it; and once ‘eternal’, it remains so even after the fading away of the
‘plaintive anthem’, with the flying away of the bird to the other side of the
hill.
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
Here,
where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where
palsy shakes of few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where
but to think is to be full of sorrow.”
Melancholy
arises from transience of joy is transient by its nature. Therefore, Keats
accepts life as a whole-with its joy and beauty as well as its pain and
despair. It is this alternation of joy and pain, light and shadow, that gives
life its harmony, his is the truth of life- and truth is beauty. The poet is
wholly in the time and with the things of which he wrote. He lives wholly in
the present, and does not look back to the past or forward into the future.
The
Greeks were lovers of beauty, and so is Keats. To him, as to the Greeks, the
expression of beauty is the aim of all art, and beauty for Keats and Greeks is
not exclusively physical or intellectual or spiritual bur represents the
fullest development of all that makes for human perfection. It was the
perfection of loveliness in Greek art that fascinated Keats, and it was the
beauty and shapeliness of the figures on the Grecian Urn that started the
imaginative impulse which created the great Ode. The instinctive Greekness of
Keats’s mind lies in his passionate pursuit of beauty, which is the very soul
of his poetry. It is a temper of unruffled pleasure, of keen sensuous joy in beauty.
To him a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Keats enters fully into the life of
nature, and does not impute his own feelings to her. He is completely absorbed
in the momentary joy and movement of things in nature. He enters into-
“Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes
whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee
sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy
hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;”
The
Greeks did not burden their poetry with philosophy or spiritual message. Their
poetry was incarnation of beauty, and existed for itself. Similarly Keats was a
pure poet. He enjoyed unalloyed pleasure in nature, which for him did not carry
any philosophical or spiritual message. Keats did not know anything of
Shelley’s enthusiasm for humanity, or his passion for reforming the world.
Keats’s poetry had no palpable design; it existed by its right of beauty. For
Keats the sense of beauty overcame every other consideration.
“Go, soul, the body’s guest,
Upon
a thankless arrant
Fear
not to touch the best;
The
truth shall be thy warrant.
Go since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.”…
Graham
Hough perceived that Keats’s major odes ‘are closely bound up this theme of
transience and permanence.’ It is his
romantic urge that forces him, after acutely feeling the tragic loss of all
that is lovable and precious in life in
the inevitable flux of the world of reality, to discover an imaginative
resource of permanent beauty and happiness,
which would defy the decaying power of
time. And in his poetry he continually makes an ‘attempt to reconcile the
contradiction’ between mutability of human life and permanence of art.
The
four major odes of Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode
to Autumn’ and ‘Ode On Melancholy’ yield a very interesting study if they are
read one after the other. The total impression of these Odes constitutes a very
solid and compact whole. There is an
element of unity in the final impression that they leave upon the reader and
this unity springs primarily from the oneness of themes in these odes. The
basic theme, underlying all these Odes can be summed up very briefly like this:
The Odes deal with the fundamental human problems of finding a solace from the
naked and merciless realities of life. The solace can be found in the objects
and beauties of nature, in the world of art, in the world of imagination and in
a wish for death but with Keats the solace is always temporary in character and
a final come back into the world of realities is very important and essential. In
the Ode to Autumn, he asks, the past or forward into the future. The acceptance of life- this triumph
over despair attained through deep spiritual experience is expressed most
forcibly in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.
“Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour:
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!”…………………….
The
ode begins and ends in real time and is in a very profound way bound by time.
Living in real time and is in a very profound way bound by time. Living in real
time, the nightingale provides the plot by impinging on the poet’s
consciousness, so provoking the reflections that make up the poem, before
flying away…’. This is the fact, as observed by John Barnard in his John Keats
that accounts for the thematic unity of the ode. The thought of soporific drug
in the first stanza leads to the thought of wine in second stanza and the
thought of flight from reality. The reason for this desire to escape is given
in third stanza. The escape is achieved through imagination in fourth stanza
and this and the next stanza dwell on a peaceful, relaxed enjoyment of the
sensuous beauty of nature. The topic of death in six stanzas is allied to the
desire to escape already mooted in the earlier stanza. Robert Bridges has
complained of an unexpected shift of thought in seventh stanza., but of the
key-line, ‘ Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!’ has own and of man’s
, mortality, a contrast, which is very
much the central theme. It is a moment
which is timeless, this impression is created by the magical voice of the
nightingale and the same spell is conveyed on us by the wonderful song of the
poet. So, it is idle to complain that the poem lacks a definite central theme.
Rather the unity of the basic inspiration is felt again and again in the depth
of our hearts and it is clearly betrayed in the diction as well. The ‘fade
away’ of second stanza is echoed by ‘Fade for away’ in third stanza, and ‘Away!
away! for I will fly with thee’ in fourth stanza. The ‘hungry generations’ in
seventh stanza recalls the sordid picture of life in third stanza. It is the last word, ‘forlorn’ in sixth
stanza which is repeated like a refrain at the beginning of seventh stanza to
mark a bridge between the land of fancy and the solid ground of reality. What
more could be expected by way of thematic unity in a genuine romantic poetry
where passion and imagination enjoy the right to blossom fully?
“Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded
heaven
With
the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft place.”
In
his Ode to Nightingale, the luxuriance of his fancy carries him far away from
the fever and fret of the world to a faery land, where the song of the
nightingale can be heard through “charmed magic casements opening on the
seas”. He is carried away by his
imaginative impulse, but his artistic sense soon prevails. The exuberance of
his fancy does not blind him to his classical sense of form and order. He
realizes that “fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do,” and he comes
back to the world of realities.
“A little lowly Hermitage it was,
Down
in a dale, hard by a forest’s side.”
All
romantic poets except Keats see in nature a deep meaning, ethical, moral,
intellectual or spiritual. For Wordsworth, Nature is a mother, a nurse, an
educating influence. He regards it as a
living spirit. He sees in it the presence of God. Shelley, too, finds in Nature
Intellectual Beauty, but while Shelley intellectualizes nature and Wordsworth
spiritualises it, “Keats is content to express her through the senses; the
colour, the touch, the scent, the pulsing music; these are the things that stir
him to his depths; there is not a mood of Earth he doesnot love, not a season
that will not cheer or inspire him.”
