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Full of the true , the <unk> Hippocrene ,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim ,
And purple @-@ <unk> mouth ;
That I might drink , and leave the world unseen ,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim : 20
Fade far away , dissolve , and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known ,
The weariness , the fever , and the fret
Here , where men sit and hear each other groan ;
Where palsy shakes a few , sad , last grey hairs , 25
Where youth grows pale , and spectre @-@ thin , and dies ;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden @-@ eyed despairs ;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes ,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to @-@ morrow . 30
Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee ,
Not <unk> by Bacchus and his <unk> ,
But on the <unk> wings of Poesy ,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards :
Already with thee ! tender is the night , 35
And <unk> the Queen @-@ Moon is on her throne ,
Cluster 'd around by all her starry <unk>
But here there is no light ,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through <unk> <unk> and winding mossy ways . 40
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet ,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs ,
But , in <unk> darkness , guess each sweet
<unk> the seasonable month endows
The grass , the thicket , and the fruit @-@ tree wild ; 45
White hawthorn , and the pastoral eglantine ;
Fast @-@ fading violets cover 'd up in leaves ;
And mid @-@ May 's eldest child ,
The coming musk @-@ rose , full of dewy wine ,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves . 50
Darkling I listen ; and , for many a time
I have been half in love with <unk> Death ,
Call 'd him soft names in many a <unk> rhyme ,
To take into the air my quiet breath ;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die , 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain ,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy !
Still wouldst thou sing , and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod . 60
Thou wast not born for death , immortal Bird !
No hungry generations tread thee down ;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown :
Perhaps the self @-@ same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth , when , sick for home ,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm 'd magic casements , opening on the foam
Of perilous seas , in faery lands forlorn . 70
Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self !
Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do , deceiving elf .
Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows , over the still stream ,
Up the hill @-@ side ; and now ' tis buried deep
In the next valley @-@ glades :
Was it a vision , or a waking dream ?
Fled is that music : — do I wake or sleep ? 80
= = Themes = =
" Ode to a Nightingale " describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature . In the words of Richard Fogle , " The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual : inclusive terms which , however , contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain , of imagination and common sense reason , of fullness and privation , of permanence and change , of nature and the human , of art and life , freedom and bondage , waking and dream . " Of course , the nightingale 's song is the dominant image and dominant " voice " within the ode . The nightingale is also the object of empathy and praise within the poem . However , the nightingale and the discussion of the nightingale is not simply about the bird or the song , but about human experience in general . This is not to say that the song is a simple metaphor , but it is a complex image that is formed through the interaction of the conflicting voices of praise and questioning . On this theme , David Perkins summarizes the way " Ode to a Nightingale " and " Ode on a Grecian Urn " perform this when he says , " we are dealing with a talent , indeed an entire approach to poetry , in which symbol , however necessary , may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry , any more than it could with Shakespeare , but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions " . However , there is a difference between an urn and a nightingale in that the nightingale is not an eternal entity . Furthermore , in creating any aspect of the nightingale immortal during the poem the narrator separates any union that he can have with the nightingale .
The nightingale 's song within the poem is connected to the art of music in a way that the urn in " Ode on a Grecian Urn " is connected to the art of sculpture . As such , the nightingale would represent an enchanting presence and , unlike the urn , is directly connected to nature . As natural music , the song is for beauty and lacks a message of truth . Keats follows Coleridge 's belief , as found in " The Nightingale " , in separating from the world by losing himself in the bird 's song . Although Keats favours a female nightingale over Coleridge 's masculine bird , both reject the traditional depiction of the nightingale as related to the tragedy of Philomela . Their songbird is a happy nightingale that lacks the melancholic feel of previous poetic depictions . The bird is only a voice within the poem , but it is a voice that compels the narrator to join with in and forget the sorrows of the world . However , there is tension in that the narrator holds Keats 's guilt regarding the death of Tom Keats , his brother . The song 's conclusion represents the result of trying to escape into the realm of fancy .
