Ode to a Nightingale
Critics argue both sides of the various paradoxical implications of Keats’s masterpiece, Ode to a Nightingale, with the same result at nearly every end. Some New Critical approaches and Romantic critics have stressed the complex organic whole that the self-contained poem is comprised of, others want to foreground the idealism of the poem and others the realism of the narrator’s descriptive, but elusive and often contradictory, phrasing. This Ode examines the question having to do with the inherent union of life and death, pain and pleasure, actual and ideal from the perspective of a narrator wishing to live immortally or die easefully. The way that music functions in the poem defines the way the narration views the answer to such questions; the authoritative force of the poem lies in the indeterminacy of the final line and the previous cycle of repression, transference, and return that the narrator’s psychology delineates through music of several forms. The music of life, music of death, and the music of immortality are all part of the whole of the play, the preference for one over the other changes, sometimes slowly other times more suddenly, throughout the duration of the narration.
To cease upon the midnight with no pain, Given these obvious oppositions intrinsic with the poem, contrasts between pleasure and pain, knowledge and forgetfulness, self and selflessness, and life and death; it follows that conflicts are as obvious in within the text. The narrator says that the music is fled, perhaps the music he remembers from Southern summer life, but the fleeting music might just as easily be directed towards the nightingale as he “Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”(10), which contrasts with the narration consisting of the slighting difficulties of forgetting, loss, pain, and envy of the previous lines. If the final statement of line 80 is concerned with the sadly envious song of the nightingale, then the following question has one answer; if the buried music was a testament to the beauty of inspirational music that can chariot the narrator away, the question, “Do I wake or sleep?”(80), might have an altogether different answer. The poem does have in it, signs indicative of the more valorized of the two flights into fantasy; “Away! away! for I will fly to thee, But on the viewless wings of Poesy,” (31-33) tement and question, “Fled is that music: -Do I wake or sleep?”(80) D.H. Lawrence describes the verbal signifiers’ signified, and the unreliability of the music that both glows with aliveness and flickers with mortality; If the music the narrator hears “claims perfectibility”(Rajan 75) when the narrator uses the thought of beautiful music to fade into the unseen, the question is answered, the narrator wishes to sleep. But if the narrator by flying “on the viewless wings of Poesy” privileges the bird-song and “laments its absence by dismissing life as a vale of tears”(Rajan 75) the question is answered quite differently. On the one hand, the question seems to present a vast horizon of indeterminacy, ending on this statement and final question; however the text employs distinctly the tools to determine which answer is privileged. The narrator first makes verbal effect the bird-song illicits, but is slow to remove the pain, that the bird can’t know, from the pleasure that the narrator can now only associate with the ‘song’ of the ‘South’ that might take him
Some topics in this essay:
DH Lawrence,
David Perkins,
Ode Nightingale,
,
life death,
contradictory phrasing,
viewless wings poesy”,
viewless wings,
actual human life,
wings poesy”,
‘provencal song’,
easeful death,
question answered,
pain pleasure,
actual human,
pleasure life,
Join now to see the rest of the essay!
Approximate Word count = 1517
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
More Essays on Ode to a Nightingale
Professional Papers: |
CUSTOMER SERVICES
|
|
Saved Papers
You haven't saved any papers.
|
Example Essays Home
