On Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”
Walter Jackson Bate in his award-winning biography on John Keats claimed that Ode to a Nightingale, while not his most perfect poem (he reserved that distinction for his ode To Autumn) it was his greatest poem. To Autumn was, he believed line by line, more tight-knit and focused on the overall subject. Also it accomplished to a greater degree what Keats had set out to do with his idea of selflessness: sinking of the self to achieve deeper sympathies with the world around you. But there were imaginative heights that Keats reached in Nightingale that were not touched upon in Autumn. In this analysis I would like to sketch out those heights, highlighting the small beauties and mentioning Keats’s opinion on poetry that are revealed in this poem.
Before we go any further, whether you are familiar with the poem or not, I would highly recommend listening to Matthew Coulton’s reading of Nightingale. His renditions of the odes convinced me that poetry is meant to be spoken aloud; not a simple dry recitation but an attempt to feel what the poet felt, to act out his/her feelings for every line, and emphasize the sweet music between words.
Link to the reading below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1KH60CenMM
What remains near constant throughout the entire poem is that, line for line, there is either a parallel of vowel sound, of consonant sound, or both. Add to this a variety of sounds in general within the line and wonderfully placed caesuras, and you have a poem that can be almost sung, with natural breaks to catch one’s breath. Perhaps some of these techniques were done consciously, but I get the feeling that this voice came almost naturally, as it seems he was simply dictating his highest thoughts to a tune.
Out of the first stanza, the fourth line with the caesura placed after the fourth syllable,
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Gives the line a falling effect, like one’s voice is trailing off the end of the sentence. And how appropriate that such an effect is tied to the word “sunk”! I want to mention that Keats wrote in his letter to Shelley that he should be more of an artist and “load every rift with ore”. I think this line illustrates what he meant. The poet should have an eye to the effects of certain techniques. An amateur might use alliteration as it comes to them, and find the repeated sound pleasant to the ear. The more experienced will tie the repeated sound to a phenomena that is being described. See any of Melville’s sentences in Moby-Dick, where the repeated “b” sound is used to mimic the repeating sound of waves breaking on the sides of a ship. Keats will use the repeated “b” sound in a later stanza.
We have another line in the first stanza that sounds to me like pure poetry:
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
The nightingale’s song recalls an entire season, and what follows in the next stanza is a list of the special delights that are found in summer. See also how he identifies with the bird. The song is not loud or sweet, but is sung “full-throated,” another way to say “at the top of our lungs,” though the former is a stronger phrase because it recalls the sensation that one feels. When we have been using our voice at full capacity it puts a strain on it and, if untrained, can cause one’s throat to become hoarse rather quickly. But the nightingale, despite its size, has a voice greater than itself, and singing at such a volume for nearly its entire life it should come with “ease”. Imagine this, singing as loud as you can with little to no strain on your voice, and you can place yourself among the branches with the bird.
In the second line of the second stanza, when describing a bottle of wine that has been sitting in a cellar:
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth
A tendency in the later works of Keats, and this is pointed out in Bate, is to use completed actions like “cooled” or “warmed” for a more specific description. In this line, if he had said “a chilly bottle in the deep…” in our mind we imagine a cold bottle in an underground cellar, whose chill originates from the object. But in the line from the stanza above, what is imagined is more apt for reality, that the deep-delved earth, the cool soil, has chilled the bottle directly.
Later on in the same stanza we have another drink, this time warm wine.
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth
The bubbles are “beaded” around the brim of the glass, like a string of jewels, that are “winking.” See the effect of choosing “winking” over “popping” or even “blinking”. First, winking has character to it, it is an action that is alluring or attention-grabbing, and if you have affections for this person or thing that is winking at you, you could go further and say it be seductive. And this seductive temptation is right in line with the inclination to drink, as if the full glass is teasing you, and each bubble contains a potential pleasure to carry you afloat, away from present concern to that carefree state where all inhibition is banished, and the tongue and mind, as one, loosely spill whatever delightful thought arrives.
Add to this how the sequence of sounds in the phrase “beaded bubbles winking” mimics the bubble bursting. After the sounds of the two b’s, the mouth takes a slightly rounded shape after “bubbles”, until flattening or popping that shape when it goes to say “winking”.
In the third stanza we have another identification with the bird.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
At first it may seem a cruel indifference Nature holds to the plight of humankind. How awful it is to be ignored, how insignificant one’s whole life may feel when, in the throes of pain and cruelty, and in our mind we are begging for some relief, the bird’s reply is not a conciliating song but cheerful chirps that could hardly seem more happy. But then perhaps it’s that very ignorance which lets the bird sing such sweet music.
