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. .
The Ode concludes with both a statement 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; .
"The nightingale never made any man in love with easeful death, except by contrast. The contrast between the bright flame of positive, pure, self aliveness, in the bird, and the uneasy flickering of yearning selflessness, for ever yearning for something outside himself which is Keats."(Inglis 127).
The statement, "Fled is that music"(80), in reference to line 14's "Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!", in a stanza full of cool wine, warm tastes, and "true" poetic inspiration, celebrates music and revelry that, receding with the bird-song, fades the narrator into the "forest dim"(21) This celebration, realization, and receding is consistent with the play from beginning to end.
