Analysis of Ode to a Nightingale

hello literature students my name is mr. Beasley and in this video I'm gonna be having a detailed look at one of the most famous and celebrated poems in the English language john Keats's ode to a nightingale Keats wrote ode to a nightingale in the spring of 1819 while staying with his friend Charles Armitage Brown and the creation of the poem is described by Brown in the following account in the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house 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 two or three hours when he came into the house I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books on inquiry I found those scraps four or five in number contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale so what is an ode well an ode is a type of lyric poem which means that it expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet and these feelings are often intense and deeply personal this particular poem comes from the Romantic tradition and this certainly doesn't mean flowers and chocolates on Valentine's Day or in fact anything to do with romantic love at all but rather a set of core beliefs surrounding the relationship between the poet and the world around him or her one of these beliefs is the idea that poetry as an art form should be a representation of internal feelings rather than focusing on observations on the world and therefore we can see this poem as a work of art which has come from inside Keats and his powerful imagination rather than simply observing and recording what he sees ODEs specifically are meditations on some object or quality and in this poem as you might expect Keats specifically addresses a nightingale which takes on symbolic see a sort of visionary happiness is created through his communion with the nightingale and this happiness is contrasted with the reality of human grief and sickness along with the transience of human life itself Keats had good reason to view life in this way his brother Tom suffered from tuberculosis and deteriorated through the autumn and winter of 1818 Keats had been nursing him throughout this time but Tom Keats died in December 1818 by the spring of the following year during the time that Keats experienced one of his greatest and most focused periods of creativity and when he was writing ode to a nightingale he was already starting to display symptoms of the same illness and Keats died just three years later probably as a result of having exposed himself to his brother's infection ode to a nightingale is structured in 810 line stanzas with each line having an average of 10 syllables and each stanza is divided into two parts an opening four lines called a quatrain followed by a group of six lines called the sestet lines of poetry are grouped in this way through the rhyme scheme so here you've got the opening four lines which rhyme a B a B and here's the sestet which rhymes c de CDE so let's have a look at the poem in a bit more detail 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 one minute past and leafy woods had sunk it is not through envy of thy happy lot but being too happy in thine happiness that thou light winged Dryad of the trees in some melodious plot of beech and green and shadows numberless Singha stuff summer in full throated ease the poem begins as suddenly perhaps as the song of the nightingale Keats remember is outside in a garden when he hears the nightingales song and my heart aches is certainly indicative of Keats's sad melancholy mood and although the underlying reason for this is never stated we can infer from details provided later that his sadness has been increased by comparison with the Beauty bliss and carefree nature of the nightingales song this opening stanza has a sort of dreamlike quality to it and this is created through mention of two drugs both with sedative or soporific qualities Keats feels drowsy and numb as if he'd drunk hemlock or swallowed opiates and the reference to hemlock is interesting this is a plant which in smaller doses can be used as a sedative while in larger quantities is poisonous the mention of this specifically might hint toward the Greek philosopher Socrates who was made to drink hemlock as a punishment for corrupting young minds in 399 BC Socrates was made to walk around until the numbness in his feet meant that he could walk no more the feeling of numbness crept up his body until eventually it reached his heart and killed him in his final moments Socrates said he was unafraid of death and that death would be a release and this is significant because critics have interpreted these lines is introducing a theme of escapism which dominates the poem at this early stage keeps his imagining a means by which he might drift away with the nightingale to a place where human suffering with all of its aches and pains might be numbed and forgotten the reference to Lethe which is the river of forgetfulness in classical hel suggests his desire to float away from the world's troubles and achieve unity with the nightingales peace there's a general sense of removal from the real world in the opening lines of the poem achieved firstly through the words drowsy and numbness together with the rhyming verbs drunk and sunk but also the adjectives here dull which suggests the emotionally dull and detached state into which Keats has fallen into in the sister which follows Keats begins to explain or excuse his reasons for this firstly