Ode to a Nightingale: poem and comments

怀抱花朵的孩子

Ode to a Nightingale
   
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 Lethe-wards had sunk:   
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,          5
  But being too happy in thine happiness,   
    That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,   
          In some melodious plot   
  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,   
    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.   10
  
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been   
  Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,   
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,   
  Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!   
O for a beaker full of the warm South!   15
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,   
    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,   
          And purple-stainèd 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 charioted by Bacchus and his pards,   
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,   
  Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:   
Already with thee! tender is the night,   35
  And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,   
    Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays   
          But here there is no light,   
  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown   
    Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.   40
  
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,   
  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,   
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet   
  Wherewith 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 easeful Death,   
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd 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

You can listen this poem in :http://edu.qq.com/a/20050930/000084.htm

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-5-22 12:17 编辑 ]

怀抱花朵的孩子

The Timelessness of a Publication: John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale
                                                     Created by jperez

As a poem, distinguished by a beauty that contrasts "real melancholy" with "imaginary relief" (Wullschlager, 4, quoting Leigh Hunt), Ode to a Nightingale was written at a time in his life when Keats found himself caught at the junction between two worlds. Published in the spring of 1819 (May, 1819), Keats' poem is written soon after a previous December that marked both the death of his brother Thomas Keats and an engagement to Fanny Browne. Struggling between "imaginative escape" and "human limitation" (Sperry, 264), Ode to a Nightingale pits tensions echoed in Keats' personal life. These are tensions that reflect a universal dichotomy of human experience in mortality and the sublime. Similarly, Keats' love for Fanny Browne is interrupted by the death of his much beloved brother, a tragedy that inevitably influences his later Odes. In conclusion, for all its struggles as a poem, Ode to a Nightingale experienced a relatively easy and smooth publication history, released only one month (July 1819) after its original transcription. In its effortless publication, the poem may truly be the full expression of human experience (Wullshlager, 4) that it professes to be.

In a journal-letter written to his brother and sister in America dated 1818-1819, Keats writes, "The last days of poor Tom were of the most distressing nature; but his last moment were not so painful, and his very last was without a pang", he continues later on to say, "I have a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom." (Milnes, 164-65) Obviously distraught and heart-broken by the passing of his brother, Keats ironically later writes in his Ode to a Nightingale, "That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/ And with thee fade away into the forest dim:" or "I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/ To take into the air my quiet breath;/ Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” (Keats, line 55).

After his brother's death in early December, Keats seemed at a loss for words, unable to write nor complete any of his pieces. Under the urgings of his friend and companion Charles Brown, Keats decided to return home and renew his downtrodden spirits among familiar faces. It worked, as Keats began his epic poem Hyperion that he later described as a Vision of the divine, although eventually published only in fragments (Milnes, 163). Following Hyperion, Keats struggled to write down a series of shorter works, which were ultimately only destined for the truth. As Richard Milnes describes, "it seemed as if, when his imagination was once relieved, by writing down its effusions, he cared so little about them that it required a friend at hand to prevent them from being utterly lost." (Milnes, 163) That friend turned out to be Charles Brown. During his period of greatest productivity, approaching the early spring of 1819, Keats began what later would be coined his four Great Odes, arguably the “greatest short poems in Romantic Literature” (Hilton, 102). Brown describes one of these odes, Ode to a Nightingale in the following commentary on its origination:

“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 for 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 the nightingale.”

The commentary reveals Keats true skills as a poet and the extreme level of revelation the experience had held for him. Written in only two or three hours, with later little to no revisions, except for a small handful pushed by his editor James Elmes, the poem truly lives up to its own qualities as a partial unconscious meditation brought forth by the imagination or what Coleridge calls ‘primary Imagination’ (Dickstein, 204). For while the poem undoubtedly recognizes the tragic shortcomings and limitations of humanity, “Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,/ Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow” (29-30), it also yearns for a vision of self-transcendence where “Away! Away! For I will fly to thee,/ Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/ but on the viewless wings of Poesy,/ Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:” (31-5). In this sense, perhaps, Keats does in fact experience at least a partial vision “pouring forth soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!”, through the speediness of transcription. Similarly, his solitude and independence away from Charles and the others seems to support the Romantic ideal of the individual and his/her personal commune with nature. Here it is reported that such an event may have existed.

On the other hand, in his frustration “thrusting (his papers) behind the books”, Keats expresses sentiments echoed in the poem, relating the impossibility of such a transcendence and full immersion into the bird’s song. It can be said that however hard humanity tries, mortality inherently inhibits our capacity for pleasure; even as a poet appreciating a bird’s song these universal dichotomies are still apparent: “Still thou wouldst sing, and I have ears in vain-/ To thy high requiem become a sod.” (59-60) The poem continues, as Keats’ general frustration grows, amounting to an estranged sense of jealousy, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!/No hungry generations tread thee down” (61-2).

In its composition, Ode to a Nightingale experiences an evolution of thought that hints at Keats’ own evolving ideas on life. His recent engagement to Fanny marked by the death of his brother, both find their direct embodiment in the nightingale’s song. In its final movement, the poem’s nightingale is retained only through memory and loss. The bird’s divinity only remains alive in our imagination. The poem acts as testimony to Keats own sad middle-reality of his life. In her essay entitled John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: An Easy Publication for a Difficult End, Anne Wullschlager describes Keats as “one of the most, if not the most beloved poet of Romanticism. However, he did not fit neatly into the framework of the Romantic era. Keats was old enough to be a part of the founding group with Wordsworth and Coleridge, but unlike his upper-class contemporaries Shelly and Byron, Keats was of the middle working class. His life is somehow much more solitary in relation to these other men. He seems here nor there” (Wullshlager, 1). Between the tragic events that preceded his odes, combined with his cultural background and indistinct character as a poet, Keats life is marked by a self-conscious sense of uncertainty.

