Journey of the Magi and Ode to a Nightengale
...achieved on earth. There is a journey one must take which starts with innocence, then one must fall, and finally there is redemption. 1) To their alarm the Magi begin to see the disgusting state that their world is in. The eyes of the Magi are opened by the behaviour of the camel men with their swearing, liquor, and woman. “Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, an wanting their liquor and woman” 2) In the following passage the Magi are sorry that they started on the journey. They now realize how naïve they had been at the beginning of their journey. They world is an ugly place and their innocence is gone. “With the voices singing in our ears, saying/That this was all folly.” 3). In the quote below, the horse represents the Magi isolated from the rest of the world, since it appears in the second stanza when they are in ‘the fall'. The Magi are trying to leave behind the old contemptible world and its old beliefs. White traditionally represents purity and the Magi are coming closer to purity, Christ. “And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow” 4) “Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And the feet kicking the empty wine-skins “ There is a visual image of leaves over the lintel and also a visual image of all the drinking and gambling taking place. They now realize how disgusting the world has become. 5) “I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Births was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” This paradox of dying to be born is carried throughout the poem, but is finally realized in the last stanza of redemption. To be redeemed, one must release oneself from the possessions of this earthly world and prepare for the passage into the true Kingdom. c) In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, like the Magi was naïve and innocent. Through his experience with Kurtz, he realizes that people are not as good as he wants them to be. The magi realized this when they saw the behaviour of the people during their journey. Like the Magi, Marlow had no choice but to accept the horror of human nature. . 2. Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats a) Ode to a Nightingale is a meditation on the nature of mortality and man’s experience as he contemplates beauty. Intoxication precedes the song of the bird in Ode to a Nightingale. Its voice is not heard until the fifth line and the bird is never seen. The first stanza introduces thematic ingredients: joy, sorrow, music, death and the rapture, which frees the poet into a world of sense. The poet then experiences a conflict of desires, first to equal the bird in eloquence and then to die at the height of the ecstasy the nightingale’s song inspires. Keats clarifies the reasons for his envy and abandons the notion of drunkenness as an escape. His imagination is sufficient to unite him with the bird in the depths of the forest. He describes the sweet smell and sounds of the dark. Keats’s associates the dark forest with death, and he confesses he has been “half in love” with the release from care which death would offer. For the poet, death would be sweet! The poet realizes that in death he would be deaf to the nightingale’s song. Consequently, his wish to dissolve his personality and fade away with the bird gives way to an awareness of the timeless beauty of the bird’s song. The spell of the moment is broken when the music is gone. b) The truth in this poem is man’s desire of a...