CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 2 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202

CRITICAL STUDY OF JOHN KEATS ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

Dr. Vandana V.
Assistant Professor

Abstract

John Keats was born in London on 31st October 1795. The Ode to a Nightingale, the
famous poem in English literature written by him. The poem explores the themes nature,
transience and morality the latter being particularly personals to Keats. This paper focuses on the
theme and critical study of The Ode to a Nightingale Poem. This is one of Keats best, unique
poems. This particular Ode is rightly valued as one of the greatest poems in the language and is a
glory to its literature.

Keywords: Lyric, horror, mythology, death feeling, transience, morality

John Keats was an English romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second
generation of romantic poets. The ode was written in May 1819 and first published in The Annals
of the Fine Arts in July 1819. John Keats a poet of the romantic era, composed this poem in the
spring of 1819, when keats was residing Hempstead with his friend Brown. It was inspired by the
song of the nightingale, which is always singing in the garden Keats.

Ode to a nightingale is a personal poem, which describes Keat’s journey into the state of
negative capacity. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within
Keats’s earlier poems and instead explores the themes of nature, transience and morality the
latter being particularly personals to Keats. The poem was written a few months after the death
of the poet’s brother. He emphasised on sensuousness, that is his works appeared to all the five
senses of sight sound, touch, smell and taste. An Ode is a lyric, which is lofty in style and is
usually addressed formally to its subject. Greek and Roman Mythology were inspired for his
poetry. He filled vivid picture of imagination medieval elements and romances and Arthurian
legends were incorporated in his poetry with a brilliant sense of imagery. Keats often express his
sad feelings and uses the Nightingale and portray it as some sort of a god or peaceful symbol.
The ode was born of a sudden inspiration. The poet actually heard the singing of the bird and felt
the urge to express his own response to it. The crowded felicities of the poem and its verbal
beauty are not studiously inlaid., but they are the vital essence of the speech. This is what may be
called the spontaneous or unpremeditated art.

Every word of the poem vibrates with a genuine lyrical fervour and bears the
unmistakable sign of the depth of feeling which wells up suddenly in the ode. It expresses no

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pose, but feelings are deeply felt for the moment. The mood of the poet is directly reflected in
direction of the poem. In the ode, we can detect the sign of the drooping of the vital powers
which were the over shadowing of the wings of the death. The mental state of the poet due to the
loss of a brother, migration of another to America and the attacks of the reviewer, all lead to the
decline of his own health and impact to the poem a subdued melancholy. Still it cannot be said
that the poet was anxious to give out to the world the picture of his own misery in life. However
intense and momentary the impulse to wall forth his sorrow was in the poet’s mind. He imparts
to the poem a touch of universal note. He calls the reader to share his feeling and attitude
towards life, and successfully strikes a similar note in his heart.

No poet that ever lived, had the faculty of natural music more than Keats, and in this
poem, it finds the fullest expression. According to Swinburne, “the faultless force and profound
subtlety of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty
is, doubtless, the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all the
equals, Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen more than any that is in these lines;
lovelier at surely has never seen nor can ever see. It is loaded with gold in every rift.

The structure of the stanza is of Keats’s own invention. The rhymes are almost faultless,
and the remarkable harmonious results are obtained by the skilful use of alliteration and the full
vowel sounds. Literary allusions abound, in the poem and so do felicitous phrases which haunt
the reader with their undeniable charm and grandeur.

Of course, this poem has some weaknesses. The tendency to over ornamentation is
obvious. Another defect is the profusion mythological references. The reader’s mind does not
like to be hurried through the images. So many in number, however beautiful they are heaped
one upon another, in such great profusion.

The poetic height achieved by Keats in his odes has never been attained by any other
poet. The regular ode reached its culmination in his hands. This is one of his best, unique and
perfect in style. This particular ode is rightly valued as one of the greatest poems in the language
and is a glory to its literature “I could not name” says Robert Bridges. Any English poem of the
length which contains so much beauty at this ode.