he says that his sadness hasn't been caused through envy of the nightingales happy state is not through envy of thy happy lot but rather through a sudden elevation in his own spirits which has caused such a contrast to his usual melancholy mood and there's further evidence of contrast in the opening line to the poem the nightingale is light compared to the dull aching numbness of Keats another feature of romantic poetry and the work of Keats in particular is an interest in their transcendental and even the supernatural over more rational and scientific values and you'll notice if you've already seen my videos on Keita's LaBella saw mercy and the eve of Sand Agnes here we can look at line 7 and see the nightingale being compared metaphorically to a liked wind drier dove the trees where a dryad is a shy tree spirit in Greek mythology Keats concludes the opening stanza by describing the imagined place where the nightingale is singing I say imagined because Keats from his chair in the garden cannot see the nightingale but only hear it and in these three lines Keats pax in the sensory description to create an image of beautiful and peaceful perfection for the nightingale to sing in the word melodious means sweet sounding while plot indicates a small secretive piece of land the idea of seclusion or secrecy is further enhanced by the shadows numberless while beach and here is used to describe the deep green color of the setting created by the spring sunshine filtering through the many leaves of the wood at the beginning of the second stanza Keats uses the quatrain the opening for lines to turn away from the to earlier modes of escaping the world and turn instead to alcohol one of the things which separates Keats in my mind from many other poets is his use of sensory description and this stanza is a perfect example of that as Keats imagines drinking a beaker full and fading into the forest with the nightingale but it isn't just any alcohol which Keats imagines drinking at that moment it's only a draught of fine vintage red wine imbued with mythical properties to elevate it in perfection with the nightingales song which will enable him to achieve union with it so the wine which Keats lungs for would have been cool cooled a long age in the deep delved earth in other words been a long time underground to the point where it tastes of nature and the countryside itself and Keats evokes a pastoral scene here containing the sorts of activities that might be done there on a warm sunny evening dancing and singing happily flora is the Roman goddess of plants she's also strongly associated with the season of spring which seems appropriate considering this was when Keats was writing the poem it was a belief at the time that people who were ill with diseases such as tuberculosis could have their health in some way restored by warmer climates such as those found further south and so the allusion here to the warm South has connotations of health and happiness as well as being linked to the much wider theme of escapism which I mentioned just now Hippocrene here is a sacred spring in Greek mythology which was formed by the hooves of the mythical horse Pegasus the water from which was said to bring forth poetic inspiration while the alliterative be sound repeated in the seventh line of the stanza I read with three plosive pops buh buh buh representing the bubbles of wine popping or winking at the top of the glass the purple stained mouth which follows this clearly indicates that Keats is now imagining tasting this wine the long vowel sounds in the final two lines of the stanza which I've tried to indicate year huh here have a as a yearning quality as Keats wishes that the alcohol might allow him to escape from the world and fly away into the dim forest with the nightingale there's a structural link between the second and third stands are created by the words fade away and this sense of things disappearing is repeated in three separate ways at the start of this stanza firstly through fading and then dissolving and then forgetting and all three point to Keats his desire to remove himself from a world which he sees as full of illness suffering and death he is envious of the nightingales blissful state that it's never known the suffering of human beings the picture of earthly suffering which Keats paints over the next few lines is pretty desperate stuff he begins with the weariness the fever and the fret in other words the exhaustion the illness and the constant worry followed by the image of shared and mutual suffering with the men who sit and hear each other groan without the power to do anything about it next is the image of old-age riddled with palsy which is a sort of shaking disease so vigorous that it shakes the last few gray hairs from the head then comes the image of premature death the young like Thomas Chatterton or Keats his own brother who become ill grow pale Spectre thin and die in fact the world which Keats creates here is not dissimilar to the one created by Shakespeare's Hamlet where thought itself is enough to create sadness sorrow and despair where beauty will fade and love is transient for the picture of a world of human suffering was created by Keaton this stanza might seem like an entirely negative construction but in fact it isn't Keats believed that earthly suffering was essential to making a human soul and that the world is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways this Keats would argue is the way in which individual souls are created and in some of the letters which keeps wrote he articulated the idea that in fact suffering is an essential part of the creative process stands for begins with a sudden change in tone that the repetition of a way away as Keats rejects the idea of reaching a spiritual union with the bird through the use of drugs or alcohol Bacchus by the way is the Roman god of wine and revelry instead Keats will achieve this union through the wings of posy or poetry even though he admits his own brain is affected by human weaknesses and confusions and that all of a sudden he's there the power of Keats his imagination has transported him to the singing spot of the nightingale it's dark the night is personified as gentle and caring the moon is out and surrounded by stars and the combination of these two images the queen moon and the fairy stars gives the scene a mythical and enchanted quality although Kate's is unable himself to see them presumably because in this imaginative state in the singing spot of the nightingale Keats's beneath a thick green canopy of trees it's gloomy maze-like which further develops the sense of mystery and secrecy it's a secret place and one rarely experienced well I mentioned previously about Keats his use of sensory description and there are sometimes moments in Kita's poetry where whatever action there is stops and the lines of poetry create a sort of tapestry of sensual images and this is one of those stanzas it begins with Keats through the power of his imagination the high up in the canopy of trees with the nightingale so high that he cannot see the flowers below him and this sensory deprivation allows other senses to take over the soft instance of the flowers hanging among the branches is an image which frames the stanza with a sort of spiritual quality even the darkness has a sweet smell about it created by the word bomb although embalmed has connotations of death about it too which had developed further in the next stanza in this darkness Keats must feel around him and guess what seasonable flowers are their grass the kit and fruit tree wild there is a transience in nature too as the violet of the previous season is fast fading while the musk roses of mid-may are coming and Keats even appears to empathize with the murmurous haunt of flies who want summer evenings will sit the Dewey wine from these flowers when the question which Keats appears to be asking in this stanza is this is nature beautiful enough to take his mind away from a world which is full of suffering this question isn't answered but his removal from the harsh reality of the world through death is what dominates the next stanza the word darkling which begins it is a curious combination of dark and darling the literal meaning is in the dark but also suggests that the darkness is growing it's difficult to get away from the feeling that Keats is addressing the darkness here telling it that he is listening to it or it could simply be that in the dark he continues to listen to the sounds of the wood the dark is obviously a symbolic representation of death and it's clear that in this stanza the idea of death has become powerfully attractive for Keats as he resides in the ideal world at the nightingale notice how Keats personifies death as someone whom he's called soft names in rhyme indicating his attraction towards the idea of dying especially at this moment when he's reached a state of pain-free happiness listening to the nightingales song he describes death as ease for literally bringing ease or relief from a world of pain the nightingale is pouring forth its song in such an ecstasy and that word is worth drawing attention to because of the different ways of reading it the most straightforward definition is simply great happiness or bliss but ecstasy also suggests a spiritual transcendental state and what I mean by that is that Keats feels that the nightingale has taken him beyond the normal bounds of human experience and he's achieved a state somewhere between the mortal and mystical realms in the final two lines of this stanza there appears a realization of what the circumstances would be if Keats were to actually give in to this temptation towards death that in spite of it the bird would continue to sing and the stanza ends with a couple of contrasts firstly the birds apparent immortality compared to Keats his own lifelessness the bird singing a requiem which is a piece of music played in memory of someone who's died and keeps being deaf to it if he died and then there's the contrast of state the high Requiem of the bird inspiring emotion and feeling compared to Keats who has now become a sod an insensible piece of ground with grass growing on top of it this theme of the birds in mortality forms a structural link to the next stanza which begins there was not born for death immortal bird the song of the nightingale is immune and unaffected by all the struggling generations which have come before and there's a contrast which is struck here between the transitory nature of Keats's experience in the timeless immortality of the nightingales song he generates this sense of immortality in the second half of the stanza by taking us back through three stages of removal from the present moment so while Keats his experience is passing the song of the nightingale was heard firstly in ancient days by Emperor and clown the highest and lowest rank in