“Forlorn; the very word is like a bell
That
dolls me back from thee to my sole self”,
Thus
we find here a happy blending of the romantic ardour with Greek restraint of
romantic freedom with classical severity. Thus
“there was in Keats the keenest sense and enjoyment of beauty, and this gave
him a fellow-feeling with the Greek masters”, but of it was one side of Greek
art he saw. He saw its beauty, but he did not see its purity, its
self-restraint and its severe refinement. His poems-barring La Belle, the Odes
and the Hyperion fragments are characterized by over-refinement and
looseness. They have romantic ardour,
but lack classical severity. It is in the Odes that we find a fusion of
romantic impulse with classical severity. Here we notice Keats’s sense of form,
purity and orderliness. The Odes show an amazing sense of proportion in the
Greek manner and present well-designed evolution of thought. They have a close
texture and are marked by severe restraint, but at the same time they have all
the spontaneity and freedom of imagination that characterizes romantic poetry.
“Mori
mihi contingat, non enim alia
Liberatio
ab aerumnis fuerit ullo pacto istis.”
(Would I were dead,for nought, God
knows,
But death can rid me of these woes.)
The poem ends by admitting in a very sensible
manner the impossibility of achieving freedom from the tethers of the struggles
and pains and frustration of life
through imagination forever, because ‘the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is
fam’d to do, deceiving elf’. The implication in ‘so well’ includes a stress on
‘so long’ too, but the quality and intensity of this joy and freedom achieved
through artistic fancy has an eternal value. John Barnard has rightly observed:
‘The paradox of the poem is that by admitting failure it, as if inadvertently,
demonstrates the grandeurs of the human
singer, who within his limits, gives the bird immortality-an immortality that exists only in the human mind.’ It is
our capacity of thought which makes our mortality so palpable to us and makes
us ‘full of sorrow’. But for, the nightingale is unthinking, so it cannot
possible comprehend the advantage of immortality and accompanying feeling of
superiority.
“For Love is lord of truth and
loyalty,
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden plumes up to the purest sky
Above the reach of loathly, sinful
lust
Whose
base affect through cowardly distrust
Of
his weak wings dare not to heaven fly.
But
like a moldwarp in the earth doth lie.”
Same
is true of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats is acutely aware that in real life
everything is short-lived and fleeting, but when he looks at a beautiful pieces
of art, the Urn, he is all praise for its artistic worth which has lent a torch
of immortality, not only to the Urn itself, but also to all that has been
carved upon it, the piper, the trees, the lover and the maidens. Even earthly
objects have been immortalized just because they are there on a piece of art
that has been very beautifully named by Keats as the “Still unravish’d bride of
quietness” and the “Sylvan historian.” Analysing the contents of Keats’s Ode to
a Nightingale according to prosaic logic, one may naturally think that the poem
is full of diverse thoughts. It begins with an expression of dull pain suffered
by the poet which seeks a relief in the joyous song of the nightingale. It draws a contrast between his deep
drowsiness and the bird’s full-throated song and Dryad like charm in the
beech-green forest. The second stanza records a picture of Dance, and
Provencial song, and sunburnt mirth in summer in Southern France, born out of
the poet’s desire for a beaker full of
wine which he needs to drink in order to forget the world of reality and escape
from it to the nightingale’s world. The third stanza concentrates on the misery
and plight of human beings on earth, where suffering and death are the only
certainty, and youth, beauty and love are constantly facing extinction. The
fourth and fifth stanzas contain the poet’s imaginative experience of sitting
on the leafy tree with the nightingale in the embalmed darkness and
anticipating the beauty of the moonlit sky above and the charm of the fragrant
flowery garden below. The sixth stanza brings back his focus on the
nightingale’s song itself and triggers off his constitutional desire for death,
which flares up at this opportune moment, when the bird’s song can serve as a
requiem. The seventh stanza contains an emphatic assertion of the nightingale’s
immortality, and the poet, flying on the wings of imagination, traverses an unending
amount of space and time to affirm that the same nightingale sang from days
immemorial to persons of all kinds, in life and in fiction. Finally, in the
last stanza the poet wakes up from his dream, at the fading away of the
nightingale’s song, as the bird flies across the hills. He is faced with stark
reality and realizes that fancy cannot prolong its spell on human mind.
The
beautiful sensuous lines on the Queen Moon, ‘Starry Fays’ and the scented
flowers of the season, bear eloquent testimony to his love for and intense
appreciation of the gifts of nature which he wanted to explore and cherish. The
spirit and attitude betrayed here is positively youthful and enthusiastic. His
whole being is involved in this eternal celebration of life. No idle escapist
has the capacity to think, as Keats has done in this ode, about the relation of
ideal art, represented by the nightingale’s song and transient, ever-changing
life of reality. The nightingale was ‘not born for death’, he asserts and
immediately re-asserts his conviction by calling it ‘immortal Bird!’, but man is simply mortal and in his world
of mortality nothing lasts long,
being devoured by time and treaded down
by ‘hungry generation.’ Moreover, if the
escapist mood had become dominant for some moments due to frustrations and vexations of life, Keats finally does not
fail to realize that escape from reality is
absurd and realistically he can feel that the nightingale’s song is nothing as joyous as it pretended to
be, but a ‘plaintive anthem’. At the end
of the poem he wakes up from his indolent dream to face actual life on its
terms.
“Love, the delight of all well-thinking minds;
Delight,
the fruit of virtue dearly loved;
Virtue,
the highest good that reason finds;
Reason, the fire wherein men’s
thoughts be proved;
Are from one world by Nature’s power
bereft,
And in one creature, for her glory,
left.”
Moreover,
it is the bard, a human creator, who invests the nightingale with immortality
by glorifying its song in his song that hopes to attain immortality. In reality
a nightingale’s life-span is much shorter than a man’s and its song survives
only in the sense of a kind of song by successive generations of nightingales;
whereas in case of a great poet like Keats, his individual song endures.
“Ecce novo campos Zephyritis gramine vesit
Fertilis,
et vitreo rore madescit humus.”
(See, the bountiful daughter of Zephyr dresses the fields
in new grass, and the earth is moist with glistering dew.)
