Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)
Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)
Though not the masterpiece, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is undoubtedly the greatest of Keats’ odes, enshrining profoundly deep philosophical idea that escapes from the grim realism of life is almost an impossibility. According to a noted American critic, this ode is the masterpiece of Keats in the sense that it helps us in following Keats’ logic (provided that the bird-Nightingale is not taken as a mere song-bird, but as the voice of that perfect and serene happinessBeauty). Love for which Keats yearned passionately and never had.
Keats in this poem, solves an extremely complex and intricate philosophic problem that has baffled many a bad-headed philosopher. Can Fancy help one to escape from the worries and pains of the realistic world?…or in other words, ‘living in the material world, full of cares and anxieties, can we forget its stern realities? Keats olves the question by saying:
“Fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving self”.
In this ode is present the keen sense of the tragedy and forlornness of life :
“Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.
Where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies.”
From this oppressive feeling a refuge is sought and found in the rapturous song of the nightingale “singing in the full-throated ease”. The tempo of this rapturous feeling becomes quicker and quicker, till it carries the poet quite out of the confines of the ordinary human experience into the contemplation of a deliciously romantic death :
“To cease upon the midnight with no pain
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!”
And in the flight of a romantic fancy to charmed magic easement, opening on the foam of perilous seas in “Faery lands forlorn”.
But ah! the Escape fails and the magic of the song of Nightingale dissolves like such props of sorrow-laden soul. Fancy can no longer cheat, and he falls back to his sole self:
“Fled is that music : Do I wake or sleep?”
Nightingale is embodiment of the spirit of Romance, which according to Keats, is immortal in every age and clime, the sorrowful hearts of men and women have been consoled by the Ideal happiness depicted in romance.
How perfect is the structure of the ode, with each of the stanzas, composed of ten lines, packed with such expressive phrases! Its irresistible flow and music of words give it such a marvellous character of spontaneity, like the music of the Nightingale itself into full-throated ease.
The poem is a specimen of Keats’ use of pictorial scene how beautifully does he paint a picture of the night in this poem or the ode:
“Tender is the night,
And happily the Queen-moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays.”
Prof. Palgrave has given the following appreciation of this ode :
“The Ode to a Nightingale is one of the six or eight among Keats poems which are so perfect in style that it is hard to see how any experience could have improved them. Let me quote Sidney Colvin’s remark-‘Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrases and cadence cannot be more absolute than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draught of Southern vintage picturing the frailty and wretchedness of man’s state in this earth conjecturing in the embalmed darkness the diverse odours of Spring.
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