While neither fully invested in love nor loss, Keats finds meaning to his Ode to a Nightingale in what Geoffrey Hartman describes as “the middle-ground of imaginative activity, not reaching vision, not falling into blackness.” (Dickstein, 210) His lack of assurance and absolute meaning are nowhere as much a self-reflection as in Keats’ Ode. An uneasiness in life’s ultimate meaning becomes a concept that eventually resonates, self-consciously, throughout the rest of his poetry. In a letter written to his brother and sister-in-law he writes of Ode to a Nightingale: “it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance…I went to bed, and enjoyed an uninterrupted sleep-Sane I went to bed and sane I arose” (from Dickstein, 212). Under a feigned sense of self-assurance, Keats asserts qualities of sanity unsubstantiated by the poem itself, as well as his frustrated actions that follow.

In another instance, Brown writes after finding the scraps of paper, frustratingly crumpled

“On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his Ode to a Nightingale, a poem which has been the delight of every one. Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again assisted me. Thus I rescued the Ode and other valuable short poems, which might otherwise have been lost. From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was released from their influence, that it required a friend at hand to preserve them.” (Brown, 54)

But they were not only preserved, they were published. Encouraged by his other friend, the painter Benjamin Haydon, Keats sent his piece to James Elmes, editor of the literary magazine Annals of the Fine Arts (Wullschlager, 3). Keats’ poem appeared in the “July 1819 issue, anonymous, but signed with a dagger” (Wullschlager, 3), which Elmes may have done as a possible reaction to oppressive critics (Wullschlager, 3). Yet even before its publication, minor alterations had taken place to the original manuscript of Ode to a Nightingale. Keats changes words in line 16 and 17 (Hilton, 102), he also writes words atop of each other (see original transcript Gittings, pg. 36 and it's translation). Following his anonymous publication in the Annals of the Fine Arts, Keats undertakes a serious re-working of his pieces for a collective volume that would later be published by Taylor and Hessey on July 1st 1820 (Wullschlager, 3).

Unfortunately around the same time as his publishing, Keats was also destined to suffer the second of two sever hemorrhagings in June of 1820, and by September sets sail for Italy doomed by his doctor to not “survive another winter in England”. (Wullschlager, 3) Marquess writes of these last fatal moments of the poet’s life, “Soon after the drastic hemorrhage of February 1820, when he apparently offered to break the engagement with Fanny, he wrote sadly to her ‘I would mention that there are impossibilities in the world. ’” Not far from his earlier beliefs after the passing of his brother, Keats now experiences that very same fleetingness of reality once so prevalent in Ode to a Nightingale—except now firsthand. It is a disastrous realization that befell Keats over and over throughout his lifetime: “The weariness, the fever, and the fret/ Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;/ Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,/ Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;” (23-6). Tragically young, Keats died at the age of 25, on February 23 1821 in Rome battling tuberculosis .

Unbound to publication strictures while alive, it wasn’t until after his death Keats began experiencing publication controversy, Hilton writes:

“John Taylor, the dominant partner in the publishing house of Taylor and Hessey, which published Keats last two volumes, was the first of the circle to propose a memoir. After all, he was in a sense the literary executor of the young poet, who had asked Taylor to distribute his books to friends after his death. But the announcement of the proposal that Taylor placed in the Morning Chronicle of 4 June 1821 seemed to show ‘indecorous haste’ to Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown, who questioned the bookseller’s motives.” (Hilton, 34)

With no official biography (though arguments can be made for Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and His Contemporaries or Galignani’s The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats,--see Marquess, pg. 34) and only minor changes to his initial manuscript, such as the distinction between the word “fairy” and “faery” of line 70 (Wullschlager, 3), Keats still appears pretty obscure. His genius as a poet in describing the “perfect expression of the imperfect reality of (human) experience” (Wullschlager, 3) retains weight through time because of his lack of recognition among audiences. Ode to a Nightingale is kept alive by the poem’s near flawless publication history as well as Keats own mystery. Compared to Lord Byron or Wordsworth, even Shelley, Keats is not among that elite class of poets who define their individual generations. But at the same time, because of his tragic history and young demise, Keats entertains notions appealing to a Modern Romatic audience. In his lack of recognition, he gains an aura of mystery that parallels many notions apparent in his texts.


The comments about this articale

mphillip, 1126 days ago.
You had a unique challenge with this report, thanks to what you call an “effortless publication”: the smoother the process, the fewer the ‘filters’, the harder it is to detail a history. At its strongest, this report makes a convincing parallel between the “full-throated ease” that catches the narrator’s envy in TAN & what seems like a smooth composition and publication history. This is an interesting correlation, but too often you seem to fall into the poem too much; rather than trace a publication history, you’re more interested in relaying Keats’s (romantically doomed) biography, reflecting TAN’s biographical references more than exploring its actual format down through time. As a result, even though the narrator of TAN sobers up to something like the real world at the end of his poem, your report strays off into an “aura of mystery,” with many actual details and leads left unexplored.
The paper makes repeated use of Brown’s account of JK’s composing TAN, and sensibly so. Even if this narrative might be doubted (it seems to glorify Brown quite a lot: is he muscling in on JK in some way? And if JK were really so indifferent to publishing, why then did he submit to it?), at least it gives us glimpses into some details of generation outside of the poem itself. But you don’t end up doing much with them – the scraps, the hiding away, the reliance on friends to recognize and validate: doesn’t this all trouble a picture of effortless, confident composition?