Like Percy Bysshe Shelley ’ s " To a Skylark " , Keats ’ s narrator listens to a bird song , but listening to the song within “ Ode to a Nightingale ” is almost painful and similar to death . The narrator seeks to be with the nightingale and abandons his sense of vision in order to embrace the sound in an attempt to share in the darkness with the bird . As the poem ends , the trance caused by the nightingale is broken and the narrator is left wondering if it was a real vision or just a dream . The poem reliance on the process of sleeping common to Keats 's poems , and " Ode to a Nightingale " shares many of the same themes as Keats 's Sleep and Poetry and Eve of St. Agnes . This further separates the image of the nightingale 's song from its closest comparative image , the urn as represented in " Ode on a Grecian Urn " . The nightingale is distant and mysterious , and even disappears at the end of the poem . The dream image emphasizes the <unk> and elusiveness of the poem . These elements make it impossible for there to be a complete self @-@ identification with the nightingale , but it also allows for self @-@ awareness to permeate throughout the poem , albeit in an altered state .
Midway through the poem , there is a split between the two actions of the poem : the first attempts to identify with the nightingale and its song , and the second discusses the convergence of the past with the future while experiencing the present . This second theme is reminiscent of Keats 's view of human progression through the Mansion of Many Apartments and how man develops from experiencing and wanting only pleasure to understanding truth as a mixture of both pleasure and pain . The Elysian fields and the nightingale 's song in the first half of the poem represent the pleasurable moments that overwhelm the individual like a drug . However , the experience does not last forever , and the body is left desiring it until the narrator feels helpless without the pleasure . Instead of embracing the coming truth , the narrator clings to poetry to hide from the loss of pleasure . Poetry does not bring about the pleasure that the narrator original asks for , but it does liberate him from his desire for only pleasure .
Responding to this emphasis on pleasure , Albert Guerard , Jr. argues that the poem contains a " longing not for art but a free reverie of any kind . The form of the poem is that of progression by association , so that the movement of feeling is at the mercy of words evoked by chance , such words as fade and forlorn , the very words that , like a bell , toll the dreamer back to his sole self . " However , Fogle points out that the terms Guerard emphasizes are " associational translations " and that Guerard misunderstands Keats 's aesthetic . After all , the acceptance of the loss of pleasure by the end of the poem is an acceptance of life and , in turn , of death . Death was a constant theme that permeated aspects of Keats poetry because he was exposed to death of his family members throughout his life . Within the poem , there are many images of death . The nightingale experiences a sort of death and even the god Apollo experiences death , but his death reveals his own divine state . As Perkins explains , " But , of course , the nightingale is not thought to be literally dying . The point is that the deity or the nightingale can sing without dying . But , as the ode makes clear , man cannot — or at least not in a visionary way . "
With this theme of a loss of pleasure and inevitable death , the poem , according to Claude Finney , describes " the inadequacy of the romantic escape from the world of reality to the world of ideal beauty " . Earl Wasserman essentially agrees with Finney , but he extended his summation of the poem to incorporate the themes of Keats 's Mansion of Many Apartments when he says , " the core of the poem is the search for the mystery , the unsuccessful quest for light within its darkness " and this " leads only to an increasing darkness , or a growing recognition of how impenetrable the mystery is to mortals . " With these views in mind , the poem recalls Keats 's earlier view of pleasure and an optimistic view of poetry found within his earlier poems , especially Sleep and Poetry , and rejects them . This loss of pleasure and incorporation of death imagery lends the poem a dark air , which connects " Ode to a Nightingale " with Keats ' other poems that discuss the demonic nature of poetic imagination , including Lamia . 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 .