In the description of a world,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
A layer of sadness is added if one knows that Keats had lost his younger brother to tuberculosis, not too long before this poem was composed. Also, similar to that line in the first stanza, here we have the structure to match the topic discussed. Before the comma the time it takes to say the phrase shortens. Though there are four syllables both in “where youth grows pale” and “and spectre-thin,” the syllables in the former phrase are naturally stressed, while in the latter “and” and the second syllable in “spectre” can be pronounced unstressed. Then the line shortens further to the two syllables, one unstressed and one stressed, in “and dies,” like a taper slowly burning until the very end. At first it is difficult to know where to put a caesura in a line with two commas. In the reading I posted above, Coulton pauses after “thin,” and feeling the dramatic effect I could not imagine placing it anywhere else in the line. The abrupt end ties into the unexpected loss of life in youth whose flame has been snuffed before it could blaze.
We are halfway through the poem, onto the fourth stanza. The poet chooses to fly towards the bird, not with the assistance of some liquored concoction,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards
These two lines give a brief synopsis of what Keats believed poetry, or at least his poetry, was founded upon, and what hinders the development of any creative act. “Viewless” means that which cannot be seen externally. The external world can offer unlimited raw material for the poet. This external beauty, once taken up in the mind and imagined in its absence into verse, is not keenly felt upon the senses, but in the “mind’s eye”. We are not to imagine the poet to grow literal wings and fly among the birds. Instead his soul is with them, while his body waits below. Poetry is given wings as he believed it “should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance,” soaring over the lowly thoughts in commonplace phrases and habitual sayings. The poet may have a high level of craft or technical ability, though his poetic vision, a product of his imagination, is that secret power which like a passionate fire burns throughout his poems. Keats wrote to Shelley in 1820 that his own “imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk.”
The line about the “dull brain” accords with his belief that the intellect has a tendency, through rational thought, to drift into a rigid bipolar worldview where one strives to grasp onto a perceived single truth and ignore all objections to the contrary. Almost inevitably this leads to more confusion. He found that great artists must possess: “Negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I do not think artists can fully explain the source of their inspiration in any rational manner; instead it peaks the intuition, and they can “feel” that this subject or that theme is a proper fit to their chosen medium for their construction.
In the fifth stanza we have examples of Keats’s aim towards imagined sensations that strengthen the imagery in his verse.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
The incense is given texture, weight, and now appears almost a solid thing that presses on our nose. Similarly the darkness is given a scent and becomes something a little more palpable than a shadow.
In the sixth and seventh stanza the mortality of the poet is contrasted with the immortality of the bird’s song. In the seventh stanza we encounter those heights of imagined beauties that were mentioned before. Almost the entire stanza is worth quoting for example.
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn
Through a present song he can find his way back thousands of years and place himself in an intimate moment with historic figures. The immortality in the song is its ability to deliver ever-living pleasure to whatever ear it spills into, always refreshing itself through improvised variations.
The last three lines in this stanza is another imagined height, but while the previous was a trip to a real place in time, here we are off to a land of dream, where the bird’s song is,
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
This is pure poetic vision. How unreal, yet how natural it seems, to open a window and hear a song! I see myself in a castle high above the ocean, on some far forgotten island, and as I approach the window it opens slowly to the nightingale’s song, and I wonder whether it was the bird’s tune or a passing sea breeze that swung the window open. Keats was exceedingly fond of Shakespeare and thought he was the only poet we really needed. I think it is likely that when Keats wrote of “faery lands forlorn” he imagined the setting of The Tempest.
In the first line of the last stanza:
Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
“Forlorn” is one of those lucky words among the abundant English vocabulary that sounds akin to its meaning. The deep, repeated long “o” sound, unstressed and stressed, does mimic the toll of a bell. This is the death knell for a fleeting vision. The poet’s mind hopelessly tries to cling to what does not last. His soul fades back and returns to the present moment.
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
The vividness of that flight upon the “viewless wings” hints to the poet that what he felt was no passing fondness towards the bird, but something deeper within the soul, possibly transcendent.
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?
Keats was striving in his poetry to capture moments of sincere feeling, of authentic vision, and not simple musings of some daydream paradise. Those sincere feelings must flow from a fount of truth. Here in this poem we have a poet who sings of death which he had experienced closely. He finds relief from his own mortality by letting his soul fly with the immortal Bird. Knowing such a moment of ecstasy is ever fleeting, he crafts the ode hoping it will immortalize the sensation. Now it can be sung alongside the nightingale’s tune for eternity.
