Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Q. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats as a Romantic poem
👉 Concepts of the ‘romantic’ view
Etymologically the term ‘romantic’ means any incident remote from life. But this does not suggest that to be ‘romantic’, a work of art has to be anti realistic. The hallmark of romantic art is, as Prof. Bowra claims, an overdose of imagination. This romantic imagination is to be distinguished from both fancy and fantasy, for it is essentially creative.
👉 Keats’ opinion upon ‘romantic’ view
Keats has probably this constructive nature of the imagination in the mind when he claims that whatever the imagination ‘seizes as beauty must be truth.’ The mind of a romantic poet is again not a ‘mirror’ but a ‘lamp’. In other words, the romantic mind is not considered to be a passive reflector of experience but a radiant projector.
While classical literature is exclusively intellectual, romantic literature is predominantly emotional, meditative, and even intuitive.
👉 Main beliefs of ‘romantic poetry’
Inhabitants of an ‘ivory tower’ the romantic poets dream of an ideal world of fulfilment. Since this dream world is at odds with the thorns of life, romantic poetry often reveals the agony of a dreamer, eager to escape into the ideal world of imagination but shocked to find it eternally elusive. Romantic poetry again is a spontaneous overflow, a ‘fine excess’ of feelings, something which comes ‘as natural as leaves to a tree' (Keats). Admittedly in ‘romantic poetry’ we have not the rigour of ‘correctness’ and lyric poetry happens to be the dominant poetic form in any romantic period.
👉 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats as a Romantic poem
Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale may be considered as a representative romantic poem, for it embodies all the distinctive features of Romanticism. The poet listens with a rapt attention to the ecstatic song of the Nightingale.
The poet canonizes this song evidently because it is sung in ‘full-throated ease’. Not only the Nightingale’s song but the poet's rhapsody is also characteristically unlaborious. This is evident from the choice of the poetic form. The poem is an ‘Ode' which is an outburst of an impassioned address to an object not because the poet wishes to say something to it but because he is eager to record his personal feelings most passionately. ‘Ode to a Nightingale' is less about a Nightingale whose song transports the poet to an ideal world. It is more about John Keats who having been disgusted with ‘the wariness, the fever and fret' of life seeks an anchorage in the melodies world of the bird only to find it an illusory unreality.
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a veritable ‘romantic poem’, because here imagination is used as a creative force. The most artistic touch of the imagination is to be found in the image of ‘charmed magic casements, opening the foam/ Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.’
It can also be traced to be sensuous verbal icons split all over the poem. Keats’ imagination is so strong that he tries to sensuously comprehend every idea and consequently we come across sensuous images like ‘beechen green’, ‘sunburnt mirth’, ‘embalmed darkness’ almost in every line.
Often the creative imagination of the poet tends to run riot and we have such exquisite synesthetic combination as
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough”.
Like other romantic poets Keats too frowns upon reason and intellect and evidently has faith in the constructive potency of the imagination. In Stanza -IV, the poet expresses his determination to journey to the world of the Nightingale on the ‘viewless wings of Posey’ that is, on the wings of imagination. He admits that his ‘dull brain’, that is, his intellect perplexes him. But the jubilant outburst ‘already with thee’ suggests the triumph of the imagination over intellect.
But the most important romantic feature of the poem, Ode to a Nightingale is the poet’s vision of an ideal world. The real world to Keats is a world of ‘giant agony’. It is a ‘vale of tears’. In this world ‘palsy shakes a few'; ‘youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’; ‘Beauty cannot keep lustrous eyes.’
In other words, the mundane world is a world of suffering and disappointment. As a romantic poet Keats, therefore, seeks to escape from this world of ‘leaden-eyed despairs’ into an ideal world of fulfilment. The Nightingale represents the ideal world of fulfilment.
However, the Nightingale represents the ideal world because it is ‘immortal’ and it pours forth its soul ‘in such an ecstasy'. The poet in imagination journeys to this dreamland and enjoys the bliss accorded by the ‘melodies plot /Of between green’ for sometime.
But the romantic el dorado is, after all, the land of dreams. Consequently, it cannot supply any idealistic with a permanent shelter. The edifice of imagination shatters too soon. No wonder that Keats is tolled back to the real world and the ‘plaintive anthem’ of a bird that was ‘not born for death’ fades behind the meadows. Ode to a Nightingale, thus, is a representative romantic poem and can undoubtedly be placed beside such classics as Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan', and also Shelley’s ‘The West Wind'.
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