Keats: Nightingale Ode

good evening and welcome to today's podcast from claysmore english department i'm james carpenter and i'm going to talk to you about keats's poem ode to a nightingale the poem is far too complicated to deal in any detail in a ten-minute podcast so i want to focus on just a couple of things firstly i'd like to say a word or two generally about the poem and then to focus on one or two stanzas in a bit more detail keats wrote the poem in

april or may eighteen nineteen after a nightingale had nested in his garden in hampstead and so in one sense the poem is an ode to a nightingale but on another level of course it is about poetic inspiration and the astonishing power, the intoxication of poetic inspiration that Keats feels but also its elusiveness.

it's the difficulty that he has in grasping it and ultimately in the poem the poetic inspiration leaves him and it leaves him in a sense of doubt about what he has really experienced or even indeed whether he has experienced it at all so firstly the poem as a whole

there are eight stanzas in the first three keats is talking about what he doesn't want to do he is craving poetic inspiration my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense but he doesn't want to he contemplates drinking alcohol oh for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep delved earth

he talks about the beaker full of the warm south and the beaded bubbles winking at the brim and he's contemplating drinking and leaving the world unseen and with the nightingale fading away into the forest dim But in line 31, he makes clear that he doesn't want to... follow the song of the nightingale in quite that way he says that he doesn't want to fly charioted by bacchus and his pards but rather he wishes to fly on the viewless wings of posy and within a fraction of a second

he's made his journey a kind of telly transportation through the realm of the intuition already with the tender is the night and haply the queen moon is on her throne clustered around by all her starry fays and this is where we see how the poem develops it is moved from the everyday world of home and just ordinary dreaming to a world of poetic inspiration to do with the phase the fairy lands of line seventy

and as soon as he's made this move the poem becomes paradoxical he talks about how there's no light save what from heaven is with the breezes blown through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways how he cannot see what flowers are at his feet nor can he see what soft incense hangs upon the boughs and in these four lines we are reminded of keats's characteristic

mixing of the senses what today we talk about as synesthesia he talks about how the light is by the breezes blown or how he cannot see soft incense and the mixing of senses is very evident. Instead, he's relying on other senses. He has to guess.

each sweet wherewith the seasonable month endows the grass the thicket and the fruit-tree wild and we have a feeling that he's now living, if you wish, in a parallel world in line 45, because that line echoes very closely the line the weariness the fever and the fret line twenty three so although there is not an explicit antithesis there is a rhythmical one between the ordinary world the world of weariness fever and fret and the poetic world

where he's now among the grass, the thicket and the fruit tree wild. Interestingly, in this poem, there are far fewer uses of... assonance and internal rhyme remember in the ode to melancholy we found that the poem was riddled with those echoing sounds and indeed in ode to a grecian urn but in this poem keats is using different techniques to try to convey

the atmosphere of the imagination for example you might like to look at the simplicity of the language in stanza six and stanza seven and compare that with the complexity and the richness of the language that we found in melancholy and grecian urn by saying less keats in fact conjures up more ideas in our own imagination than he had perhaps managed to by describing what was in his own in the earlier two odes

in order to achieve this state this realm of the imagination keats has set up a whole load of opposites life and death waking and sleeping beauty and the fading of beauty, youth and age. And it's almost as though in order to help us imagine this realm of the imagination, Keats can only do that by defining opposites. He explains what this realm isn't.

and out of what it isn't emerges a sense of what it is. So in line nine he talks about the shadows numberless, and that's very much the kind of world that he's trying to describe, a world of shadows and something that can't be numbered or indeed something that can't be described and we're going to see at the end of the poem the very opening of stanza eight that it's a word that destroys this realm of the imagination it's a word

that brings him back to his soul self and makes the imaginary world fly from him other opposites that we see for example in line sixty one He puts the word death and immortal alongside each other in an oxymoronic kind of way. But the whole of line 61 is paradoxical.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird. And so in a sense, I suppose what I'd like to suggest is that it's through paradox, and certainly... illogicality and it's through the realm of the intuition that Keats is going to attain imaginative insight which is what he's trying to write about. We have a sense of this if we just look at the patterns of imagery, perhaps. There are a whole series of words to do with religion. We hear about the high requiem. We hear about Ruth.

and we hear about the plaintive anthem, and there are a whole series of words to do with the classical world. We hear about the dryad and Bacchus of ancient days where the song was heard by emperor and clown. And we also, the third theme is to do with the realm of the imagination, the realm of fancy. we hear about the queen moon and all her starry phase which reminds us of shakespeare's romeo and juliet and mercutio's speech about the moon we also have fairy lands forlorn

and we need to just dwell a little bit upon airy lands forlorn. The Song of the Nightingale Keats reflects was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown and also possibly was the same song that was heard by ruth and it's the same song he says in line sixty eight that hath charmed magic casements and one has to imagine the window the magic casement opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn the song has opened

the window on to the realm of the imagination which interestingly for keats is perilous it's a dangerous place it's a slightly irrational difficult dangerous place for him to contemplate and at the end of line seventy he describes the fairy lands as forlorn lost lost to the contemporary world lost to him perhaps and indeed that's precisely what happens forlorn