Hearing the song of the nightingale, the poet is very happy. He forgets his surroundings
and it appears to him as if he had taken the juice of hemlock or opiate which induces sleep and
causes forgetfulness. He is very happy but he is not envious of the happy lot of the nightingale.
He hears the song of the nightingale. He hears the song of the nightingale whom he considers the
Dryad of the trees. The bird is singing happily and the entire atmosphere is melodious by the
song. The poet desires to forget the world of sorrows and sufferings and to run away from this
world of trouble to the Nightingale who has never known the misery and the suffering of human
beings. He longs to share the bird’s lot. For this purpose, he desires to drink the rich wine of

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southern France so that he may forget the world and become one with the nightingale. The poet
then rejects the idea of wine and seeks the aid of poetic then inspiration and poetic imagination
to be with bird. He feels that his imagination has brought him nearer to the bird. He finds the
beautiful flowers spreading all round him. The moon is high up in the sky and its beams throw
the bright light on the earth. But the foliage of the forest does not allow the beams of the moon to
fall on all the flowers. He can only sense what flowers are growing on around him by their
fragrance. The poet is very happy at this time and so he desires to die at that moment. What a
pleasing thing it is die at such a moment of supreme joy and pass away quietly from this world,
while the bird is singing its sweet song in full rapture, for to wait after the bird has stopped
singing will again make the poet unhappy.

The poet feels the nightingale is an immortal bird and it’s cannot die. The music of the
nightingale has provided consolation to people in the past and the present. The nightingale has
sung through the ages and it is quite likely that the same song was heard by Ruth when she was
standing in the corn fields in a foreign land was feeling home sick. Perhaps it is the same
melodious music of the nightingale which cheered up a princess imprisoned in an enchanted
castle, the magic windows of which opened of their own accord on the waves of the sea in some
romantic religions how lying desolate and deserted.

“Perhaps the self some song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, slack of home
She stood in tears amid the allen corn” (Keats Poem)
The poet feels at the end, that the song of the nightingale cannot keep him for a longer
time in the realm of imagination. The poet, therefore, bids farewell to the birds which is flying
away from him. Its song is growing fainter and fainter as it flies over meadows streams and hill
sides and ultimately things about the immortality of the bird and its rapturous song is forgotten
by the poet and he is once more brought in contact with hard and rugged facts of real life.

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he
had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere
in the forest and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s
happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings
the music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish
for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and like peasant dances, and let
him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third
stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the
nightingale has never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its
consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin,
and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”

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In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not
through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but through poetry, which will give
him “viewless wings.” He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade,
where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the
breezes blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in
the glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white Hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and
the musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”
In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has
often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes.
Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than
ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours its soul
ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would
“have ears in vain” and be no longer able to hear.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not
“born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient
emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic
windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth
stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the
nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments
that his imagination has failed him and says that he can no longer recall whether the
nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker
cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.
Keats lost his brother. Tom and as a result of this incident became sorrowful. His
melancholic mood made sick of home. He had mental strain. So, he wanted escape from that
ugly atmosphere. In the mean while he hears the heavenly music of the Nightingale in the garden
at Hampstead, where he was staying with his friend Brown. The same music of the bird,
enchanted the poet to compose “Ode to a Nightingale.” This poem is an Ode and like the Odes to
the Skylark by Wordsworth and Shelley, it acts immediately as an address to the bird. An Ode is
a Lyric that usually in the form of an address to someone. It is written in a very elaborate and
complicated stanza of Keats own invention through a rhyme here or there seems to provide a
smile. This song of the nightingale acts on the poet like some opiate. He feels as if he was
sinking into oblivion forgetting all the weariness and horrors of life. The pictures the bird as
filling some beechen green with its melodious music. The music sounds him a strange ecstasy.
He wishes he had some wine cooled for ages under the earth and reminds him of song and dance.
The misery and horror of the world will also share the beautiful music of the nightingale. The
poet is so one with the music of the nightingale that he is not aware even of the flowers that
blossoms around him. This heavenly music soothes his sense. This music is immortal because
misery and horrors of the world do not touch it. The poet destined to die, but the music of the
nightingale remains eternal.

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Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas.
However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode
to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the
eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five.
“Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every
stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To
Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed
ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.
The themes of “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest
exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the
transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, /
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the
nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises
the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that
numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a
connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing
the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first
thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a “draught
of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the
transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus
was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by
leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures
in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”
The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s
music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the
darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of
painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never
experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the
word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined
escape from the inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do,
deceiving elf”). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left
him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.
In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to
embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale’s
song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the
outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at
last. The “art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without
record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s
language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other

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