= = Keats 's reception = =
Contemporary critics of Keats enjoyed the poem , and it was heavily quoted in their reviews . An anonymous review of Keats 's poetry that ran in the August and October 1820 Scots Magazine stated : " Amongst the minor poems we prefer the ' Ode to the Nightingale . ' Indeed , we are inclined to prefer it beyond every other poem in the book ; but let the reader judge . The third and seventh stanzas have a charm for us which we should find it difficult to explain . We have read this ode over and over again , and every time with increased delight . " At the same time , Leigh Hunt wrote a review of Keats 's poem for the 2 August and 9 August 1820 The Indicator : " As a specimen of the Poems , which are all lyrical , we must indulge ourselves in quoting entire the ' Ode to a Nightingale ' . There is that mixture in it of real melancholy and imaginative relief , which poetry alone presents us in her ' charmed cup , ' and which some over @-@ rational critics have undertaken to find wrong because it is not true . It does not follow that what is not true to them , is not true to others . If the relief is real , the mixture is good and sufficing . "
John Scott , in an anonymous review for the September 1820 edition of The London Magazine , argued for the greatness of Keats 's poetry as exemplified by poems including " Ode to a Nightingale " :
The injustice which has been done to our author 's works , in estimating their poetical merit , rendered us doubly anxious , on opening his last volume , to find it likely to seize fast hold of general sympathy , and thus turn an overwhelming power against the paltry traducers of talent , more eminently promising in many respects , than any the present age has been called upon to encourage . We have not found it to be quite all that we wished in this <unk> it would have been very extraordinary if we had , for our wishes went far beyond reasonable expectations . But we have found it of a nature to present to common understandings the poetical power with which the author 's mind is gifted , in a more tangible and intelligible shape than that in which it has appeared in any of his former compositions . It is , therefore , calculated to throw shame on the lying , vulgar spirit , in which this young worshipper in the temple of the Muses has been cried @-@ down ; whatever questions may still leave to be settled as to the kind and degree of his poetical merits . Take for instance , as proof of the justice of our praise , the following passage from an Ode to the Nightingale : <unk> is distinct , noble , pathetic , and true : the thoughts have all chords of direct communication with naturally @-@ constituted hearts : the echoes of the strain linger bout the depths of human bosoms .
In a review for the 21 January 1835 London Journal , Hunt claimed that while Keats wrote the poem , " The poet had then his mortal illness upon him , and knew it . Never was the voice of death sweeter . " David Moir , in 1851 , used The Even of St Agnes to claim , " We have here a specimen of descriptive power luxuriously rich and original ; but the following lines , from the ' Ode to a Nightingale , ' flow from a far more profound fountain of inspiration . "
At the end of the 19th century , Robert Bridges 's analysis of the poem became a dominant view and would influence later interpretations of the poem . Bridges , in 1895 , declared that the poem was the best of Keats 's odes but he thought that the poem contained too much artificial language . In particular , he emphasised the use of the word " forlorn " and the last stanza as being examples of Keats 's artificial language . In " Two odes of Keats 's " ( 1897 ) , William C Wilkinson suggested that " Ode to a Nightingale " is deeply flawed because it contains too many " incoherent musings " that failed to supply a standard of logic that would allow the reader to understand the relationship between the poet and the bird . However , Herbert Grierson , arguing in 1928 , believed Nightingale to be superior to " Ode on a Grecian Urn " , " Ode on Melancholy " , and " Ode to Psyche " , arguing the exact opposite of Wilkinson as he stated that " Nightingale " , along with " To Autumn " , showed a greater amount of logical thought and more aptly presented the cases they were intended to make .