The very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my soul self. So without any overt reference to death, the bell tolling just indicates to us that this is a kind of dying. that the loss of the realm of the imagination is a kind of dying and it's a dying that is obviously metaphorical it's expressed that he comes back to his soul self he regains self-consciousness through the use of language and he goes on to explain that the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do deceiving

he thought he was in this magical imaginative realm but in fact the use of language destroys it and he cannot remain in the magical world the other set of images that we find in this poem that echoes other poems and letters by keats is this idea of fading that he becomes a part of the imaginative world by fading line twenty he wants to fade with the sorry and with thee fade away into the forest dim fade far away dissolve and quite forget and so on so this emphasis is on on fading he talks in

line forty seven about the fast fading violets he talks or we have a sense that beauty fades in line twenty nine that this idea of fading and dissolving is very important to him it is something he picked up in his own annotations to shakespeare's play antony and cleopatra where we find a similar idea that identity dissolves or fades

and for keats in one of his letters he talks about the annihilation of the self this is what he is interested in the annihilation of the ego the dissolving of the self enables poetic inspiration to take place all the time you're in control of yourself where the ego is dominant for keats it's impossible to attain the poetic or imaginative insights that he's striving for

and in this he contrasts himself with wordsworth who he saw as being overwhelmed by his own ego he talks indeed about being with wordsworth bullied by the whims of an egotist And later on, he talks about the egotistical sublime of a poet like Wordsworth and contrasts it with what he's trying to do, which is to get away from that. And most famously, he expresses this idea in his phrase about negative capability.

how the loss of self, the loss of the ego, is important to the poet in gaining poetic insight. And paradoxically, obviously for a poet, it's language that prevents this from happening. So line 70, 71, that's the critical point there, that language prevents the poetic insight taking place. And for a poet, of course,

that's the essential paradox of everything that he is doing perhaps what's most extraordinary about this poem though is that the process that keats is describing is indeed exactly the process that we go through as we listen to the poem and as we reach its end so we begin with keats our heart aching in a drowsy numbness he takes us through a number of ideas of the beaded bubbles winking at the brim of the glass of wine and we

travel with him and the song of the nightingale into this magical world of stanza five and six and seven and there is a progression through the stanzas so in stanza v it is about what he cannot see and what he cannot see fades into what he cannot hear darkling i listen and for many a time i have been half in love with easeful death so it moves from what can't be seen

in a sense to what can't be heard what one's striving to hear and because he can hear the poetic inspiration and because he can hear the sound of the nightingale 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 in such an ecstasy

and notice even in those lines there is this characteristic keatsian movement of idea he has a thought now more than ever seems it rich to die and then it is modified not to die but simply to cease upon the midnight with no pain And by the time we get to stanza seven, he's very much concentrating on the voice that he can hear and the awareness that that voice has transcended generations.

This ode is unlike any of the other odes he's written to date, in that he has fiddled about with the eighth line.

of the stanzas so we still have ten-line stanzas just like we had an ode on melancholy and the grecian urn but here we have a short eighth line in each stanza and so the question that immediately arises well is why has he done this and what happens to us the reader in the silence of the second half of that line and of course what Keats has done here brilliantly is to create in the reader

the very process that he's trying to write about as happening to himself that it's in the silence that our imagination moves and it's in the silence of the short eighth line that the intuition takes over before it's modified and we return to a more substantial idea.

so if we look at stanza seven for example through the sad heart of ruth when sick for home she stood in tears amid the alien corn the same that oft times hath and in the silence we sense the searching for an idea which is charmed magic casements and then he is in the magical place you can look at every stanza and identify the transition in idea that takes place in the silence of the short eighth line and it is a stroke of genius that keats discovers in this modification of the standard

structure of the line or the standard form of the ode that he has been used to using so far let's just have a quick look at the end where we hear about how the imagination cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do and the bewilderment of line seventy nine and line eighty we had the certainty at the end of or the sort of certainty at the end of the grecian urn or the ode of melancholy but here we are in a state of doubt and uncertainty was it a vision

or a waking dream fled is that music do i wake or sleep and throughout stanza eight you'll see that the metre is modified the sort of iambics that we're generally used to aren't so prevalent in stanza eight there's disturbance and uncertainty and that's reflected in the metre so many of the lines have an iambic trochaic inversion at the opening to them so past the near meadows up the hillside in the next valley glades they all begin with a strong beat rather than a weak one

and line eighty itself fled is that music and the doubt is articulated at the end of the poem do i wake or sleep has he woken from something that was unreal or actually has he now fallen asleep because what he had experienced in the song of the nightingale was so real that anything apart from that It's something that is inadequate and less real than the realm of the imagination.