When the report really focuses on TAN and how it was presented, you make some interesting observations, but these too can feel dropped. Why was TAN first presented anonymously? What was this Annals of the Fine Arts? Was it prestigious? What difference did it make that this (later canonical) poem first lived in a magazine – a magazine that sounds at least as if it wasn’t even focused on literary matters? When was it first collected with other of JK’s works? Did its designation as an ‘ode’ ensure a certain kind of context for it? Since JK’s time, has it usually been presented with the other odes as a set? Your tendency to invoke JK’s biography suggests that TAN is often now read biographically: instead of repeating this reading, a history of this poem would be better off framing it as another context, maybe the predominant one now.

A sentence on the top of page six is ridden with many of the problems in this E2: “Unfortunately around the same time as his publishing, Keats was also destined to suffer the second of two sever hemorrhagings in June of 1820, and by September sets sail for Italy doomed by his doctor to not “survive another winter in England”. (Wullshlager, 3) The sentence isn’t really interested in TAN’s publication history (“around the same time?” really?), it’s carelessly written (tense switches, confusing indications of dates, and then there are those “sever hemorrhagings”), it reaches for a quote when one really isn’t needed (and is that the doctor, or Wullshlager?), and it leans quite heavily on doom and destiny.

I don’t stress this sentence as typical of the report – there are a number of clearer, more sober passages that convey thoughtful information about TAN’s history—but it’s typical of the distractions that kill focus here. In the end, your heart seems most invested in dilating on the poem’s message, and giving us another version of its idealized doom.

this articale is from "Romantic Audience Project " forum :http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:8668/com ... de+to+a+Nightingale
"The Romantic Audience Project is a collaborative study authored by students enrolled in English 242, Spring 2003, taught by Mark Phillipson at Bowdoin College. In 2005, it spawned a sequel: RAP2."

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-5-22 12:15 编辑 ]

怀抱花朵的孩子

Keats' Ode to a Nightingale Project Prospecus

Final Project Prospectus

A Vision or Waking Dream: Keats' Ode to a Nightingale


Introduction

As shown in my E2, Ode to a Nightingale is a poem that experiences a relatively flawless publication history. Published anonymously in the Annals of Fine Arts July 1819 issue, the poem first appears to its audience with an ease that rivals only the very fantasy of birdsong it strives to depict E1. Yet despite the poem’s apparent simplicity and uncanny smoothness, Ode to a Nightingale struggles with a tension that eventually was to plague Keats throughout his entire poetic career.


In criticism published prior to Ode to a Nightingale in the Quarterly Review, Keats was described as too weak a poet, combining incongruous ideas with unintelligible sentences. Often indicted as a “direct copyist of Mr. Hunt”, Keats is here described as “more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning.” Because of its gratuity and facetiousness, Keats poem Endymion fell under what the critics would later call “Cockney poetry”. In a lot of ways, Ode to a Nightingale can be seen as a direct response to such criticism. The poem exists neither here nor there, while not solely limited to the mind of the poet, it also is not readily applied to a normal state of shared existence.


In its uncertainty, the poem evades the kind of static criticism that once so choked and stifled Keats creativity. His Ode spreads before us in its wild and untamed movement, snaking between reality and the imagined. At its height, Ode to a Nightingale paints a picture that lures its audience into a sense “Forlorn!”. In the end we are left only with a question of existence and truth: “Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep?” Keats accomplishes his ultimate task as poet in a rhetoric that literally undermines a once sure-footed audience. I hope in mapping the poem that my diagram will be able to portray this progression into uncertainty through Stanza VIII, and in the process do justice to Keats original intent. I will focus not so much on Ode to a Nightingale as a response to earlier criticism, but instead, as a poem in and of itself holding dialogue between author and reader. Audience, at least I feel, is a quite tricky subject, especially in a poem where the lines between stanzas marking very personal commentary and others intent on objective justification are blurred.

Basic Mapping

Jettisoning between reality and the imagined, forcefulness and passivity, desire and acceptance, truth and beauty Ode to a Nightingale follows an uncertain movement that snakes between stanzas. At times showing extreme want and desire (“O, for a draught of vintage!”), the poem depicts a narrator intent on his own mortal transcendence, wishing only to “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” and escape a reality all too limited and constricting. While at other times, Ode to a Nightingale also shows moments lost in Nightingale song, where the poet “on the viewless wings of Poesy” transcends reality “Already with thee!”.


The poem neither fully rejects nor accepts the idea of the immortal bird. As a muse, influencing a heightened state of reality, the bird in Stanzas IV, V, and parts of VII appears like a drug, overwhelming the poet’s senses, carrying him to a state more sublime. While throughout Stanzas II, III, VI, and VII, the poet experiences a heightened sense of reality, in direct contrast to a bird seemingly not of this world (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). Stanzas I and II fall into an interim state, not fully imaginary nor real, they act as agents carrying us as audience in and out of the poem, furthering complicating the question of “was it a vision, or a waking dream?” Presenting a poem that neither rejects nor fully accepts singular modes of interpretation, Keats leaves his audience alone with a question they must answer for themselves. In its fragility, Ode to a Nightingale embodies a piece as vulnerable and susceptible to criticism as once was the young poet himself.