= = = 20th @-@ century criticism = = =
At the beginning of the 20th century , Rudyard Kipling referred to lines 69 and 70 , alongside three lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's Kubla Khan , when he claimed of poetry : " In all the millions permitted there are no more than five — five little lines — of which one can say , ' These are the magic . These are the vision . The rest is only Poetry . ' " In 1906 , Alexander Mackie argued : " The nightingale and the lark for long monopolised poetic <unk> privilege they enjoyed solely on account of their pre @-@ eminence as song birds . Keats 's Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley 's Ode to a Skylark are two of the glories of English literature ; but both were written by men who had no claim to special or exact knowledge of ornithology as such . " Sidney Colvin , in 1920 , argued , " Throughout this ode Keats ’ s genius is at its height . Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying , felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute , than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage [ … ] To praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza [ … ] to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader ’ s power to perceive it for himself . "
Bridge 's view of " Ode to a Nightingale " was taken up by H. W. Garrod in his 1926 analysis of Keats 's poems . Like Albert Gerard would argue later in 1944 , Garrod believed that the problem within Keats 's poem was his emphasis on the rhythm and the language instead of the main ideas of the poem . When describing the fourth stanza of the poem , Maurice Ridley , in 1933 , claimed , " And so comes the stanza , with that remarkable piece of imagination at the end which feels the light as blown by the breezes , one of those characteristic sudden flashes with which Keats fires the most ordinary material . " He later declared of the seventh stanza : " And now for the great stanza in which the imagination is fanned to yet whiter heat , the stanza that would , I suppose , by common consent be taken , along with Kubla Khan , as offering us the distilled sorceries of ' Romanticism ' " . He concluded on the stanza that " I do not believe that any reader who has watched Keats at work on the more exquisitely finished of the stanzas in The Eve of St. Agnes , and seen this craftsman slowly elaborating and refining , will ever believe that this perfect stanza was achieved with the easy fluency with which , in the draft we have , it was obviously written down . " In 1936 , F. R. Leavis wrote , " One remembers the poem both as recording , and as being for the reader , an indulgence . " Following Leavis , Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren , in a 1938 essay , saw the poem as " a very rich poem . It contains some complications which we must not gloss over if we are to appreciate the depth and significance of the issues engaged . " Brooks would later argue in The Well @-@ Wrought Urn ( 1947 ) that the poem was thematically unified while contradicting many of the negative criticisms lodged against the poem .
Richard Fogle responded to the critical attack on Keats 's emphasis on rhyme and language put forth by Garrod , Gerard , and others in 1953 . His argument was similar to Brooks : that the poem was thematically coherent and that there is a poet within the poem that is different from Keats the writer of the poem . As such , Keats consciously chose the shift in the themes of the poem and the contrasts within the poem represent the pain felt when comparing the real world to an ideal world found within the imagination . Fogle also responded directly to the claims made by Leavis : " I find Mr. Leavis too austere , but he points out a quality which Keats plainly sought for . His profusion and prodigality is , however , modified by a principle of sobriety . " It is possible that Fogle 's statements were a defense of Romanticism as a group that was both respectable in terms of thought and poetic ability . Wasserman , following in 1953 , claimed that " Of all Keats ' poems , it is probably the ' Ode to a Nightingale ' that has most tormented the critic [ ... ] in any reading of the ' Ode to a Nightingale ' the turmoil will not down . Forces contend wildly within the poem , not only without resolution , but without possibility of resolution ; and the reader comes away from his experience with the sense that he has been in ' a wild Abyss ' " . He then explained , " It is this turbulence , I suspect , that has led Allen Tate to believe the ode ' at least tries to say everything that poetry an say . ' But I propose it is the ' Ode on a Grecian Urn ' that succeeds in saying what poetry can say , and that the other ode attempts to say all that the poet can . "
= = = Later critical responses = = =