In
Ode to a Nightingale Keats shows his deep sense of awareness for “the fever,
and the fret” of men and women of the world of reality. The poet thinks of forgetting his
personal loss and suffering in life by drinking and sleeping under the
influence of the liquor. He thinks that the sweet song of the nightingale is a
sure testimony of the absolutely happy world of the bird. The poet, therefore,
eagerly wants to escape from the life of reality, which has given him a surfeit
of torment and misery in the forms of ill
health,
unsuccess in poetic career and in love
and bereavement of a younger brother and seek refuge in the forest world
of the nightingale. His personal afflictions are also seen as part of the sad
lot of humanity as a whole. The general picture of malady is undeniably moving
in its pitiful starkness. Thus,
Ode to a Nightingale may truly be described as a wonderful poetic record of the
poet’s reflection of human experience.
“The Lord thy
God I am,
That Johne
dois thee call;
Johne representit man,
By grace celestiall.”
The pattern of thought in the Ode is apparently
complex and not smoothly linked in parts, but the occasion as well as the
basic impulse and atmospheric effect,
externally spelt through the music and the imagery , secure unity and
solidarity of this creative artistic production. It starts with a
feeling of drowsiness and ends with the
final clearing of that smokiness of the brain. The entire period in between was
a spell cast by the nightingale’s
melody on the highly sensitive and imaginative mind of the poet. One of the main ideas in this romantic poem
is a sincere yearning to get away from
the miseries and frustrations of life, to escape ‘the weariness, the fever and
the fret’, which the poet experienced from his failure to achieve fame, love
and health. What he generalizes as the
lot of humanity is authentically based on his personal afflictions. It is
therefore impossible to escape from inevitable pain in life. Shelley says of
the dead Adonias:
“He lives, he
wakes-his Death is dead, not he.”
It
is the thought of death or mortality that naturally leads to its opposite
thought, that of immortality. It enables the poet to highlight the contrast
between the world of man and that of the nightingale in a climactic manner.
With a philosophical imagination Keats calls the nightingale ‘Immortal Bird’.
The phrase has been variously interpreted, the most common of them being that
the poet is called not a particular bird, but the nightingale as a species,
immortal. Some think that it is not the
bird, but its song which is immortal in
its appeal, but it is more
reasonable to agree with Farrod who
points out that the particular
nightingale is addressed as ‘Immortal’ because
Keats has called it ‘light winged Dryad of the trees’ at the outset , a creature of myth, like nymphs and
fairies, which being purely imaginary,
are not subject to death.
“Who
brought me hither
Will
bring me hence, no other guide I seek.”
Ode
to a Nightingale has a note of searching melancholy and is inspired by the
poet’s personal sufferings and disappointments in life, the latest of which was
the death of his brother, Thomas Keats. Not only does he want to escape to the
nightingale’s forest, but he also yearns for death. Life’s torture has taught
him to love Death and call him ‘soft names’. The wish ‘to cease upon the
midnight with no pain’ and with the nightingale’s song in his ears, is a purely
romantic wish. The beginning of the next stanza, contrary to the opinion of
some critics, is not at all abrupt.
“Now
more than ever seems it rich to die
To
cease upon the midnight with no pain
While
thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad.”
The
thirst for wine brings in the beautiful sensuous image of a ‘beaker full of the true, the
blushful Hippocrene/With beaded bubbles winking at the brim/ And purple-stained
mouth’. Allusions and concrete imagery
reinforce each other to produce the whole sensuous impact as unforgettable. We
not only have the rich colour of the wine, but also the emphatic suggestion of
its poetic efficacy. The small bubbles with their bead-like shapes and restless
movement are compared to curious children peeping at the outside world from the
rim of the container and winking. It will be difficult to find in the whole
range of English poetry a more truly romantic lyric and a better penetration
into the mysteries of life and death in a mood of complete absorption in
beauty. The ode is intensely lyrical, yet its thoughts are elaborate enough to
form a comprehensive philosophy in combination with imagination and sensuous
experience. Keats’s poetic genius attains maturity to find its most perfect
expression in a few wonderful odes, and Ode to a Nightingale is undoubtedly at
the centre of the selected band. The
nightingale’s song, heard by the poet in the Hampstead Garden, triggers a
series of sensations and thoughts and builds up imaginative situations, in the
mind of the poet. It produces myths, gorgeous imagery, subtle psychological
perception and takes us through momentous experience of personal memory and
historical imagination.
Still
the fundamental fact remains that Keats must not escape to the world of the Urn
or the world of the Nightingale for long. In the fourth stanza of the poem he
realizes that with all its immortality withit, the Urn will remain speechless.
It will remain empty and desolate and the desolation of the Urn, once again
brings back on the hard crust of earth on which average man lives. This vivid
depiction of the negative side of life makes all readers acutely feel a desire
to escape from here. And the poet passionately and emphatically cries out: He
decides to fly on the wings of poetic imagination and stays in the company of
the nightingale on the shady branch of a leafy tree. He indulges in the
contemplation of nature’s beauty and pleasures. “Or new love pine at them
beyond to-morrow”, are “thrilled with aching hopelessness”, but this
hopelessness, this despair, Keats met squarely. In Ode to Melancholy, he points
out how sadness inevitably accompanies joy and beauty. The rose is beautiful
indeed, but we cannot think of the rose without its thorn.
“Open
the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in,…”
The
nightingale, the source of the purely joyous music, is a symbol of perfect
happiness and beauty; and is world amidst the forest is the ideal world
offering a total contrast to the sordid, painful and morbid world of man. This
purely romantic conception of aspiring for the ideal and bewailing the fact
that it cannot be achieved by mortal man, is comparable to the attitude of
Shelley in To a Skylark and of Yeats in The Stolen Child. Keats calls the
nightingale ‘light- winged Dryad of the trees’, who sings of the joyous summer
and whose song is imaginatively associated with the warm Southern countries of
‘Dance and Provencal song’ and ‘sunburnt mirth’.
“So every
spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in
it the more of heavenly light,
So it the
fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take:
For soul is form and doth the body make.”
