Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats' Romanticism with real and ideal in the nature of life.

Ode to a Nightingale - John Keats' Romanticism with real and ideal in the nature of life.

Q. How does John Keats present the strife between pain and joy, pleasure and numbness, life and death, mortal and immortal, real and ideal in the nature of life in his poem, Ode to a Nightingale?

Answer: An ode delineates its essence as a poem of celebration or praise that honors people or events or addresses nature. In Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," he anticipates the essence of the nightingale and contrasts it with his own worldly state and the nature of mortal life. He expresses a strong subject of Romanticism in the ode. Nature, through the presence of nightingale, is a world of beauty, peace, and freedom.

The nightingale turns almost as a muse for the poet's reflections as he moves from his initial response to the song of the nightingale. For instance, in Stanza I the poet, whose

“…heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock”

is touched by the bird's song, causing him to wish that he could reach a state of numb abstraction with the bird.

In the poem, Ode to A Nightingale the poet, Keats draws the conflict between the Ideal and the Real, time and timelessness, mortality and an escape into permanence. The real world for Keats is acclimatized with flux and flexibility, an awareness of which causes pain. This notion of mutability and the anguish resulting from it is explored in all details in Stanza III where Keats avers that human life, health, beauty and love are all subject to mutability and hence result in ache:

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here …,

Where …..,

Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies;

Where …. full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs

“…seems rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain”

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!”

Here Keats divides himself from the nightingale as he understands that the "immortal Bird" is not meant for death: There is a continuum for it as the "self-same song" has been overheard by Ruth and others of the ages. With all these contradictory reflections, Keats wonders in the last line of the ode if his thoughts are merely illusionary, "a waking dream."

In fact, in this poem, Keats develops leitmotifs that run concurrent with his other works, the question of the worth of human existence and whether the creative spirit that is motivated by nature is accomplished of capturing the true essence of beauty that is expressed in nature and that is a reflection of a world that ordinary mortals cannot see. Keats feels related to the world beyond that which is seen. He tries to seizure the essence of what he feels and sees in the eyes of imagination in his poetry.

The main theme in "Ode to a Nightingale" that the poet, Keats draws is the reflection to the conflicted nature of human life, i.e., the interconnection or fusion of pain and joy, intensity of feeling and coldness or lack of feeling, life and death, mortal and immortal, the actual and the ideal, and separation and connection."

Keats poetry is encouraged by his ability to slip between the veil that divides the earthly world from the immortal world of eternity. He longs, as a human, bound to an earthly life, to hug the wonder and joy of the spiritual realm. Actually, the poet begins to move into a world of imagination or fantasy, wanting to escape from the pain of a joy-pain reality. He further glorifies the nightingale by observing that

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"

Within the ode, Keats moves from his meditation of the bird to a contemplation of his own feelings. Dropping himself in the nightingale gives him a momentary relief from the unhappiness of his own existence. The whole world of the nightingale is grander to his own. Repaying to himself as the music of the nightingale fades away, he questions if his musings were real:

Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?

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