Ode to a Nightingale Totally Explained

Everything about Ode To A Nightingale totally explained

Ode to a Nightingale is a poem by John Keats. It was written in May, 1819, in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead. It was first published in 'Annals of the Fine Arts' in July of the same year. Referred to by critics of the time as "the longest and most personal of the odes," the poem describes Keats' journey into the state of Negative Capability. The poem explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being the most personal to Keats, making a direct reference to the death in 1818 of his brother, Tom. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world, and sees himself dead--he uses an abrupt, almost brutal word for it--as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination (102). The presence of weather is noticeable in the poem, as spring came early in 1819, which brought nightingales all over the heath. According to Keats' friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near his home in the spring of 1819. Keats felt a "tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two of three hours."

Brief analysis

The ode consists of eight stanzas, each containing ten lines. The rhyme scheme (ababcdecde) has a link to the sonnet form, with each stanza uniting a Shakespearian quatrain (abab) with a Petrarchan sextet (cdecde). This stanzaic prosody is characteristic of Keats's odes, and may well have evolved from his intensive work and theory on the sonnet form (see, for example, "If by Dull Rhymes our English Must be Chained").
   The opening lines of the poem make use of heavy vowel sounds to slow them down (for example "heart," "aches," "drowsy," and "numbness").
   The Hippocrene, referenced in the second stanza, is the legendary fountain of the muses, located on Mt. Helicon.
   Keats' relationship with the bird clearly changes as the text progresses and his consciousness drifts into a dreaming, imaginative space. In the first stanza, Keats refers to it with awe, using phrases such as "Light-winged Dryad of the trees," but by the seventh stanza refers to it simply as "bird". Indeed, in the final stanza the speaker addresses the animal as "deceiving elf", implying irritation at the nightingale's hypnotic song for the effect it had on him. Similarly, his views about the nightingale's song change as the poem progresses, the description "high requiem" giving way to "plaintive anthem" in the final stanza.
   Heidi Scott indicates that the turn in the poem occurs when Keats repeats the word "Forlorn!" between the penultimate and final stanzas. He is wakened from his close reverie with the bird by the sound of the word "forlorn," and he finds the bird flying away from the poetic dreamspace that provided the atmosphere of most of the ode. Keats's confusion marks the closing lines of the poem, in which he asks: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:– Do I wake or sleep?"

Mortality

Both the third and sixth stanzas contain references to mortality and death. The third stanza discusses the death of Keats's brother, Tomatzi, while the sixth expresses Keats' own fear of death. This sentence needs an inline citation. "Half in love with easeful Death," found in the sixth stanza, shows his fear, not of death, but of a slow, painful one from Consumption (the illness was common in his family, and by this point he'd already begun to show the earliest signs of the disease). "Soft names," on the following line, is almost like the communication between two lovers. "Seems it rich to die" demonstrates the level of ecstasy he's experiencing, that a man so much in love with life and afraid of death would welcome it. The stanza finishes on an anti-climax with the deliberately clumsy "sod."
The allusion to the fountain of Hippocrene in Greek mythology, pronounced the author's craving to be inspired by the muses. Specifically Caliope, being the muse of poetry. An allusion to the fountain of Hippocrene, is prevalently observed in the British literature.

Synesthetic metaphor

The poet makes use of synesthetic metaphor throughout the ode to demonstrate the speaker's confusion. For example, in the second stanza, the protagonist expresses a longing for "a draught of vintage." However the description of the taste he desires isn't commonly associated with a beverage. He demands that it taste "of Flora and the country green," Flora being the goddess of flowers. He also requests that it taste of "Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth," implying that there's a wine he drank there that conjures vivid recollections of a holiday. In the fifth stanza he claims that he can't see "what soft incense hangs upon the boughs." Of course, incense would be smelt, not seen; the implication here's that the hallucination is so vivid he'd almost be able to see smells and sounds, if it were not for the lack of light.

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