Ode To a Nightingale - analyse its Romanticism

Written in May 1819, many believe Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale to have been written at the home of Charles Brown, when Keats sat and listened to the bird for in the garden for some hours. Brown recounts how, “when he [i.e. Keats] came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand.” These pieces of paper were to contain Keats’ poetic feeling on the song of the nightingale, “a poem which has been the delight of everyone.”

The nightingale is particularly apt for the themes Keats wished to explore in his poem. In Classical tradition, the nightingale is associated with love. The influential myth of Philomela, turned into a nightingale after being raped and tortured, stresses melancholy and suffering in association with love. Keats often used Greek and Roman mythology as inspiration for his poetry and he was preoccupied with the symbolic nature of many fables. The nightingale has also been associated with poetry; Keats no doubt knew Coleridge’s two poems To the Nightingale and The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem and according to his letters, on

Keats begins by explaining the nature and cause of the sadness he is experiencing, a sadness translated into a physical ache and a “drowsy numbness”. He feels as he might if he had “of hemlock drunk” or “emptied some dull opiate to the drains” and this resembles the qualities of the Lethe, the Underworld river that the dead drank from in order to forget all that they had done or said while living. The feeling is in fact the result of a deep awareness of the happiness of the nightingale he hears singing; his resulting pleasure is so intense it has become painful. This paradoxical opening has been the interest of many critics, and Helen Vendler writes that:

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, the preservation of memories and experience.

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.

Some topics in this essay:
Helen Vendler, Coles’ Notes, Keats’s Romantic, Belle Dame, Brown Keats, Conversation Poem, Ode Nightingale, Nightingale Keats, Keats Similarly, Vendler Keats, coles’ notes, ode nightingale, helen vendler, song nightingale, taste wine, human suffering, “the warm south”, nightingale nightingale, creative process, nightingale associated, night singer,