Critically appreciate Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"
The " Ode to Nightingale " is one of the most exquisite English lyrics revealing Keats's highest imaginative powers. The poem is full of imagery. The ode was inspired by the song of a nightingale that had built its nest close to the house of the poet's friend in Hampstead. The bird's song threw Keats into a trance of tranquil pleasure.
One morning he took his chair from the breakfast table, placed it on the grass - plot under a plum tree and sat there for two or three hours with some scraps of paper in his hand. Thus we see that the song of an actual bird stirs the poet to the depth of this heart and induces a heartache and numbness as is caused by hemlock or opiate.
To him, the song of the bird is a voice of romance coming out of a region of beauty where beauty does not perish and passion does not cloy. The song of the nightingale fills the poet with an aspiration to escape from the world. " Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, where I sit and hear each other's groan and " Where youth grows pale and spectre thin and dies. " Thus the ode presents the picture of the tragedy of human life and its fullness illustrates Keat's pessimism. It shows Keats's dejection.
The ode is a masterpiece of Keats. Sidney Colven observes. " It is not the particular nightingale ". Keats had heard singing in the Hampstead Garden that he, in his poem, invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty.
From the agonies of the world, he finds refuge in the rapturous song of the nightingale, singing in full-throated case. The tempo of his ecstatic feelings becomes quicker and quicker till it carries the poet quite out of the confines of ordinary human experiences. And his joy becomes unbounded. And he wants to die in this richest moment of business :
" To cease upon the midnight with non-pain,
While thou art pouring forth the soul abvorad In such an ecstasy '
These lines reveal an undertone of pathos in the poem which is profoundly moving. It was composed at a time when the accumulated sorrows of the poet - the death of a brother, the separation from another, the savage attacks of the reviewers the suspense and agony of the passionate love for Fanny, Brawne had induced in him a mood of wistful melancholy which it is hard to suppress.
Hence in this poem, the poet clasps the joy in sadness and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. It is this complex emotion left with an acuteness which gives the poem its unique charm. " As Hereford, says, " it is a richly meditative Ode. " The contrast between the immortality of the bird's song and joy and the passing beauty, youth and joy in human life, lends a deep philosophic interest to the poem. The poet is now not content with a mere life of sensations, the years have brought him a philosophic mind.
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