All
through the poem, we are keenly alive to Keats’s sensitive study of nature’s
charm and beauties, while a poignant sense of melancholy pervades the
atmosphere, but above all and, superintending other elements, is the
astonishing flight and magical power of imagination. “This joy in present, this absorption
in the beauty of the hour, this making of it a divine possession and losing in
its loveliness, the pain of life is one of the chief makes of his genuine.”The
richly sensuous stanza on flowers where the sense of smell is most exhaustively
exercised is justly famous. The poet at once takes us into the enchantingly
fragrant atmosphere of the dark garden,
where we inhale and identify white
hawthorns, eglantines, violets and the musk-rose, astonishingly mythed as
‘Mid-May’s eldest child’. At the same time a unique melodious effect is
achieved by the ultimate verse of this stanza: ‘The murmurous haunt of flies on
summer eves.’
“her
pure and eloquent blood
Spoke
in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That
one might almost say, her body thought.”
Since
the bird is immortal its song is literally timeless and defies the barrier of space.
The poet imagines that the same nightingale which is singing to him now had
gladdened the hearts of monarchs as well as fools in ancient days, relieved the
gloom of Ruth’s mind in the biblical times and even had consoled the captive
princess of the fairy tales. The powerful imagination thus sweeps all over the
universe and blends together the real and the imaginary. The drab world of
reality is linked by its aerial ray with the ‘faery lands forlorn.’ But of,
though the wings of imagination float the poet wherever he wishes to fly Keats
retains artistic control over his creation. The quick succession of thoughts,
spontaneous, rich and colourful, is beautifully stranded together as the colours
in a rainbow. The whole effusion is
occasioned by the nightingale’s song and at the end, the poet is waked up to reality
from his ‘vision’ or reverie when the bird files away and its song fades into
silence. Meanwhile his mind has ranged from the garden bench to the farthest ‘charmed
casements, opening on the foam of periluous seas’, only to return to the
starting point, after completing a circle. Structurally the poetic frame-work,
containing the feelings, thoughts and fancies, is admirably sound.
“I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme
Who plainly say, My God, My king.”
In
sharp contrast to this, the nightingale is called ‘immortal’, ‘not born for
death’ and its song, which represents ideal beauty of art, has an eternal and
universal appeal. It is omnipresent in all times and places and casts its spell
unfailingly on John Keats as well as on kings and Ruth and the captive princes
of the medieval Romances and fairy tales. The
romantic imagination has lifted the poet far away from the nightingale whose
song is the theme of the poem.
“The same that oft-times hath
Charmed
magic casements, openings on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
Here
there is romantic suggestiveness and mystery. The nightingale’s song is the
voice of eternity, and the poet longs to die in the hope of merging with
eternity. There is, behind the expressed words, a world of mystery. This is a
romantic style. The word ‘rich’ is infinitely suggestive-suggestive of the
sensuous delight of the poet, his physical comfort as well as the soul’s ardent
longing to escape the fever and fret this world.
“And
my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall
be lifted-nevermore!”
The
beginning of the next stanza, contrary to the opinion of some critics, is not
at all abrupt. It is the thought of death or mortality that naturally leads to
its opposite thought, that of immortality. It enables the poet to highlight the
contrast between the world of man and that of the nightingale in a climactic
manner. With a philosophical imagination
Keats calls the nightingale ‘Immortal Bird’. The phrase has been variously
interpreted the most common of them being that the poet is calling is not particular bird, but the nightingale as a species,
immortal. Some think that it is not the bird, but its song which is immortal in
its appeal, but it is more reasonable to agree with Garrod who points out that the particular nightingale is addressed
as ‘Immortal’ because Keats has called it ‘light winged Dryad of the trees’ at
the outset, a creature of myth like nymphs and fairies, which, being purely
imaginary are not subject to death.
“Where
are the songs of spring?
Ay,
where are they?”
He answers,
“Why talk of spring? We are in autumn.”
From
this stark and gruesome reality the poet wants to escape on the ‘viewless
wings’ of imagination to the world of the nightingale. By virtue of his
unfettered romantic fancy he can lose himself in the midst of the dark foliage
of the trees and sit beside the nightingale. It has a miraculous power to
deport him through time and space anywhere in the universe. It is this
imagination which immediately leads to the creation of a mythical image of
Spenserian sweetness. The note of escapism asserts more strongly in the
death-wish of the poet. The soothing darkness brings up his desire for dark
death.
“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And
purple-stained mouth;
That
I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And
with thee fade away into the forest dim.”
A
drowsiness steals over him as if he has drunk an opiate. He wishes for a
draught of vintage, which would carry him out of the world into the abode of
the nightingale. He would thus leave behind him the sorrows of the world. He
thinks of the universal, sorrows of man, and his own particular and personal
griefs. The youth that grows pale and spectre-thin and dies, is his own, dearly
loved brother Tom who had died few months before, and beauty’s lustrous eyes
are according to Middleton Murray, the eyes of Fanny Brawne, whom Keats loved.
“This stanza is tense with the emotion of personal suffering controlled by
poetic genius.”
“..for
many a time
I
have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d
him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To
take into the air my quiet breath;
Now
more than ever seems it rich to die,
To
cease upon the midnight with no pain…”
A
highly imaginative and purely romantic poet like Shelley or Keats cannot be
reconciled with the real life which they feel as oppressive and restrictive in
every way. In all their representative creations an urge for getting rid of the
tyranny and bondage of social life must be inevitably betrayed. Ode to a
Nightingale being one of Keats’s most significant poetical utterances, does
illustrate an escapist trend of the poet. However before making any final
appraisal of this feature in the poem, we have to consider what the term
‘escapism’ implies and whether in Keats’s poetry it is a passing mood or a
permanent obsession. ’Escapism’ is usually a pejorative term; it is used to
denote a strong reproof, a criticism of the habit of shrinking or avoiding
duties, a failure to face life’s trials. Escapists run away from harsh,
unpleasant acts and duties and try to hide themselves in their idle world of
dream and peace, like an ostrich hiding its head in the sands during storms on
the desert. It implies cowardice and
spinelessness.
The
first and foremost quality of his odes is their unity of impression. The major
odes of Keats-Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy
have a common subject and theme. They have a common mood to depict and last but
not the least in all these odes the
development of mood is more or less similar and the mood develops , in the shape
of a drama, i.e. first the mood takes birth, it develops, reaches a climax and
finally the anti –climax takes place. Thus when we read Keats’s odes, we feel
that we are reading an abridged drama, and in this lay the secret of their
success. In so short a form of writing, Keats been able to give an impression
of the kind that plays of Shakespeare produce, but for it shall be an
over-simplification of facts if this statements of ours is taken to mean that
Keats has reached the Shakespearean heights of literature’s perfection. No
doubt it was Keats’s most cherished desire to be remembered with Shakespeare in
the rank of men of letters, but unfortunately Keats could not perform this
feat. Might be, if he had not died young, he could have had been able to probe
better into his poetic wealth.
