Re-reading “Ode to a Nightingale”
Recently I bought a book at a thrift store entitled, “The Art of Reading Poetry” by Earl Daniels. Until then I had a strong prejudice against any book of this sort, and any kind of literary criticism or theory. I am a staunch supporter of intuition. Surely, I thought, you cannot be taught how to appreciate something, like art for instance, without falling trap to another’s ideology. How could you interact sincerely with art, and extract authentic experiences, through the lens of someone else?
This book, once I opened it, clapped over that mouth in my mind that is always spouting stubborn opinions. Daniels has a section dedicated to the “Lions” which stand in our way towards appreciation. It seems I have been fighting the Lion of Prejudice Against Analysis. Quickly I was reading thoughts that were somewhat like my own, but more refined and more encompassing. The continual knots of argument that I would constantly struggle with regarding art and poetry were easily unloosened. My mind was calm and my train of thoughts was smooth.
My passion for poetry was sparked, and the flame grew stronger and brighter. This is the prime purpose for a mentor. It is likely, with how disfigured the state of poetry is at the moment, there are likely no living mentors you will ever meet that could do you any long-lasting good.
On the first page of Chapter One, Earl Daniels writes:
Poetry is still being written, perhaps by more people, in larger quantities than ever. Mushroom magazines, countless numbers of them, spring up, to die for the independence of verse. Few read them except the contributors…
This was written in 1941! Similar sentiments are shared in Dana Gioia’s book, “Why Poetry matters”. In that he points out the irony that, even though there is a proliferation of college and professional creative writing workshops and outlets dedicated to poetry, the overall quality of this poetry is, compared to previous times, leaves much to be desired, if I should put it nicely.
From reading award-winning contemporary poetry, I can safely say that for a while now the aspiring poets have been fighting the Lion of Substitution. I sit the blame for this chiefly in the hands of the professors and teachers who have you analyze poems in school. Those analyses always stray away from the poem, and before you know it, demand that you follow along: now you are three books deep and away from the actual poem.
Earl Daniels keeps it simple, and sums up a poem as an experience the poet had which they felt compelled to communicate. So, with this new, unbridled mindset, I re-read “Nightingale” slowly, in my own words, but attentively, drawing out the meaning behind every line. This time around new phrases struck me.
In some melodious plot
It is a patch of land surrounded on all sides by birds, and I can see the flowers and branches swaying in time with the music.
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene
This poem rests on the authenticity of our experiences. Our imagination is constantly working on the external world, and visions (images with sensations, with real feeling) pass across our mind. How real are these? And though they affect us strongly, how small, how pathetic they seem when we drop our eyes from the clouds! That perfumed tapestry dissolves against the hard rain that floods this once peaceful rill.
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
I read this at first as the poet leaving this world, without anyone noticing him. In other words, that he could die without the guilt of causing undue suffering onto others. But could this also mean, to leave “the unseen world”? This unseen world being composed of our anxious conceptions, fueled by a fearful imagination? I mean the image of the world that pops into your mind when people say the harsh one-sided aphorism: “The world is a cruel place”. Because the following,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
Is not this the expressed desire to escape society and return to nature? And the beginning of the next stanza confirms this, when he speaks of
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
I can finally hear the aggravation in his voice. Particularly at those old men who,
…sit and hear each other groan
Only a younger person would rail against the elderly like this. We all are familiar with this type of person, where half they say is a whining complaint that starts with “Back in my day,” and “When I was growing up” and “kids these days,”. Sometimes I want to shake them out of their rose-tinted recollections and say, “Your day is now! Are you not alive? And look at this gift of Life, a temporary miracle! Let’s enjoy this great weather. Breathe; isn’t it nice?”
But even Life, though it shows so much promise in a youth, can be robbed:
Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies.
I would show the state of this youth to those old men and say, “Look how lucky you’ve had it! You’ve seen your hair turn gray!” And after the anger fit leaves, I would be left with a sense of the deep unfairness of it all, wondering why a flame would burn so bright if it was only to last such a short time?
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs…
In the thought patterns of my mind, whenever a new topic enters, I tend to conceive it within one single light, positive or negative. Looking for silver linings, I can always bring something from the pedestal down to the ground, or vice versa. It can be quickly depressing, and one can easily sink into despair when every new bubble of promise can be popped by some point of rhetoric or reason.
Already with thee! Tender is the night,
And haply the Queen moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays.
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and windy mossy ways.
This whole section has a stronger significance for me, and for the whole concept of experience in regards to imagination and reality. I can imagine that he was, in the spirit of ecstasy he caught with the bird, riding on the golden waves of summer pleasures, he turned his eyes up, and gazed longingly at the moon. It was now something true. Scanning the scene, his eyes descend again, from staring into heaven back to the ground. The “viewless wings of Poetry”, and Art in general, can lift you upwards on those higher states when you are set in the right mood. It is not something you can chase. I bet a cloud revealed the moon, or perhaps a breeze brushed away a branch, and she momentarily peeked silently between the leaves. That wind could be an example of what comes down from heaven. All those delightful, rewarding, unsuspected surprises that are sprinkled throughout our days. The chances of finding this “Art of Reading Poetry” book at that exact thrift store, which my Mom just happened to drive by, and though I said I did not feel like going inside, she pushed me again about it — is not something as simple as this a blessing?
No hungry generations tread thee down,
Now I see this means no one hunts the bird. Nothing is out to get it. It lives for its song.
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
And now I realize why this “forlorn” would call him back. See how he is, in his imaginations, someone and somewhere else, away from where he is. He watches the king, the clown, Rachel, and the princess or knowing breeze that opens the window. But his own unhappiness creeps back in, and he is pulled back, away from the heavens and onto this place where “there is no light.”
The poem ends with the question: whether what we just experienced in this poet is authentic or fantasy. That I return to this poem, again and again, threshing out new meanings in the phrases and between the lines, reveals to me that this experience was one of the former.
