Ode To a Nightingale - analyse its Romanticism
...rd and the intense empathy which wishes to participate in the bird’s happiness." The language in the first stanza also contrasts strongly, where we can see it being used effectively to create a certain mood. In the opening of the poem for example, a sense of sluggish weightiness is suggested by the heavy thudding alliterative sounds produced by the repetition of ‘d’ (“drowsy”, “drunk”, “dull”, “drains”), ‘m’ (“My”, “numb”, “hemlock”, “minute”), and ‘p’ (“pains,” emptied”, “opiate”, “past”). If we compare this to the effects created in the second half of the stanza by the light assonantal - “trees”, “beechen green” – and sibilant sounds – “shadows”, “singest”, “summer” – the reader can see that the nightingale, in comparison to the poet, is a much freer spirit. In the second stanza, Keats longs for some intoxicant, “a draught of vintage” that will let him achieve union with the nightingale, take him out of the world, and allow him to forget human suffering and despair and the transience of all experience. The wine is to counteract the effects of the previously mentioned hemlock – after having been numb, the poet’s sensations are heightened and therefore more intense. This stanza provides an excellent example of all the tendencies in Keats’ imagery and reveals an intense compression of descriptions: “sunburnt mirth”, for example, conveys through just two words the joyful celebrations of bronzed country-folk. The taste of wine is described in terms of other senses – the visual in “the country green”, the aural in “Provençal song” and the tactile through, “the warm South”. Clearly it would be difficult to explain how anything could literally taste of such things; it is the sense of innocence and carefree pleasure they evoke which Keats is associating with the taste of wine. The images are also highly concrete and pictorial. The last three lines do not only suggest the taste of the wine, they also make the taste tangible by conjuring up the picture of a slightly intoxicated satyr, participating in some revel. The wine is to be all things to the poet at once, “Cooled a long age” yet tasting of “the warm South”. “It reverses the process of numbness” and instead “lifts the poet out of ache into a forgetfulness of another kind, one which transports him to the singing voice in the night”, states Coles’ Notes. The asking for drugged ease reminds the reader of the pain that has still requires succour and stanza 3 provides the explanation for why the poet wishes to “fade away” Here, the poet enters some twilight region of the mind. The song of the nightingale reminds the poet of all that he needs to forget; as Coles’ Notes informs us, “the bird … represents experience unalloyed, untainted by the “weariness, the fever and the fret” ”. Keats takes on an interesting role in this stanza – he becomes something of an arbitrator and a gauge for these opposed existences. “What thou among the trees has never known” is human suffering – Keats has known this. Similarly, those trapped in “leaden-eyed despairs” have never known the blissful song of the nightingale – Keats has known this also. One of the lines of the ode, found here, that especially struck me was “to think is to be full of sorrow”. Keats here seems to be implying that if a body has any awareness or perception of itself or its surroundings, then it will almost certainly know unhappiness. Helen Vendler in her critical article comments that: The admission that consciousness itself is the essential source of human grief is Keats’s most truthful statement in the stanza, and leads to the fundamental choice, on which the ode turns, between unhappy consciousness and the unconsciousness of death. Keats then goes on to reveal to more causes of melancholy – the fact that Beauty will fade and “cannot keep her lustrous eyes” and that Love’s fidelity is fleeting. Therefore, Keats’s attempts to mediate between the ‘here’ of the physical world and the ‘there’ of the nightingale’s realm are not resolved and the next stanza opens with Keats seemingly believing that it is justifiable to “desire to escape the human world of sorrow”. He decides against relying on “Bacchus” (the Greek god of wine), instead hoping to rely on “the viewless wings of Poesy”; interestingly, Keats is happy to place his confidence in the imagination, even though he doesn’t know where it will take him. Keats also shows his appreciation of the creative process when he describes that, “Tender is the night … But here there is no light, // Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown.” Once again, Keats compares the world of the nightingale with human existence and finds the forest to be more favourable – it falls short of the ideal. However, while the experience of the nightingale may have been satisfying, it is short-lived and the poet returns to the shadows. Stanza five continues with paradoxical notions; although the natural beauty of his environment is physically denied to him, it is not withheld from the mind's eye, which as Coles’ Notes states, “vaults barriers”. While he can see nothing, his other senses feed the imagination, constructing within his mind that which actually cannot be seen – “The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild”. For Keats, these creations would be as real to him as anything found in the material world; as in I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, Keats wishes to emphasise that, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not”, a preoccupation that is unearthed more fully later in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Coles’ Notes observes that, “The rhythm and the tone of stanza V emphasize the thematic change.” Unlike the brusque, impatient manner of the poet in stanza four, stanza five relaxes into a more cadenced exposition. Although the speaker has returned to the “here” of stanza two, he concludes that it is better to envisage a world of sensual pleasures, rather than the land of frustrations described before. He lives in “embalmed darkness” with the embalming suggesting preservation after death...