“She
found me roots of relish sweet
Of
honey wild and manna dew.”
Yes,
a note of escapism is sounded clearly in Ode to a Nightingale because the poet
wants passiately to ‘leave the world unseen’ and with the nightingale ‘fade
away into the forest dim.” The setting of the poem, La Belle Dame Sans
Merci is medieval. We have here also medieval accessories-the knight-at-arms,
the cruel mysterious, lady, ‘a faery’s child’, the elfin grot, and the spell
and enchantment and general supernatural atmosphere. La Belle is one of Keats’s
great achievements. It is medieval in its setting and atmosphere and has the
simplicity of the medieval ballad. The Eve of St. Agnes, on the other hand, is
overloaded with excessive details and is marked by gorgeous, high-flown style.
La Belle is in the simple style of a ballad, and tells a supernatural story
with a medieval atmosphere.
“Since
then ‘tis centuries; and yet each
Feels
shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.” …………
The
other element of drama to be found in the odes of Keats is their drama-like
development. A mood takes birth, it develops and reaches its point of pinnacle
and finally it drops from that high point to its lowest position. The climax is
reached when the mood of escape goes to the extent of a wish for death and at
that moment Keats finds it richer than ever to die but the word ‘forlorn’
reverts the whole process and the anti-climax takes place with Keats’s return
to the world of reality.
“Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease
after war, death after life does greatly please.”
This
temper of spontaneous joy changes with the coming of pain and sorrow in the
poet’s life. He has his brother die and
his love doomed to disappointment. The temper of the poet becomes grave and
imaginative, and his note towards nature is mixed with sorrow, which seeks to
lose itself in joy. Now there is deep spiritual union between the soul of the
poet and the soul of nature. Nature does not merely gratify his senses -she now
goes deep into his soul. In the joy of nature, Keats forgets his sorrow. This
is the spirit that informs the Ode to Nightingale. The poet has felt the burden
of sorrow in his own personal life and the whole world of full of sorrow, but
of then there is the nightingale also in the world, and the nightingale is
the very symbol of joy. The imagination
of the poet is set aglow by the song of the bird, and he forgets his sorrow and
joins the nightingale in spirit. This is the moment when nature, with her moon
and stars and flowers, enters into his soul, and his soul is merged in nature.
Keats and nightingale are one; it is his soul that sings in the bird, and he
sings.
In
one of his lad poems- Ode to Autumn, he describes the sensuous beauty of the
season-but here the tone is one of joy mixed with the sadness of thought. The
poet is and to think of the passing away of beauty, though he soon overcomes
the feeling of sadness.
“Season
of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-Friend of the maturing sun.”
The
most characteristic quality of Keats’s poetic art is power to paint pictures by
means of words. His poems may be said to have been painted with words. His
words and epithets call up vivid pictures to the mind: “beaded bubbles winking
at the brim; anguish moist; full throated ease; soft conched hushed,
cool-rooted flowers fragrant eyed.” The abstract ideas in Keats’s poetry assume
a concrete, corporeal form; for instance, he gives a concrete living image to
express the idea of earthly joy which is transitory;
“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
Keats
was extraordinarily endowed with a native gift- viz. that of feeling acutely with his senses. All
his five senses reacted quickly to the beauties of the external world, and
these sense-impressions are transmitted into poetry by his imagination. The
first line of Endymion strikes the keynote of Keats’ poetry..
Even
in the midst of his pains of disease and his sufferings and disappointments of
life, this joy of beauty came to him through his senses. In one of his early
poems-Sleep and Poetry, he wrote-
“First
the realm I’ll pass
Of
Flora and of Pan, sleep in the grass,
Feed
upon apples, and strawberries
And
choose each pleasure that my fancy sees.”
So
Keats drank in the beauty of the external world with all his senses, and his
whole being was excited by it and he sang out with wonder and delight,
“The
Ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its
ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears
Its voice mysterious.”
Thus
throughout his brief career, Keats’s poetry reveal sensuousness aspect of his
love of beauty.
“How
sould I rewill me or in quhat wys,
I
wad sum wyse man wald devys;
Sen
I can leif in no degree,
Bot
sum my maneris will dis pys.
Lord
God, how sould I governe me?”
The
poetic genius transports him. Not with the help of wine but on the wings of
poetic imagination, he flies to the realm of forgetfulness-viz, the romantic
world of the nightingale. This world is “a heaven of joy”, where the poet
listens to the song of the nightingale. Now more than ever it seems to him rich
to die, and cease upon the midnight with no pain. But if, he was indeed to die,
he would not hear the song. Thus, morality has its poor advantage, in that he,
while living, can hear the enchanting song of the bird. “Morality is
re-asserted against the immortality of which the bird’s song is at once the
symbol and the elixir.”
“Joy
whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding
adieu.”
The
poetic equivalent for an emotion with Keats is commonly a picture; he hardly
expresses a thought or feeling in abstract terms; his thought leaps into visual
forms the chill of winter is thus expressed by means of picturesque images.
“A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour.”
Keats
is a Greek in his manner of personifying the powers of nature. The attitude of
the ancient Greeks in the presence of nature was one of childlike wonder and
joy, and they defined the powers of nature. This imaginative attitude of the Greek
created their “beautiful mythology”. They felt the presence of Proteus in the
sea, of Dryads in the trees and of Naiads in the brooks. Keats’s instinctive
delight in the presence of nature led him to the heart of Greek mythology. What
Greeks felt, Keats also felt. The rising sun for Keats is not a ball of fire,
but Apollo riding his chariot. He sees the moon as the goddess with a silver
bow coming down to kiss Endymion. Infact, the world of Greek paganism lives
again in the poetry of Keats, with all its sensuousness and joy of life, and
with all the wonder and mysticism of the natural world, Autumn to Keats is not
only a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, but a divinity in hun shape.
Autumn sometimes appears as a thresher.
“St. Agnes’ Eve- Ah, bitter chill was:
The
Owl for all his feathers was a cold,
The hare limp’d trembling
through the frozen grass
And
silent was the flock in woolly fold.”
