Essay on 'An Ode to a Nightingale':Meaning of the Bird Song Is Eternal

Do we get to choose? Do we get to live or do we get to die? Quite an indecisive argument that every individual holds up at a certain point in life continuously living in the ruins of time. Every Leaf turns brown, every youth wrinkles away and every bone cracks its age. Nothing is immortal------ immortal is the soul, immortal is the way of existence, immortal is the mark we leave behind.

‘Ode to a Nightingale’ was carved by one of the pioneers of Romantic poetry, John Keats in the spring of 1819. Somewhat running through eighty lines, it is the longest of Keats's odes( which includes poems like ‘ Ode on a Grecian Urn' and ‘ Ode on Melancholy’). 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a poem believed to have been written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London, or, according to Keats’ friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats’ house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead.

Halting in the dark lonely forest adoring a beautiful Nightingale singing a mesmerizing song entraps the poet’s mind which is lost in the deeper aspects of life. Provoking meandering meditation on time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering something which every man wants to escape. Being torn on the thought as to whether the poet should find solace in the Nightingale's song Which would metaphorically bring him closer to the Nightingale or probably when the bird flies away, will leave him in a trance as to question himself was it an experience, “a vision” Or a reverie, just a “daydream”.

Having a glimpse of 'immortality' in the singing Nightingale ---- a creature that, the poet believes, is neither plagued by human suffering, anxiety, emotional stress, strings of earthly attachments, or familial pressure nor is ever drawn to the cold sands of the grave rather whose song keeps coaching through the centuries from wide and across.

The poet's ability to embrace the world is damped by the inevitable truth that nothing lasts forever. Perhaps, why the speaker is paradoxically “too happy” Of having heard a bird’s song in the first stanza. This happiness in a sense is already over and thereby also feels excessive to him. Every mortal being gives way to mortality. Beauty fades, youth ages, and young grow old in a way that everyone is on an impending march to the dark wooden cage.

“ Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes

Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow”.

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Teaching a very great truth the poet says that neither beauty will be forever beautiful nor new love will always be new. Everything gives its way to the upcoming news. Old has to succumb to the dark for the unborn to see the light. The immortality of the bird lies in its song as being the same old song being sung and heard in times immemorial and even biblical. But this is to say is just an exaggeration as the night angle is not really immortal but it’s just its song, its achievement over time and death and only temporarily---- Distracting the poet from stress, anxiety, and sorrow about the fleeting nature of earthly things.

Finding relief in intoxication, the poet wonders as to how this will help him in the sorrow and escape the suffering. Though claims not to be envious of the bird the “happy” Nightingale---- which doesn’t seem pathetic in the same manner as him----- the bird serves as an alert that the poet can’t truly escape human awareness. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker peers into the woods from outside and tells the nightingale, “Whoa, dude, I’m jealous that you get to live in there. How can I get a place like that?” Imagining that the bird is living it up in the forest like a pleasure-seeker in the sun-soaked Mediterranean, he compares the forest to the humdrum of the world, the place where most humans live, suffer each day, cries for their mere bread, every man die every single day carrying out duties which makes the outside world look like the site of endless death and decay. Talk about a skewed perspective! He ignores all the good parts of the human world. Night angle and the beauty of its song represent liberation from the limiting, isolating confines of the tortured human mind.

Using poetry as a medium to partake in the nightingale's world deep in the Woods, where the moonlight could hardly touch the forest floor. The poet is unable to spot any Flowers or plants around him or neither can he smell them. Thereby it would eventually be and useless task to give up on your life knowing that no one is around except for the enchanting night angle.

‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Highlights the never-ending relationship between two different shades of beauty; the world of art created by mankind and the rich variety of life created by nature. The poem does present an important question ask whether the night angle and its song represent a beauty created by nature greater than anything humans can carve. The poem both begins and closes with the poet's drowsiness suggesting that the speaker finds consciousness exhausting. In the flight of the bird, the poet is left behind in a dilemma was this whole elopement to his Wonderland and experience, a real vision or he was just dreaming and he has to return to the same mundane life?

Three main thoughts overrun the ode. First being---- Keats’s evaluation of life; that life is a tale of tears and torture. The happiness which Keats hears in the song of the nightingale has made him happy momentarily but has been succeeded by a feeling of torpor which in turn is succeeded by the conviction that life is not only painful but also intolerable. Ironically the happiness which he derives from the song of the bird has specifically made him aware of the unhappiness of the world. Surely Keats wants to escape life, but not through the means of intoxication but by a more powerful agent, the imagination. Imagination has no boundaries, and no limitations, we can wander to distant lands irrespective of any topographical alterations. Nothing holds us back, nothing forbids us, and nothing seems wrong.

The second meaning thought rather than the main theme of the poem is Keats’s wish that he might die and it will be an end altogether, provided that the death would be easy and painless so that he could fall asleep. In many respects, Keats’ life had been unsatisfactory for some time before he wrote the poem. His family life was shattered by the departure of one brother to America and the death from tuberculosis of the other. His second volume of poetry had been harshly reviewed. He had no gainful occupation and no prospects since he had abandoned his medical studies.

The third thought is the power of imagination or fancy. Rejecting the need for any wine or intoxication he uses the power of imagination to fly away from the stressful life to a land of happiness of beauty with no suffering and no pain where every individual is free from familial ties and responsibilities when no one has to fight for earning the daily bread nor is anyone sick or ill. But soon reality dawns on the poet that imagination no matter how strong and powerful it cannot lead you to that world of fancy, ultimately we all are left behind to deal with our sufferings in the real world. As the bird flies away again back into the forest the poet is left to contemplate that all this while what he was doing, was all a mere fancy a Daydream, and nothing is really all which is real is that every man has to sweat to earn his bread and that's what is decided from above is the ultimate and real.