Although the poem was defended by a few critics , E. C. Pettet returned to the argument that the poem lacked a structure and emphasized the word " forlorn " as evidence of his view . In his 1957 work , Pettet did praise the poem as he declared , " The Ode to a Nightingale has a special interest in that most of us would probably regard it as the most richly representative of all Keats ’ s poems . Two reasons for this quality are immediately apparent : there is its matchless evocation of that late spring and early summer season [ … ] and there is its exceptional degree of ' distillation ' , of concentrated recollection " . David Perkins felt the need to defend the use of the word " forlorn " and claimed that it described the feeling from the impossibility of not being able to live in the world of the imagination . When praising the poem in 1959 , Perkins claimed , " Although the " Ode to a Nightingale " ranges more widely than the " Ode on a Grecian Urn , " the poem can also be regarded as the exploration or testing out of a symbol , and , compared with the urn as a symbol , the nightingale would seem to have both limitations and advantages . " Walter Jackson Bate also made a similar defense of the word " forlorn " by claiming that the world described by describing the impossibility of reaching that land . When describing the poem compared to the rest of English poetry , Bate argued in 1963 , " Ode to a Nightingale " is among " the greatest lyrics in English " and the only one written with such speed : " We are free to doubt whether any poem in English of comparable length and quality has been composed so quickly . " In 1968 , Robert Gittins stated , " It may not be wrong to regard [ Ode on Indolence and Ode on Melancholy ] as Keats 's earlier essays in this [ ode ] form , and the great Nightingale and Grecian Urn as his more finished and later works . "
From the late 1960s onward , many of the Yale School of critics describe the poem as a reworking of John Milton 's poetic diction , but they argued that poem revealed that Keats lacked the ability of Milton as a poet . The critics , Harold Bloom ( 1965 ) , Leslie <unk> ( 1973 ) , Paul Fry ( 1980 ) , John Hollander ( 1981 ) and Cynthia Chase ( 1985 ) , all focused on the poem with Milton as a progenitor to " Ode to a Nightingale " while ignoring other possibilities , including Shakespeare who was emphasised as being the source of many of Keats 's phrases . Responding to the claims about Milton and Keats 's shortcomings , critics like R. S. White ( 1981 ) and Willard Spiegelman ( 1983 ) used the Shakespearean echoes to argue for a multiplicity of sources for the poem to claim that Keats was not trying to respond just Milton or escape from his shadow . Instead , " Ode to a Nightingale " was an original poem , as White claimed , " The poem is richly saturated in Shakespeare , yet the assimilations are so profound that the Ode is finally original , and wholly Keatsian " . Similarly , Spiegelman claimed that Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night 's Dream had " flavored and ripened the later poem " . This was followed in 1986 by Jonathan Bate claiming that Keats was " left enriched by the voice of Shakespeare , the ' immortal bird ' " .
Focusing on the quality of the poem , Stuart Sperry , argued in 1973 , " ' Ode to a Nightingale ' is the supreme expression in all Keats 's poetry of the impulse to imaginative escape that flies in the face of the knowledge of human limitation , the impulse fully expressed in ' Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee . ' " Wolf Hirst , in 1981 , described the poem as " justly celebrated " and claimed that " Since this movement into an eternal realm of song is one of the most magnificent in literature , the poet 's return to actuality is all the more shattering . " Helen Vendler continued the earlier view that the poem was artificial but added that the poem was an attempt to be aesthetic and spontaneous that was later dropped . In 1983 , she argued , " In its absence of conclusiveness and its abandonment to reverie , the poem appeals to readers who prize it as the most personal , the most apparently spontaneous , the most immediately beautiful , and the most confessional of Keats 's odes . I believe that the ' events ' of the ode , as it unfolds in time , have more logic , however , than is usually granted them , and that they are best seen in relation to Keats 's pursuit of the idea of music as a <unk> art . "
In a review of contemporary criticism of " Ode to a Nightingale " in 1998 , James O 'Rouke claimed that " To judge from the volume , the variety , and the polemical force of the modern critical responses engendered , there have been few moments in English poetic history as baffling as Keats 's repetition of the word ' forlorn ' " . When referring to the reliance of the ideas of John Dryden and William Hazlitt within the poem , Poet Laureate Andrew Motion , in 1999 , argued " whose notion of poetry as a ' movement ' from personal consciousness to an awareness of suffering humanity it perfectly illustrates . "
= = In fiction = =
F. Scott Fitzgerald took the title of his novel Tender is the Night from the 35th line of the ode .
According to Ildikó de Papp Carrington , Keats ' wording , " when , sick for home , / She stood in tears amid the alien corn " , seems to be echoed in by Alice Munro 's Save the Reaper ( 1998 ) , the end of which reads : " Eve would lie down [ ... ] with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark " ( book version ) .