The
imagination of Keats came to be elevated by his sense perception and sense
–impressions. His poetry is not a mere record of sense-impressions. It is a
spontaneous overflow of his imagination kindled by the senses. He hears the
song of nightingale and is filled with deep joy which at once kindles his
imagination. He has been hearing the actual song of a nightingale, but when his
imagination is excited, he hears the eternal voice of the nightingale singing
from the beginning of time. He sees the beauty of the Grecian Urn and of the
figures carved upon in. His imagination is stirred, and he hears in his
imagination the music of the piper.
“Because
I could not stop for Death,
He kindly
stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.”
Indirect
contrast to this is the world of the Nightingale who, “Among the leaves has
never known” what it is to sad and unhappy. The nightingale is singing the
happy and melodious songs of summer “in full-throated ease.” She is an immortal
bird as compared to man who is ever prone to death. It is here that the real
drama takes place. The poet, already quite tired of the worries of the real
world, wants to fly away to the world of the Nightingale “on the viewless Wings
of Poesy.” He wants to make an escape to the care-free surroundings of the
Nightingale, but the drama does not end with the escape. It touches their
heights of climax with the sound of a single word; and that word is “forlorn!”,
the very word is like a bell.“To toll me back from thee to my sole self”with
this the poet is back on the hard crust of earth. He accepts the world of his
fellow beings with all its pains and worries. In nutshell, he does not allow
the deceiving elf, and fancy to cheat him. The ode presents a living picture of
Keats’s state of mind. It shall, therefore be in fitness of things to say that
the ode takes birth from the inner conflicts of Keats’s mind.
Sometimes,
as a reaper, sound asleep on a half reaped furrow, or as a gleaner, steadying
the laden head across a brook. This is the typical attitude of the Greeks, who
attributed human qualities and shapes to gods and demi-gods. The Pan of Greek
myth was half human - any one wandering in the lovely woods, may expect to meet
him playing on his pipe. The Pan of Keats’s ode is also half human, and he sits
by the riverside, wanders in the evening in the fields and meadows.
“Heard
melodies are sweet, those unheard
Are
sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on
Not
to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe to the
spirit, ditties of no tone.”
Keats’s
greatest achievement, however, is in his presentation of pure beauty. Beauty
itself was his interest, not beauty to point a moral or to carry a message.
Keats had no lesson to teach. He did not want to call his readers’ attentions
to social wrongs as Shelley did; to the corrupt state of society as Byron did,
to nature as a great moral teacher as Wordsworth did. Because of this lack of
bias, his poems have an objective beauty which is especially attractive to
young people. But for, to readers of all ages Keats sings enduring music.
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But,
in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith
the seasonable month endows…”
Keats’s
influence has been very strong from Tennyson to the present time. His emphasis
upon craftsmanship has had excellent following. Many a poet has been led
through the example of Keats to perfect verse that might otherwise have been
carelessly written. Keats also turned attention to richness of verse, unlike
the simplicity of Wordsworth. Again, he taught
a new use of the classics. Instead of finding in the classics models for
restraint he found a highly coloured romanticism. Restraint of form he did emphasize,
but for his material he chose the legends of Endymion and Lamia
rather than the tales of Greeks and Romans of inspiring deeds.
“Where Beauty cannot keep
her lustrous eyes,
Or
new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”
The
underlying principle of all Keats’s poetic thought is this: ‘’Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty”. In one of his letters he says: “I have loved the principle of
beauty in all things”. But of, his “passion for the beautiful “was not that of
the sensuous or sentimental man, it was an intellectual and spiritual passion.
There was a deep melancholy about him, too; pain and beauty were the two
intense experiences of his mind. “Do you not see”, he writes, “how necessary a
world of pains and troubles is to school intelligence and make it a soul?”
Keats studied the Elizabethans, and “caught their turn of thought, and really
saw things with their sovereign eye.. He rediscovered the delight and wonder
that lay enchanted in a dictionary” (Lowell). “There is something innermost
soul of poetry in almost everything he
wrote.” (Tennyson).
“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,”…
The
English Romantic Movement was the movement in literature which started towards
the end of the 18th century and continued till the thirties of the
19th century. It can be roughly dated from 1780 and it ended round
about 1830. Of course, there were poets of 18th century who showed
romantic tendencies in their writings before 1780. Thomson, Dyer, Akenside etc.
wrote in a manner which anticipated some features of romantic poetry. But of,
true romanticism, though it sometimes flings our imagination far into the
remote and the unseen, is essentially based on truth- the truth of emotion and
the truth of imagination. Keats was a true romantic-not a romantic in the
hackneyed sense of dealing with the unrealities of life. He loved not merely
beauty but truth as well, and not merely the world of imagination but that of
reality; and he saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty. He never escaped from
the realities of life in pursuit of the beautiful visions of his imagination;
in fact, the visions of his imagination are based on reality. He persistently endeavoured
to reconcile the world of imagination with the world of reality. Therefore,
Middleton Murray calls Keats “a true romantic.”
Shakespeare
and Wordsworth developed his intellect and style though in different ways. The
vocabulary and phraseology of Endymion differ from that of the 1817 volume in
the influx of Shakespearian words, allusions and reminiscences, drawn from a
large number of plays while the influence of Shakespeare’s poems is shown in
the fact that though the large number of Keats’s sonnets are in Italian form,
all the best, with the exception of the Chapman’s sonnet which belongs to an
earlier date, are written upon the model of Shakespeare. At the same time that
he was finding in Shakespeare the greatest examples of the imaginative
presentation of life, he was turning to Wordsworth whose teaching had seemed to
Wordsworth a pretty piece of paganism, yet it was Wordsworth’s interpretation
of Greek mythology which revealed to Keats the spirit which informed the poem.
Furthermore, Keats owed much to the spirit and vocabulary of the old English
poets especially those of the Renaissance. The influence of Paradise Lost is
visible in Hyperion.
.“Thou wast not born of death,
immortal bird.
No
hungry generations; tread thee down.”……………..~~~
Written
in the spring of 1819, this Ode “was inspired by a song of a nightingale that
had built its nest close to the house” of a friend in Hampstead. The bird’s
song, we are told often threw Keats into a sort of trance of tranquil pleasure.
