Ode to a Nightingale Flashcards
(28 cards)
Poem form
Horatian ode
- personal and less formal
- regular structure
- iambic pentameter
- rhyme
Nightingale associations
- beauty and romance
- bird of moonlit summer nights
- sings at dusk and night
- an elusive bird famed for its beautiful song
Nightingale as a symbol
- symbol of inspiration, a muse
- immortality and beauty of nature
- leads to contemplation of contrasting human mortality and imagination”
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense”
“As though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains” “Lethe- wards had sunk”
- Physical feeling of numbness/melancholy
- Paradox, oxymoronic - describing the feeling as painful yet numb
- Trapped in a liminal space as the senses fade
- Comparing this feeling to poison, drugs and a deathlike state (river of forgetting)
“But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light winded Dyrad of the trees”
- Speaker presents themselves as overwhelmed by joy expressed by the nightingale’s song
- Speaker addresses the bird, using Ancient Greek imagery to represent the bird as a spirit of the forest
“In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full throated ease”
- Synaesthesia, use of aural and visual imagery
- Celebration of the beauty, freedom and joy associated with nature
“O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep- delved earth,”
- Metaphor highlighting the speakers connection with nature
- Merging with the purity of nature
- Use of tactile imagery to portray the experience of merging with nature as overwhelmingly beautiful - typically Romantic
“Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!”
- Synaesthesia, blending gustatory and visual imagery
Ancient Green imagery further highlights how the speaker merges with the spiritual aspect of nature - Wine is portrayed as tasting of culture and joy present in summer, highlighting joys of natural world
“Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbled winking at the brim,
And purple stained mouth;”
“Hippocrene” - fountain of muses, inspiration
- Creates a magical yet mischievous image
- Alliteration
- Portrays speaker as wanting to be marked by the natural world
“That I may drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim;”
- A desire to escape contemporary society and by extension, human suffering and merge with the natural world
- Portrays nature as an escape, transcendent aspect of nature
“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,”
- Anadiplosis
- Highlights a desire to ‘dissolve’ from physicality and instead to swell in spirituality of nightingale’s happiness
- Nightingale has never had to experience the troubles of contemporary society that Keats wishes to escape
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;”
- Melancholic portrayal of humanity
- Portrays living in contemporary society as painful, yet it is a communal suffering
- Highlights the duality of the human experience as we can feel such pain yet also experience such overwhelming feelings of joy
“Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;”
- Imagery of death highlights a consciousness of human mortality (AO3: after the death of Keats brother), highlights the horror and misery of the world that even the young become sick and pass away
- Contrast between transient beauty of humanity vs transcendent beauty of nature
“Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden- eyed despairs;”
- Suggestion that thinking is a source of suffering
- This offers an explanation in the speaker’s mind for the reason which the nightingale does not experience suffering
“Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow”
- Personification of beauty, image that even beauty struggles to stay beautiful - highlights the transitory aspects of life (Even love is transient)
- However, the nightingale’s song does not struggle with maintaining this beauty
- Personification of love”
“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy”
- Exclamatory, highlighting the sudden burst of energy
- metaphor: Speaker casts away drinking as a way to escape suffering and instead Keats will fly to the nightingale using the form of poetry
- Poetry becomes Keats’ birdsong, portrays human art as only momentarily a worthy partner of nature’s beauty
“Though the dull brain perplexes and retards”
- Personification of the brain suggesting its limitations
- Portrayed as stopping Keats from being able to achieve a state of bliss
“But there is no light,
Save what from the heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways”
- Highlights a sense of isolation, limitations of imagination
- Natural imagery - sense of Romantic
- Nightingale’s home is portrayed as magical and out of this world
“But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild”
- Connotations of death highlight how only in death will you be able to experience the world of the nightingale - connection with nature
- Portrays it as a experience of true bliss without suffering
- Sensory image, balm= sweet substance, conveys a sense of timelessness
- Keats experiences both spring and summer simultaneously, power of imagination
Highlights the transcendent state of poetry
“While hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves”
- Highlights the abundance of life in the forest, this comforts Keats and the idea of his own mortality
- “violets” as a symbol of fertility
“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme”
- Melancholic mood
- Theme of mortality
“Soft names”- connotations of a wishing for his death?
AO3: Keats’ brother
“No more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain”
- Keats views death highly - opposite of typical associations (feat and empty)
- Metaphor for death, however here it is portrayed as simply not existing, “midnight”
“In such ecstasy!”
Keats feels pure happiness and bliss in response to the nightingale’s song
- Death being portrayed as an ideal state as it releases the soul from sorrow and suffering
- Keats wishing for an early death? :(
“Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod”
- Keats desires to die whilst hearing the song, to die in a peaceful state
“Sod” - Keats will become a part of nature, an inanimate object
