Summary
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.”
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.
Form
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.
Themes
With “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 senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, “But here
there is no light”; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see
what flowers” are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on
a Grecian Urn,” which is in many ways a companion poem to “Ode to a
Nightingale.” In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created
art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he
has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that
expression—the nightingale’s song—is spontaneous and without physical
manifestation.
One of the greatest odes in the canon of English literature of all times. The creative genius of Keats as a poet of the senses is well evident here. Thanks for sharing the post.
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Really useful one, compact yet packed with important points.Thank You very much for the effort to make the hard one looks so simple. Further, you can access this site to read Summary of the Poem "Ode to a Nightingale"
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