Audience

In a pattern similar to the poem’s movement between reality and the imagined, Keats addresses two specific audiences. The first is Charles Brown, Keats’s good friend who continually supports Keats in his endeavors as a poet. Brown is the main “audience” in Keats’s meandering into the Imagined World. Secondly, and very different, are the critics who once ripped apart Keats in the Quarterly Review, for what they felt were his downfalls as the poet of Endymion. Similar to Brown’s relation to the imagined, the critics directly affect Keats’s scorned realism and depiction of a less-than-perfect mortal world.

A final address to audience occurs at the very end of Ode to a Nightingale in an appeal to readership. Keats ends his poem in a rhetorical question stating, “Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep”, and in the process blurs the lines between reality and the imagined. Keats seeks our acceptance and recognition of a world wholly uncertain. In a state of limbo, the reader gets the feeling that Keats, more than anything, is depicting himself, and a world that is not fully willing to accept his truly intense capabilities both emotionally and intellectually. Keats turns to us, not simply asking the question of “was it a vision, or waking dream?” but more importantly, “do you too see the inherent paradoxical nature of reality, in a world unable to commit to beauty or truth”? In the poem’s final movement, the poet asks an unanswerable question that falls on deaf ears. We cannot answer. In his “floating” question, Keats only accomplishes to fall deeper into a more profound solitude and loneliness that was to plague him his entire life. To this day, Keats’s Odes are still seen as “works in progress”, furthering the notion that his struggles to gain acceptance from a scornful readership continues.

Medium

Microsoft PowerPoint.

mphillip, 1100 days ago.
Jonathan,
There’s much thought and effort on display here; the project illuminates quite a bit about Ode to a Nightingale, though it also mystifies. I know you’ve wrestled quite a bit with imposing some kind of visual scenario onto Keats’s flighty poem, and some of your solutions (for there are several here – too many) are quite canny.

Charting Ode to a Nightingale’s weave between the real and the imaginary is often illuminating, though some questions get raised, which I’ll get to in a minute. At its best, this charting gives us a sense of how this poem conducts a fairly balanced exploration of polarities (while seeming spontaneous), and your introduction of Brown and the critics as tugs in either direction help point us to John Keats’s consideration of specified, representational audiences.

But there are a lot of abstractions flying around, with uncertain correlation to the audiences you’ve identified. For example, I end up being unsure about Keats’s address to Brown: does conceiving of Brown help Keats veer towards the ‘imagined’? If so, why does he leave Brown to compose poetry (kind of like the bird will leave him within the poem)? Conversely, does the suicidal release prompted by those nasty critics push Keats away from reality? I see a weave motivated by opposed audiences here, but I’m not exactly sure what causes the swerves.

Positing a third audience for those final questions is an intriguing way of resolving your presentation, but this step seems tentatively tacked on. The key makes claims about "us" being "sure-footed" throughout the poem until its end, when we’re "undermined." This is interesting, but not really graphically presented or conceptually developed. Why would we be so untroubled until the end? Is not being addressed a point of security for ‘us’?

The presentation seems to forget about this formulation, claiming, for example, of the first two stanzas that they “fall into an interim state, not fully imaginary nor real, they act as agents carrying us as audience in and out of the poem.” Since your chart positions the last stanza in line with where the first one was, I wonder what the real difference of address at the end is. I think you’re still on to something, sensing in those open questions an invitation for engagement missing from the rest of the poem. But this climactic point only gets fitful attention in the key, and less in the project.

As for the project’s packaging: a Powerpoint display does help you convey the sense of evolution in the poem (even as you seem to underplay motivation for the poem’s changes). But sometimes the interspersed images seem fairly gratuitous - sometimes as distractingly off as, say, terms such as “jettisoning.” Why Ansel Adams? Why rush hour Manhattan? Linked to the poem by the broadest of abstractions, such pictures seem to impose altered contexts on JK for no specified reason. Instead of demonstrating a truth about audience, they can seem like random window-dressing, at best competition in the Nightingale slalom. Here’s where your eagerness to represent the poem is getting in the way of analyzing its terms of representation.

Despite points of confusion and distraction, genuine immersion in Ode to a Nightingale allows you to make some nice points about the poem along the way, building to a sense of mutual forlornness, a paradoxical point of connection between audience and poet, at the end of the poem. I suspect your sense of John Keats’s maddeningly elusive birdsong will continue to sharpen, as you continue to supply the responsiveness that Ode to a Nightingale seduces.

jperez, 1096 days ago.
In response to some of the criticisms:
You write, “there are a lot of abstractions flying around, with uncertain correlation to audiences.” Why does Brown influence Keats into the “imagined”, didn’t Keats leave Brown’s side initially to write the poem?
Response 1: Keats does not need to be right next to Brown to feel his support as a friend and avid reader of his poetry. In fact, what you claim to be “like the bird”, in so far as Brown flutters away from Keats yet stays in his mind may be closer to the truth. The reality is that Brown saved Keats’s work from being discarded, and ultimately was his closest friend and comrade for doing so. You may answer “true, but how does this explain Keats’s imagination?” Because Keats is constantly in Brown’s company, in his backyard at his house, knowing his friend is nearby when he divulges into the imagined vis-à-vis the nightingale; he feels a certain comfort in his friend. Keats feels a level of openness that he wouldn’t, say, around the critics. Brown is an outlet to Keats’s imagination
B. You find a second critique of audience, wondering why “those nasty critics push Keats away from reality”.
Response 2. Keats, disgusted by the critics, is forced back inside of himself to ‘recuperate’ from such a world not ready for his poetry. Obviously what other people said did affect him, and obviously the general tendency of those who did not know him (the critics and an unreceptive public), was a kind of reality for Keats. It is a reality he did not wish to partake in. I thought this and the last point were self-evident throughout my project and didn’t require any further sort of explanation. Here, you may be looking for more forms of audience to represent the two worlds I charted, yet this would have been too complicated and too much of a task.