ancient times and then further back into the realms of biblical mythology through the care of Ruth and there's a bit more to say about that in just a moment and then Keats takes us out of reality completely and into a world of fantasy and imagination suggested by the magic casements and the foam of perilous seas the final illusion here to faerie lands are for lon or sad it seems because of mortal man's inability to live or stay there so back to Ruth now this is a tricky image in the poem an opinion is divided about which literary Ruth is being conjured up in this line most people and most notes pages on this poem will tell you that it is Ruth from the Book of Ruth which is in the Old Testament of the Bible which tells of a woman Ruth whose husband dies and so travels to another part of the world away from her native people with her mother-in-law eventually she remarries and has children one of whom becomes the grandfather of King David this biblical story certainly ticks the box of being in a foreign or alien land but Ruth is never described as homesick and she's depicted as working in the fields she's never seen crying in them so as well as this it's possible that Keats has in mind a couple of poems written by William Wordsworth which might well be worth looking up just for interest the poem the solitary Reaper is about a woman in a cornfield she is certainly sad and moreover the poem does contain a nightingale Wordsworth also wrote a poem called Ruth or the influences of nature in which a woman called Ruth is abandoned by her lover goes mad and is imprisoned before escaping to return to the fields where she might breathe again wherever he got the image of Ruth from it's interesting to note the various meanings of the name so in the Ebru Ruth means companion friend as well as vision of beauty all of which could be associated with the nightingale in this poem however in Middle English which is about the year 1066 to about 1400 Ruth means pity sorrow and grief and examples of this usage can be found in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer whatever the influence Keats imagines a sad homesick girl alone in a foreign land who weeps when she hears a nightingales song with images of loneliness isolation and sadness a common in romantic poetry I mean just think about the two stanzas six and seven which I've just spoken about now I've mentioned a couple of times about structural linking between stanzas and there's another example of it here the first word of the final stanza echoing the final word of the previous one and I said at the time that the word forlorn means sad but it is a bit more than that for lon means miserable depressed and hopeless and this word acts like an alarm bell to wake Keats from his idyllic dreamlike state with the nightingale and bring him back to reality Keats knows that he cannot stay with the Nightingale forever in a world of pain free perfection his suffering calls to him as an integral part of his identity and creative drive and as I mentioned previously he wrote him believed that a world of pains and troubles is necessary and an essential part of his humanity and so he says goodbye to the bird before reflecting briefly on the power of the imagination which may be able to distract from reality but only for a limited time he calls the nightingale at deceiving elf which at once connects the nightingale to the realms of fantasy and mythology while at the same time recognizes its trickery in creating a world to touched from Keats's real experience the work plaintiff is an adjective which means sad or mournful and it's used to describe the sound of the nightingales song as it fades into the distance the focus of the poem broadens here and the pastoral setting is re-established as the song fades over meadows streams hillsides and valley glades and as it fades so does the poetic inspiration one is symbolic of the other the final lines of the poem have a questioning tone as Keats is left on the threshold between two states of being he wonders whether the experience was a vision or a waking dream and whether he is now awake or still sleeping another way of reading these final words involves considering the metaphorical significance of both where wakefulness is associated with life and sleep with death it's a popular poetic image most famously used by Shakespeare's Hamlet in his to be or not to be speech and I've mentioned Hamlet in this video once already and if we follow this reasoning through then the final words do I wake or sleep or less of a meditation on the effect of the experience he's just had and more of a question as to what he should do next now that he's experienced to the adil ik world of the nightingale and been removed from it would it be better to live or die Keats was pitifully aware of his own mortality and both idealized life and idealized death and meditated on in this poem that this question is left unanswered at the end of the poem raises wider questions about the nature of mortality and immortality as well as whether the nightingale has offered him any hope or release from the world

Channel: Mr M Beasley

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Keywords: beasley, Keats, Nightingale, Ode to a Nightingale, poetry, beasley teaches, literature, GCSE, A level, iGCSE, English, Bruff, AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas, WJEC, OCR

Id: kuHPXCNdgew

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018