The proper subject of the poem is not so much the bird itself as the poet’s
“aspiration towards a life of beauty away from the oppressing world”- a beauty
revealed to him for a moment by listening to the bird’s song. This glimpse of
the Infinite, revealed to Keats for a moment by the song of the nightingale, is
also suggested in that bold line, Then with a magnificent sweep of the
imagination he sees the bird and the song as one. “The bird becomes pure song
and inherits the eternity of beauty.
“A thing of beauty is a joy
forever.”
Like
all romantic poets, Keats seeks an escape in the past. His imagination is
attracted by the ancient Greeks as well as the glory and splendor of the Middle
Ages. Most of his poetry is inspired by the past. It is rarely that he devotes
himself to the pressing problems of the present. Endymion, Hyperion and Lamia
are all classical in theme, though romantic in style. The eve of St. Agnes,
Isabella and La Belle Dame Sans Merci are medieval in origin. Keats thus finds
an escape to the past from the oppressive realities of the present. The poetry
of Keats shows a process of gradual development. His earlier experiments in verse
are products of youthful imagination, immature and overcharged with imagery.
The youthful poet has abnormal sensibility, but lacks experience of life.
Endymion opens with the famous line-‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’, it
is full of glorious promise, but it is lost in shadows and uncertainties,
because it is not based upon experience of real life. In the tale that
follow-Isabella, Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes, the poet has not come to grips
with real life: his imagination plays with the romance of love. In the Odes,
Keats’s poetry assumes a deeper tone. There he faces the sorrows and sufferings
of life. He would wish for a life of joy and happiness, like that of
nightingale.
“My
heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My
sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or
emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One
minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:”
The
effect of listening to the song of the nightingale is that the poet’s heart is
full of aching pain and his senses are dulled, owing to the very happy
participation in the happiness of the bird. The pain is the outcome of
excessive joy of the poet to think that the nightingale should thus sing in
full throated ease in the care-free manner. The poet longs to lose himself into
the happy spirit of the bird, and leave the world unseen and fade away into the
dim forest. At first proposes to do with the help of a cup of wink that has
been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, and is rich with all the
associations of the songs and dances of Provence, its country of origin. If he
can do so, he will leave behind him all the woes of the world, the weariness,
the fever and the fret of the world where we sit and hear each other groan,
where youth grows pale all too soon, and beauty fades in no time. But in, on
second thought he understands, wine is not potent enough to transport him into
the ideal region. Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts his own power, but
the next moment he finds himself in imagination by the side of the bird, listening
to the bird’s song in the wwoodland.The poet describes the romantic forest into
which he has flown on the viewless wings of poetry. In the darkness he cannot
see the flowers, but can guess each of them by its peculiar fragrance-the
hawthorn, the eglantine, the violet and the musk rose. The illusion is broken;
the poet comes back to his daily consciousness and regrets that imagination has
not the power to beguile him for ever. In this beautiful romantic scene the
poet thinks of many associations of the bird’s song as he listens to it. “In
his joy he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him,
and thinks it would be more welcome now than ever.” The nightingale would not
cease her song- the poet will die but the bird will sing on-the contrasts the transitoriness
of the individual human life with the permanence of the song-bird’s life,
meaning the life of this type. The bird was not born or to die; the voice that
the poet hears was heard in ancient times by damsel kept captive in some
medieval castle. The Ode to a Nightingale is “a poem of midnight, and sorrow
and beauty”. The poet hears the song of a nightingale when the night is tender.
“That
leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy’d,
A
burning forehead and a parching tongue,
Thou,
silent form: doth lease us out of thought
As
doth eternity; Cold Pastoral:”
The
stanza-form, with its intricate rhyme-plan is a beautiful invention of the
poet. It has a sustained melody the
rolling music of the lines being variegated by the introduction of a short line
in each verse. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is a b a b c d e c d e. There is
a Shakespearian felicity of expression in the telling epithets and picturesque
compounds throughout the poem.
“Where
palsy shakes a few, sand last grey hairs,
Where
youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies,
Where
but to think if to be full of sorrows
And
leaden-eyed despairs.”
To
Wordsworth, the cuckoo becomes a wandering voice, which turns, this world into
a faery unsubstantial place. In the Immortality Ode, Wordsworth passes from the
finite to infinite when he says:
“Hence
in a season of calm weather
Though
inland far we be,
Our
souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which
brought us hither.”
The
nightingale whose song the poet hears is suddenly transported in a flash from
the world of time to the world of eternity; it has been singing for ages and
ages. Thus to the poet in that moment of
imaginative ecstasy the nightingale is not a solitary bird swinging from its
hiding place in the tree; the bird is turned into song; the bird and the song
are one- therefore the bird is immortal, “not born finite, from the world of
the time to the world of eternity is a marked feature of the greatest romantic
poetry. Blake expresses his imaginative vision of eternity in a wonderful
manner:
“To
see a world in a grain of sand
And
a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And
Eternity in an hour.”……………
Some
superficial critics have complained of
the logical fallacy involved in the contrast
between the transitory life of the individual man with the permanent life of the nightingale,
conceived not as an individual but as a
type of the race; but such critics, led
by their prosaic method of criticism,
have missed the real significance of the
great line-“ Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird.“
“And
haply the Queen Moon is on her throne,
Clustered
around by her starry rays.”
“I
could not name”, says Bridges, “an English poem of the same length which
contains so much beauty as this Ode.” Middleton Murray says: “For sheer
loveliness this poem is unsurpassed in the English language.” It reaches the
peak of romantic poetry in the lines……………..
The
poetic style of Keats reaches its peak of glory in the Ode to a Nightingale. As
an example of almost perfect execution, the ode is one of the very greatest that has been written in the
English language. It shows a perfect
blending of classical balance and romantic inspiration. Every word is in its
place, and there is a restraint of expression from the beginning to the end;
yet it grows with emotion, which is romantic to the extreme. Starting in a mood
of despondent contemplation of life, in which beauty perishes, the poet has a
fleeting glimpse of a world- the world of eternity- where beauty does not
perish. Behind the seen world, he has a vision of the unseen-and this is the
verb quintessence of romance.
“Provencal
song and sunburnt mirth,
With beaded
bubbles winking at the brim,
Where but to
think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden
–eyed despair.
Now more than
ever seems it rich to die.”
