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Kant

In all three of these poems the ideals of mortality and immortality are compared and contrasted. As a human being Keats posses all the traits of humanity namely that which we call the human condition. He is subject to change, to time, and is susceptible to those desires and impulses which both support and hinders us. Further more, like everyone else he is ultimately at the mercy of death and it is this concept of man’s frail mortality which evokes the vulnerability which he feels. Keats knows that ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’ and what makes Keats’ pain more poignant is that there are creatures and objects which are not affected by such transience. They are able, simply by being who or what they are, to remain aloof from all human suffering and more significantly, stay permanent despite the effects of time. This is the status Keats wishes to obtain, that he might be capable of becoming a transcendental being like the Nightingale, Urn or the bright Star and thus ‘tease (himself) out of thought as doth eternity’.

For Keats mortality is painful since not only do we as human beings have physical and mental limitations which cannot be broken, but eventually we all succumb to these and die. While the majority of

The figures on the Grecian Urn are immune to time but also suffer in a perpetual state of desire and thus will never be wholly satisfied. Keats highlights this by describing the desolation of the ‘little town by the river’ which ‘is emptied of this folk’. Its inhabitants will never return since their place has been set on the Urn permanently and is thus unalterable. It could be that Keats connects with such desolation that despite all his efforts, that part of him reserved exclusively for immortality’s virtues will remain empty. Like the town, the component which is crucial for Keats’ continuing survival will never be achieved. This is also linked to the comparison the poet draws between himself and Ruth in Ode to a Nightingale. Like her, Keats feels as if he is living in a land which he is alien, exiled from his true home which he either considers or hopes to be the land of the gods.

people merely accept this, Keats is unable to do so and thus Ode to a Nightingale speaks of his quest to discover some way to escape this universal obligation. He considers both drink and (in contrast to When I have fears…) suicide as potential routes which will allow him to ‘leave this world unseen’. However, such acts are futile since they would not give him the eternal status of the Nightingale and it is this ‘immortal bird’ with its ‘full throated ease’ of song, that the poet aspires to emulate. For Keats, its magnificence is so immense that the intensity of the moment pains (his) sense’ with ‘a drowsy numbness’. He refers to it as a ‘light-winged Dryad’, a stark contrast to man; further more, the Nightingale’s constancy is maintained even in ‘faery lands’, the realms of fantasy. Its existence can cross linguistic, spirit and literal boarders, a feat which Keats can only wonder at.

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