ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE (John Keats, 1795-1821)
"Ode to a Nightingale" was written in the spring of 1819. It is the longest of Keats's odes, and
focuses on a speaker standing in a dark forest, listening to the beguiling and beautiful song
of the nightingale bird. This provokes a deep and meandering meditation by the speaker on
time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering.
● The power of imagination
1) The relationship between the qualities of the nightingale and Romantic concepts of
the imagination
- In the poem, the speaker imagines the bird as immortal, transcending time and
place, human and supernatural, and unifying all: ‘The voice I hear this passing night was
heard/In ancient days […] the self-same song […]The same that oft-times hath /Charm’d
magic casements’. Here the speaker supposes that the song he hears is the same one
heard by all variations of people throughout all time- the time of emperors and court jesters,
biblical times (through the allusion to Ruth), when it was used to charm open the windows of
ships on dangerous seas, and when it was heard in forlorn lands where fairies dwell.
CONTEXT: In terms of how this relates to the genre of Romanticism, the belief that
imagination has the ability to illuminate, influence and transform the world into a coherent
vision was certainly a Romantic ideal, produced out of the rejection of the Enlightenment (the
‘Age of Reason). This was defined by the rigorous scientific, political and philosophical
discourse that characterised European society during the 18th century. Romanticism
rejected this; while the Enlightenment emphasised the importance of reason, Romanticism
emphasised imagination and strong emotion. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the
Romantics argued that elements of knowledge could be grasped through intuition. Infact, in
a letter to Benjamin Bailey (1817), Keats expresses: ‘O for a life of sensations rather than of
thoughts!’
- Moreover, the nightingale's power to draw the poet away from troubles, enabling
these to be forgotten for a period of time, is another quality of the bird which
correlates to Romantic concepts of imagination. Throughout the poem, the speaker
emphasises the bird’s influence on forgetting their qualms: ‘with thee fade away into
the forest dim’, ‘fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget’. The idea of escaping the
speaker’s current reality with the bird, instead embracing the ‘forest dim’ is a central
desire for the poetic voice. This is emphasised through the repetition of ‘fade’ in the
tricolon of ‘fade, ‘dissolve’ and ‘forget’, reinforcing the power of the nightingale’s
presence on the speaker. However, this is still a distance between the nightingale
and the persona, one being ‘immortal’ and the other ‘born for death’. Therefore, the
poetic voice can only retain his imagination temporarily, until they must return to
reality- ‘the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is fam'd to do’
CONTEXT: The Romantics believed strongly in imagination’s ability to enable people to
transcend their troubles and circumstances: ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty
must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions
, as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty ... O for a life of
sensations rather than thoughts.’ (letter to Benjamin Baily, November 1817).
Although the speaker’s imagination is temporary, the ‘passions and love’ within our
imagination are in their ‘sublime’, feeding the creative power of imagination in order to create
an ‘essential beauty’. Therefore, ‘what imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’. Applied
to this Ode, Keats emphasises how imagining beauty and a release from reality releases the
speaker from suffering. Moreover, it has the transformative power to ease the speaker’s
suffering in reality, not just during his imagination. By ending the poem with a rhetorical
question- ‘Do I wake or sleep?’- we can interpret this as Keats emphasising that the
speaker’s imagination has seeped into the speaker’s reality, as it finishes with an emphasis
on dreaming. Likewise, we can interpret the ambiguity of the speaker’s state in the final line
as emphasising that imaginative vision, when it fades, makes human life all the more
unbearable by emphasising the despair and confinement of the human condition.
2) The power of imagination through conjuring a magical arbour
- Keats presents the power of imagination through conjuring a magical scene which
the speaker can momentarily escape through. In the fourth stanza, through the
exclamative repetition ‘Away!’ Keats emphasises how the speaker will move away
from the human world and ‘fly’ to the nightingale, already creating a fantastical
element to the speaker’s imagination through the verb ‘fly’. Moreover, the speaker will
not achieve this through a ride from ‘Bacchus’ but will fly with the ‘viewless wings of
Poesy.’ The juxtaposition between the classical allusion to Dionysus, largely
fantastical, and the metaphor of poetry, a more sustainable form of imagination. By
emphasising the power of imagination through poetry over the power of the divine,
Keats suggests that poetry achieves its function.
- Keats does not stop here at conjuring a sense of fantasy in the speaker’s
imagination. Through sensory imagery, the place the speaker will ‘fly’ to is one of soft
scents- ‘soft incense’, ‘sweet’, ‘musk-rose’- creating an idyllic picture of nature
through the old-factory imagery. There, the ‘Queen-moon’ lives with her ‘starry fays’,
and the unseen flowers, fruits and trees are strangely distinct.
3) Imagination versus the reality of life
- In this poem the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of
actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by
contrast. For example, in the human world, ‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret’ of
human life emphasises the idea that everything is mortal and therefore
impermanence through the tricolon drawn from the semantic field of tiring.
Accordingly, Keats employs an incrementum to suggest the transition from youth to
death, as youth ‘grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.’ Even emotions remain fickle
in the human soul, as ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,/ Or new Love pine at
them beyond to-morrow.’ The personification of ‘Beauty’ suggests that in the human
world beauty is an impermanent concept, and neither does love.