The
poem represents the fleeting experience of the poet- an intense imaginative
experience in which sorrow is fused into joy, and the world of time merges into
the world of eternity. It is a romantic poem, but it denies nothing of human
experience; it tells of the sorrows of life and it reveals also that the
bitterest human experience can be transmuted into beauty, which is truth. The
Ode to Nightingale is one of the greatest lyrics in the English language.
“So hand in
hand they pass’d, the loveliest pair
That ever
since in love’s embrace met,…”
Keats
is pre-eminently a poet of sensations, whose very thought is clothed in
sensuous images. The epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality- watery
clearness, delicious face, melodious plot, azure-lidded sleep, sunburnt mirth,
embalmed darkness, anguish moist. Not only were the sense perceptions of Keats
quick and alert, but he had the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by
concrete and sensuous imagery. How vivid and enchanting is the description of
wine-bubbles in the line:
“With
beaded bubbles winking at the brim.”~~~……………
He
contemplates the sorrows of the world to which all mankind is subject, and
longs to get away from them. How? By means of his imagination which reveals to
him the truth of beauty, he at once passes from this physical world –the world
of time-to the world of eternity. The song of the nightingale represents
beauty- ideal beauty that never fades. It is the eternal spirit of beauty; it
is the voice of eternity that transcends the bounds’ of space and time:
“Thou
wast not born of death, immortal bird.”……………….~~
Keats
was passionate lover of Greek literature, mythology, sculpture and almost
anything Greek. It has influenced his attitude to nature and life immensely.
The temper of the soul with which he has looked on nature betrays all the
simplicity, the same feeling of joy and worship wrought together, which a young
Greek might have had before Socrates. In his world of poetry the sun is not a
mere ball of fire, but Apollo himself burning in with ardour; the moon is the
sweet love of Endymion. Pan’s sweet pipings are heard among the oaks and
olives, along with choirs of fauns. Trees and brooks are full of dryads and
naiads. The immortal knit relation with the mortal. This Hellenism accounts for
the charm of concrete beauty and mythical loveliness of his lyrics, narrative
poems and odes alike.
“Insuffishaunce of cunnyng & of
wyt
Defaut of language & of eloquence,
This work fro me schuld have
withholden yit…” (!....)
This
delight in pure sensation was, however, but a passing phase with Keats. As his
mind mature, his sympathies broadened, and he felt at one with the human heart
in travail. Sensuousness is still there, weaving its fairy tissues as before
but the colouring is different. In his maturerer poems, it is gradually
manifested with the stirrings of an awakening intellect, and is found charged
with pain, charged with the very religion of pain. His yearning for passing for
the beautiful is transformed into an intellectual and a spiritual passion. He
sees things, not only in their beauty, but also in their truth. And it is
partly by reason of his perception of truth in sensuous beauty that Keats has
become the, “inheritor of unfulfill’d renown.”
This
mood of serenity is expressed in the Ode to Autumn which according to Middleton
Murry, is “the perfect and unforced utterance of the truth contained in the
magic words (of Shakespeare): ‘Ripeness is all.’ The Ode to a Nightingale is a
vivid portrayal of the drama of pulls and strains, taking place in Keats’s
mind. On the one hand, like Shelley he is bleeding after having a fall on
thorns of life.”The fever, and the fret” of the world of Man are making him
feel uneasy. His dissatisfaction with the world of reality is clearly reflected
in what he has got to say about it.
“Songe
and prison han noon accordaunce;
Trowest
thou I wol synge in prisoun?
Songe
procedith of ioye and of pleasaunce
And
prison causith deth and distructioun…”~~~
That
“sensuousness is a paramount bias” in Keats’s poetry is largely true; even as
it is true that he is more a poet of sensuousness than of contemplation.” Yet, like all generalized statements, these
remarks are only partly true. Keats’s mind is mainly sensuous by direct action
but it also works by reflex action, passing from sensuousness into sentiment.
Certainly, some of his works are merely, extremely sensuous; but this is the
work in which the poet was trying his material and his powers, and rising
towards mastery of his powers, and rising towards mastery of his real faculty……….. In his mature performances in the Odes, for
example, and in Hyperion, sensuousness is penetrated by sentiment,
voluptuousness is permeated by vitiality, and aestheticism is tempered by
intellectualism. In Keats’s palace of poetry, the nucleus is sensuousness; but
the superstructure has chambers of more abiding things and more permanent
colours.
“The voice I
hear this passing night was heard
In ancient
days by emperor and clown”~~~………………….
The
other predominant feature of Keats’s poetry that holds our attention is its
masterly handling of the world of reality and the world of escape. He does not
remain uninfluenced by the delights of the world of the Nightingale. He
relishes in the carefree life of the bird. At the same time he enjoys the
pleasant and beautiful natural surroundings in which the Nightingale has her
abode. The sweet fragrance of the white hawthorn, the fast fading violets and
the musk-rose fascinates his sense of smell. So he makes an escape into the
Nightingale’s world. He fades far away flying “on the viewless wings of poesy,
but right after a very brief escape, the anti-climax follows. The very sound of
the word ‘Forlorn’ falls heavily upon Keats’s ears. It is really terrible for
Keats to stand the sound and he cannot afford to remain in the world of escape
any longer though the world continues to remain as beautiful as ever. He tossed
back into the world of naked truth. In a sonnet he wrote: “How fevered that man
who cannot look upon his mortal days with temperate blood.” Keats was trying to
attain serenity of mood in the midst of all the sufferings which he was
undergoing in his own life and which he saw all around him in life. Further
Shelley passes beyond the bounds of space and time, and expresses his poetic
vision of the Infinite when he says:
“The one remains, the many change and
pass:
Heaven’s light for ever shines,
earthy’s shadows fly.”…………………..~~~~
**********************************************************************************
EXCEPT
THE DECORUM OF THE SETTING OF ANSWER WITH ADAPTATIONS OF IDEAS OF PLACING QUOTES
ON CIRCUMSTANCES, A-MINOR CHANGES OF ORIGINAL- WRITING,--SENTENCES AND WORDS
SHADOWED DIRECTLY FROM VARIOUS BOOKS- DR.SEN, DAICHES, M.N.SINHA, AND
A.BHATTACHARYYA.
“The
poetry of the earth is never dead.” - John Keats
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