Before I move on to the question of my “tacking” on a third kind of audience, I would just like to mention that a reality where Brown-as-friend and an imagined-world-of-harsh-criticisms seems an unlikely pair. Keats consistently throughout his lifetime was less comfortable in the public eye. Recall Coleridge’s (or was it Wordsworth’s) account of their walk together and the differences between, where Keats would shy away from Coleridge’s over exuberant mind. Keats here seems closest to a Dickinson-type figure, intensely introverted and susceptible to be seen as a hermit.

2A The question of swerving.

While I appreciate your questioning this part of my chart, I also think at least part of it is self-explanatory. The swerves that occur between the two worlds of thought happen at specific times. These transitory phases happen where either the real or imagined worlds begin to show less force on Keats and die down. For example, “reality” is less intensive and more prone to subside where the chart swings into the imagined and vica versa. Similarly, the question of change and transition occurs in the stanzas themselves. The chart’s motion, ultimately, is determined only by the words themselves and not a pre-determined idea. Read literally, the words follow their own order and flow.

C. Your third question on seeking an audience in readership: You say, “this step seems tentatively tacked on.” “Why would we be so untroubled until the end?”

3. The turn to audience at the end is nothing more than an appeal to critics and modern day readers for recognition and support. As you say “why would we be so untroubled until the end?” I would point to the fact that Keats’ development as a poet throughout his odes produces a self-consciousness and uncertainness that translates even into his readers’ own questioning. In other words, there is no doubt Keats is a developing poet with much of his poetic workings still ‘uncovered’, yet Ode to A Nightingale is an attempt at dispelling some of our mistrusts. His piece stands apart as a kind of hand-in-hand tour through the inner workings of the poet’s mind and consciousness, ‘jettisoning’ between his developing imagination and unstable reality, between the poet he wants to be and the poet he is, between his aspirations and his self-consciousness. After all is said and done, an audience that believes Keats to be a fully developed poet, even before Ode To A Nightingale was written, is simply a misinformed one. Keats himself would agree.

The ending is also meant as a response to those other poets and critics like Byron and Croker, in an appeal to their sympathies and basic human understanding. ‘Was it a vision or waking dream?’, ‘real or unreal?’ ‘was this not beauty and truth?’ ‘is this not true?’ ‘is this not a purer form of beauty’: all these are questions directed at a final form of audience in the last stanzas.


3a. What you claim to be only “fitful attention in the key” is understandable. Yet, was this project not to be a visual representation and not another snip or essay? Isn’t the point of this final assignment to allow viewers of the project to see for themselves as opposed to have to carry them step by step throughout—as, say, an essay might? Why then would we have a visual representation at all? On the other hand, my ending of ‘fitful representation’ in this third kind of audience seems closest to Keats’s original plan. His ‘rhetorical question’ and final ending that doesn’t provide an answer adds but another layer or kind of ‘filter’ to the poem. Similarly, my chart follows a scheme that parallels the original plans of Ode to a Nightingale.

D. Finally, you find the photographs ‘gratuitous’ ‘distractingly off’ and you wonder ‘Why Ansel Adams’?

4 If anything, the pictures I think were the best part of my project. In Ansel Adams and a vision of New York I add a modern reading of the poem bringing Keats’s metaphors to life through familiar scenes. Again, I fear our pre-project meeting may have gotten in the way of my final product. I fear your presumption of my simply adding these photographs as a means of ‘jazzing up’ my presentation is unjustified. They are elements of personal worth and nothing else. The pictures act as visual points of reference precluding each step-by-step analysis of the stanzas. They allow breathing room and reflection and make an otherwise opaque poem understandable. What you feel to be ‘linked to the poem by the broadest of abstractions’ -- I feel work quite well in context. If anything they are a representation of my vision of Ode to a Nightingale.

If I had to present an analysis of my motives I would simply say that I am from New York, and am someone who holds both the West and its sense of wilderness in a kind of reverence, similar to Keats’ reverence of the nightingale. The awe-inspiring pictures, for me, hold a similar mystery and immortality, as did the nightingale’s song to the poet

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怀抱花朵的孩子

A Suicidal Aesthetic and The Gift of Immortality
Created by jperez.

Jonathan Perez 3/21/03
A Suicidal Aesthetic and The Gift of Immortality

In Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, the act of transmission between poet and audience becomes complicated. At first glance, the poem would seem not as much a dedication to the physical form of a bird, but instead an ode to the idea of the bird and the subsequent feelings it evokes. Keats discovers greater meaning in the Nightingale’s song that seems to transcend mortality and hint at something more divine. Further complicating the act of transmission, the poet projects his own hopes and wishes onto the birdsong, leaving us as readers, still uncertain of what is to be read as truth and what remains fixed in the poet’s imagination: “do I wake or sleep?” (Keats, line 80). The poem’s entire narrative structure centers itself around a similar paradox, as the act of transmission becomes a one-way road. While appreciating the sublime in a Nightingale’s song, Keats also finds himself unable to return to that normative state now left behind him in the wake of ecstatic experience. In other words, Keats’ dilemma lies in his inability to fully divorce himself from the Nightingale’s beautiful song. Unable to fully relinquish what came before, locked in a present state of melancholy and half-existence, the poem displays this struggle.

Defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as a “lyric poem, often in the form of an address and having an elevated style and formal structure”, the word ode arises from the Greek word for song. In this sense, Keats constructs each verse through the repetition of a specific internal rhyme scheme. After fashioning the first four lines of each verse in ABAB, Keats eases the reader into the poem’s more musical qualities. Reflecting narrative structure, the beginning of each verse can be seen as that part of the Nightingale’s song, which is both beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. In contrast, the second half of each verse follows a more inter-woven rhyme scheme with CDECDE, both putting more emphasis on the end line as well as drawing-out the latter half of each verse. Similar to the second layer of the narrative, the rhyme reflects a more profound dynamic, mirroring that part of the nightingale’s song that flirts between life and death hinting at transcendence.

Through juxtaposition in his first verse, Keats exhibits his own personal wants and needs vis-à-vis the nightingale. He explains that his “heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains” (Keats, line 1) as his senses and entire being become “emptied” (line3) seeming to invest themselves in the bird’s song. More fully explained in the second verse, he speaks of a wanting “for a draught of vintage” (Keats, 11) “that I might drink,” (line, 19) “And with thee fade away” (line20). The bird becomes a kind of fountain of youth, presenting a separate reality that is purer and more divine than that which he is accustomed to. He writes of wishing to cross “Lethe-wards” (Keats, 4), alluding to the river in Hell from which sinners drank in order to forget their past as a kind of purification.

Continuing the trope of the Nightingale’s song as a kind of liquid substance flowing forth, Keats in line 17 writes “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”, possibly alluding to the kind of divine inspiration seen once before in Coleridge’s poetry. K. Duglin in her snip entitled Bubbles , speaks of a similar image in the rising bubbles at the fountain of Kubla Kahn revived again in the The Eolian Harp. She speaks of a “release of the conscience or …inspiration”, reflecting the poet’s appeal to a higher knowledge and experience. Similarly, Keats in his beginning verses appeals to a divine vintage that can only be tapped through the sustained song of a nightingale. The song itself represents a kind of Garden of Eden before the fall. Yet not soon after, the poem takes a sudden turn in narration as its sense of impossibility and the unattainable both loom on the horizon.

The figure of the nightingale can be seen as a double-edged sword. For in verse 3, where the Nightingale once sang of “summer in full-throated ease” (Keats, 10), instead now bears gloomy reflection of Keats own mortality. He asks to forget “What thou among the leaves hast never known, / The weariness, the fever, the fret” (Keats, 22-3) and describes the sad shortcomings of his own existence. He ends the verse by glorifying the uncanny abilities of the bird to affect greater forms of Love and Beauty. Here we see the poet’s initial recognition of the one-way road I spoke of earlier. For while the Nightingale presents an ecstatic inspiration not unlike those seen in Coleridge, it also evokes in Keats, the recognition of his own mortality and limitations. The paradox becomes even more apparent through each consecutive verse as he seems to fly between both modes of interpretation: either delving deeper into the imaginative consciousness, drunken off the spiritual music (line 19) or submitting to the mundane reality “where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;” (Keats, 26).

This strange binary existence continues in Verse 4 in what would seem an appeal to escape, to “fly to thee” (Keats, 31) where “Tender is the night” (35). Verses 4 and 5 describe both what is lacking- “But here there is no light”(Keats, 38) and what could be- “in embalmed darkness guess each sweet” (Keats, 44). Employing the metaphor of a summer evening, Keats is able to convey that dual sense of darkness and disorientation without fully eclipsing familiar senses and natural phenomena. As we will see, Keats profits off his own poetic construction implying a kind of limbic half-state. Reminiscent of another of Coleridge’s pieces, the poet appears literally locked behind the bars of his own imagination. His inability to break free from his own mental capacities, which some may argue as a form of neurosis (*refer to  A Sinful and Most Miserable Man by lbridger), closely aligns Keats with This Lime Tree Bower My Prison. As a reader we can almost sense the heightened state of tension that seems to build throughout the poem between two sides never able to fully reconcile.

In what seems a non-sequitor at first, Keats dedicates verse 6 to speaking on Death. He says “I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme;” (Keats, 52-3) and that “Now more than ever seems it rich to die;” (Keats, 55). Not only does Keats personify death (capitalizing the first letter of the word as one might God), but he also flirts with the idea of death and dying. Is Keats here alluding to his own suicide as a means of breaking free from the restrictions of mortality and escaping everyday sorrows “where men sit and hear each other groan;”(Keats, 24)? Or is he simply utilizing the concept of Death as a means of further honoring the immortality of such divine song? The latter seems closest to the truth. He refers here to an aesthetic and pleasure arising from a song so completely transcendent of all natural laws that a weighty decision such as suicide and the passing to another world would seem easy. He speaks of the pure ecstasy evoked by such hymn as easing the pain of such a difficult transition. But the question remains as to what Keats fully implies when he speaks of Death. It is my belief that in one form or another, the poem in and of itself reflects a kind of suicide. Verse by verse the poet slips into an altered state, less and less certain of his own reality. Ultimately unable to divorce himself from the idea of the nightingale, Keats experiences a death of sorts.

While it can be argued, as seen earlier, that Keats wishes to “Fade far away, dissolve,” (Keats, 21), and explore the need to become fully immersed in the Nightingale’s song, the poet also in somewhat self-deprecating fashion, appeals to no end. The tragedy occurs in the positioning of the poet at the end of his poem. Neither here nor there, he embodies a half-existence forever embedded in a state of melancholy. What once was divine and ecstatic experience now flutters away with the bird and now remains only in nostalgia. Accordingly he says, “Forlorn! The very word is like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!” (Keats, 71-2) and “Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades” (Keats, 75). Yet it never fully fades. His remaining two lines question, first, the validity of his primary experience and secondly, the feelings that it evokes in him. What follows is confusion and a subsequent investigation into the feasibility of his own existence.

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep” (Keats 79-80)

Why does Keats choose to end his poem with a set of lines that feebly call into question the nature of existence perhaps doing more harm than justice to the original intent of his poem? If the poem in full is to be understood as an Ode to a Nightingale why then complete this lyrical dedication by showing the disorientation of the poet? The answer may lie in the question. For in so doing, though a changed man himself, Keats exemplifies in his bewilderment the pure power and force that natural phenomena such as a nightingale’s song hold. The threshold, which once separated mind from body, heart from imagination, now opens as Keats castes himself somewhere in between. What once appeared a suicide now is trivialized by his newfound success. The struggle still exists yet no longer is for nothing. Keats accomplishes his task best through his own loss.

Comment:
mphillip

Jonathan –
Thoughtful. This essay attempts a full reading of Keats’s richly complicated poem, arguing in the end that he charts the breakdown of divisions imprisoning the speaker in self-consciousness. It’s a very romantic reading, attuned to John Keats’s development of first-generation themes. Several times you put your claims across with a deft correlation to Coleridge in a similar state. And you make nice use of your classmates’ readings; offering your reader the feeling of synchronic tracking of themes, you heighten your credibility.

The reading is open to objection, and I’ll get to some in a minute. First, the strengths: a persuasive linkage of falling into self-consciousness with Ode to a Nightingale’s expansive verse pattern; nice consideration of the purpose of an ode, with comparison to JK’s actual use of such address; aforementioned attention to other texts; and a conclusion that wrestles in a plausible way with ON’s notorious final questions. I also get the feeling that you’ve worked to make your words as straightforward as possible – only once did I run across a “utilize” in place of “use” – a welcome effort, given the complexity of your argument and this poem.

I think the essay peaks on the top of page 4, where you describe John Keats’s narrator populating “embalmed darkness” with familiar yet refreshed imagery, thereby “profit[ing] off his own poetic construction.” This seems to predict your final reading of the poem, in which a harsh divide between a submission to imagination and the awareness of mortality resolves into a fertile limbo state, in which it’s unclear what the poet is making and what he’s perceiving.

An attractive argument – but in pitching it you seem to overlook both your notion of a one-way transmission and the indications in the second half of the poem that the nightingale is gone gone gone. It seems odd to claim of an anthem that so literally passes over into the next valley, and touches off such repeated Adieus, that “it never really fades.” Similarly, I think you underplay the hovering possibility of death, rerouting grim references to mortality into, primarily, a celebration of the bird’s “transcendence.” As a result, John Keats’s final two lines get idealized as “newfound success,” an “answer,” that ignores some contradictory evidence (not only “Fled is that music,” but maybe also the artificiality of those Fairy lands, recalling Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s popped bubbles).

It’s an indication of your effort here that you’ve steered towards a debate that seems to get at the very heart of Ode to a Nightingale. I’m sorry, though, that you seem to drop that fine consideration of a one-way transmission. It may be that more literal attention to who is speaking to what could lead to a reading of those final questions that would discover, in the midst of self-consciousness, a real crisis of address, or – to honor the romantic imperative of your paper – a richer address – a turn to us.

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怀抱花朵的孩子

John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale": An Easy Publication for a Difficult End

by Anne Wullschlager

A poet and his context

John Keats is one of the most, if not the most beloved poet of Romanticism. However, he did not fit neatly into the framework of the Romantic era. Keats was not old enough to be a part of the founding group with Wordsworth and Coleridge, but unlike his upper-class contemporaries Shelly and Byron, Keats was of the middle working class. His life is somehow much more solitary in relation to these other men. He seems here nor there, but nevertheless exceptional. There is something sympathetically attractive about this outsider state, which is compounded by the tragic course of events leading to an early death at the age of 26 in February 1821. The shattering death of his brother Thomas Keats December 1, 1818, and a renewal of spirit through the engagement to Fanny Brawne that same December, culminated in a spring of morbid creation, in a year which has been called Keatsí "Annus Mirabilis" or "The Year of Miracles." It was indeed his most successful period, writing a number of his best works with seeming ease in may. His famous Ode to a Nightingale was published in July with virtually no effort and commended for its lyrical beauty and realistic depth. He had arrived on the brink of something, on the brink of marriage, of sickness, of realizing more deeply his own mortality, and his own genius.

Composition and Publication

The composition and publication of Ode to a Nightingale is a soothing moment in a life marked with tragedy and rejection. Although simple, it is virtually an ideal story of creation and publication; a natural, unconcerned, and instantaneous exit from the poetís mind to paper and from the poet to a public audience. Although the exact date of composition is uncertain, it came short after Ode to Psyche sometime in the second half of May 1819. Charles Brown, one of Keatsí closest companions and in whose house Keats commonly resided, recalls the moment when Keats wrote the poem in a letter to Lord Houghton:

In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her next 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 for 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 some books.

Indeed, Keats did compose the eighty lines into eight impressively regular stanzas in a single morning. It was written on two half sheets. The stanzas are easy to order and the writing is extremely clear, with few simple corrections. There also appears to be an abandoned beginning at the bottom of the page on the opposite side from the proper beginning. The pages are crumpled and torn about the edges, supporting Brownís memory of him "thrusting" the poem in the back of a bookshelf.

When Keats finally removed the poem from that place is hard to tell, although we know that within a monthís time of the first ( basically final) draft he recited it for Benjamin Haydon, a close friend and painter. Recalling this moment, Haydon writes:

as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely.

Contrary to what appears to be a recitation before the composition of the poem on paper, Keats had in fact written it down, but did not feel that the copy he had was ready to hand over for publication, which his recitation that day, lead Haydon to encourage. Haydon was an intimate ally with James Elmes the editor of a magazine called "Annals of the Fine Arts." On Monday the fourteenth of June, Keats sent Elmes a copy of the poem and it appeared in the July 1819 issue, anonymous, but signed with a dagger. This was a clear response to earlier critics, who harshly reviewed such works as Edymion. He wanted to send Ode to a Nightingale out into the world free of the negative prejudice which the critics had encumbered him with. It was gracefully welcomed and acknowledged, hushing the anxiety of criticism and reassuring Keats that he had arrived at a form that agreed with his own particular genius.

After this primary publication, he began organizing his poems for a collective volume. He worked on his poems intensely in January 1820. He spent time copying a few of them, particularly Ode to a Nightingale for his brother George, who had returned to London for a brief time to gather funds. Shortly after, on February 3, Keats suffered his first severe lung hemorrhage and was diagnosed with Tuberculosis. Right after his second sever haemorrhage on June 22, the volume "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and other poems was published July 1 or 2 1820 by Taylor and Hessey.

This publication includes some minor, but marked changes from the original version of the poem in the "Annals of the Fine Arts." The word "fairy" in line 70 is changed to "faery." This change is documented to have taken place long after the original draft. The change suggests that Keats did not want to directly convey the atmosphere of an imaginary land of nymphs and lovely winged creatures. By changing the spelling he removed it one step from the over romanticized version of the imaginative realm of fairies, and more clearly conveys the "faery-land of old romance, of King Arthur and Palmerin." (Amy Lowell, pg. 253). Although it is interesting to note that "fairy" is still used in the second edition of Romanticism an Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu. The timing of two other corrections is more difficult to determine, because they appear on the first draft. The original "wide casements" became "the magic casements," and the "keelless" sea was now "perilous." The changes have since been praised and the whole volume was well reviewed. Soon after this triumph the doctor assures him he wonít survive another winter in England and on September 17 sets sail for Italy.

Why the Poem deserved such a perfect fable of publication

The meaning of this poem is in its perfect expression of the imperfect reality of experience. The fundamental flaw between the morbid banality and ecstatic beauty of life is too universally understood for this poem to enter the world with any conflict. The trajectory of its creation and publication is also bordered with two opposing realities; in December of 1818, Keats was supposedly engaged to his beloved Fanny Brawne, and yet a short while after the poemís completion he began to show signs of his terminal state of health. The poem seems to intertwine these two pressures so that one feels a harmonic resonance, a quivering space between these two realities. Keats was on the edge of crossing over into the next stage of life, where death is ever- present. This poem is the interplay of those two realms. Keatsí true genius seems to reside in that state of limbo, that falling back and forth between where the heart and imagination can briefly take us, and where painful experiences of life and death ultimately deliver us.

The poem fuses "real melancholy" with "imaginary relief" (Leigh Hunt) to adequately express the double life of human experience. The poemís movement through the different modes is achieved through a loose stylistic perfection; a dream-like experience of intoxication done with intense stanzaic regularity. Ode to a Nightingale not only waxes and wanes between these realms, it vibrates deeply with a true look at what Keats in his life has endured, and foreshadows the death to come. Within the beauty there is still the ever-present, unrelenting mortality of man to ground us: "Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;/Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,/where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" (Keats, ln. 24-6). Although, he is not too forlorn to take flight in the ecstasy of his own creative imagination and poetry. He allows the bird song to carry him off: "Away! Away! For I will fly to thee" (Keats, ln. 31). He escapes "the dull brain" (Keats, ln. 34) and forgets himself long enough to see "the Queen Moon is on her throne,/Clustered around by all her starry fays" (Keats, ln. 37-8). Stanzas 4 and 5 suppress the pain, which he returns to for the last three. However, we do not feel betrayed in either direction or pulled too far to one side or the other, and in the conclusion are left to wonder which realm is reality: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music - do I wake or sleep?" (Keats, ln. 79-80).

The relationship of the poem to the story of its emergence and publication is a rather bizarre avenue of exploration, because it does not follow the rules of cause and effect. It suggests rather some sort of simultaneous intuitive interplay or correlation between the public handling of a poem and what the poem ultimately says. In this case the publication of Ode to a Nightingale does seem to be in concert with the poemís meaning: "the odes are analogous with experience as a whole" (Walter Jackson Bate, pg. 500). The purity of its source, the single sweep of its composition and its immediate and unlabored publication, reasserts the poem as a symbol of reality itself, while being lyrically elevating, laced with harmonies and echoes, shadows and mutable reflections of a complex consciousness - as if to say it was something so fundamentally human that it could not be met with any resistance.

From: http://www.buptsl.com/websites/r ... w.asp?ArticleID=489