SparkNotes: Keats’s Odes: Ode to a Nightingale Ode to a Nightingale Ode to a Nightingale, page 2 page 1 of 2 Summary The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows. In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and like peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale.

In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.” In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the branches.

In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain” and be no longer able to hear.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not “born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep. Form Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas.

However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes. Themes With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life.

In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself.

But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.” 1 Poetry & Immortality: John Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' Poetry & Immortality: John Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' Professor Belinda Jack Download this lecture ‘Thou wast not born for Death! immortal bird/ No hungry generations tread thee down.’ Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ contains these curious lines. How can a bird be ‘immortal’? The poem is partly about immortality, but how does its complex poetic web work? Professor Belinda Jack Belinda Jack is Fellow and Tutor in French at Christ Church, University of Oxford.

She features regularly in the press and media thanks to the popularity and insight of her published works, including books such as The Woman Reader, George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large and Negritude and Literary Criticism: The History and Theory of "Negro-African" Literature in French. Professor Jack obtained her D.Phil. in Negritude and Literary Criticism at St John’s College, University of Oxford in 1989, having earlier obtained a degree in French with African and Caribbean Studies from the University of Kent. Her academic career over the past twenty years has been at Christ Church, University of Oxford, where she is an ‘Official Student’ (Fellow and Member of the Governing Body) and Tutor in French. Her main interest lies in French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. As well as her five books, Professor Jack is widely published through her many articles, essays, chapters and reviews. Her recent articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Literary Review, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and Littérature.

She is a regular on the BBC and international radio and television, as well as a frequent speaker at literary festivals throughout the British Isles and beyond. In 2013 Professor Jack was appointed the Gresham Professor of Rhetoric. In her first year of appointment, her Gresham College lectures were on The Mysteries of Reading and Writing . She writes of her appointment and the series: “Reading is a subject which has long fascinated me, not least because of my role in teaching undergraduate students to read ‘difficult’ literature with the greatest attention to detail, structure and internal connections. My most recent book, The Woman Reader, is a history of women’s reading from ancient times to the present day, and the writing of it deepened my interest in the subject of reading more generally. My Gresham lectures will draw on some of the material on which I based my book, including material that I didn’t have space to treat, and on the research I am currently undertaking.

My primary aim will be to encourage informed reading of a wide range of material, which will make us reconsider literature, ourselves and the society in which we live.” In 2015/16, Professor Jack continues her professorship with her third lecture series entitled The Mysteries of Writing Poems and Plays. Professor Jack's previous lecture series' are as follows: This is part of the series: The Mysteries of Writing Novels and Poems Subjects Poetry & Immortality: John Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' Professor Belinda Jack Poetry and Immortality: John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale Good evening – and welcome. This is the second of four lectures that I am giving on poetry, which follow four which I gave on the novel. In addition to analysing some well-known poems, I want to show how the different literary genres lend themselves to different kinds of exploration – essentially of the human condition. In my last lectures I considered ideas of remembering and remembrance in relation to Gray’s famous Elegy. Tonight I would like to explore ideas of immortality and indeterminacy in Keats’s celebrated Ode to a Nightingale.

The music you heard just now was Oliver Messiaen’s, ‘Le Réveil des oiseaux’. Messiaen was a twentieth century composer who was fascinated by birdsong, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. This by way of illustration of the importance of birdsong not only to poetry, but to music too. John Keats, one of the most famous English Romantic poets was born on October 31, 1795, in London. His father was livery-stable keeper and John Keats (hereafter, just ‘Keats’) was the oldest of four surviving children. His father died when Keats was eight years old and his mother died when he was fourteen, of tuberculosis. His maternal grandmother found him two guardians, both London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, and sent him as an apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary. Keats lodged in the attic above the surgery at 7 Church Street, Enfield (then Middlesex), until 1813. After his apprenticeship, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital .

Within a month, he was accepted as a ‘dresser’ at the hospital, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon today. It was a rapid promotion suggesting considerable aptitude for medicine. But Keats had not given up his writing and became increasingly frustrated by the time-consuming nature of his job as a doctor. The earliest poem by Keats that survives was written in 1814, when Keats was nineteen years old. He was clearly set not on medicine but on being a poet. His brother George wrote that John ‘feared that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy himself’. In 1816, Keats was awarded his apothecary’s licence which gave him the right to practice as an apothecary, doctor and surgeon. But before the year was out he had announced to his guardian that he had resolved to give up medicine and live as a poet. One of a growing number of editor and poet friends to help him was Leigh Hunt, in turn a friend of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Hunt published The Examiner and in May 1816, he agreed to publish Keats’ sonnet, ‘O Solitude’.

Keats’s first volume of poetry, entitled simply Poems by John Keats, was published in 1817. Endymion, a four-thousand-line allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked the collection, referring to the poetry of Hunt’s literary circle as ‘the Cockney school of poetry’. In Blackwood’s, Keats’s poem was described as nonsense and the magazine advised Keats to give up writing poetry altogether. Another critic quipped that the book‘might have emerged in Timbuctoo.’ Keat’s publishers, Charles and James Ollier , apparently felt ashamed of the book and Keats immediately approached Taylor and Hessey on Fleet Street who took him on. Unlike the Olliers, Taylor and Hessey were obviously excited by Keats's work and within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a new Keats volume and even paid him an advance. Taylor and Hessey were important publishers of poetry whose list eventually included Coleridge , Hazlitt , Clare , Hogg , Carlyle and Lamb .

His new publishers’ confidence in him must, in turn, have been a great boost to his own confidence. In the summer of 1818, Keats set out on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland. On returning home he committed to caring for his brother, Tom, who was suffering from TB. Tom died on December 1, 1818. Less than a year later, in the autumn of 1819, Keats himself was diagnosed with TB. From February 1820 on, he referred to his life as a ‘posthumous existence.’ But despite his illness – or perhaps with a new sense of urgency - this was a period of remarkable creativity and in July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. In addition to the title poems it contains three poems often considered among the finest in the English language, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, and the subject of tonight’s lecture, ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ The book was enthusiastically received.

That autumn, Keat’s doctor recommended that he spend the winter in a warmer climate than England and he and a painter friend, Joseph Severn, travelled to Rome. Keats died in Italy on February 23, 1821. He was twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. I have had to be highly selective in this mini biography of Keats. It could be argued that his two lovers, particularly for Fanny Brawne whom he met when he was nursing his brother, were also of considerable significance to him as a poet but I have concentrated rather on those aspects of his biography which might explain his extraordinary capacity to render the intensity of our knowledge of our mortality – and thus conception of immortality – which lies at the heart of the Ode: the early deaths of both his parents, his time living in the attic of the surgeon’s shop and no doubt very aware of pain and death below, his own experiences as a hospital doctor, Tom’s death to TB and the knowledge of his own approaching death, also from TB. But the Ode is by no means a cry of hopelessness, or anger, or despair. So how should we read it?

We might want to be guided in part by Keats’s own notion of poetry: ‘I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity – it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance’. Maurice Buxton Forman (hereafter MBF), 48 (116). In other words Keats believed that the reader or listener should be unaware of the artifice, of particular poetic techniques, and rather engage with the poem as a whole, as ‘a fine excess’. It should strike the reader as strangely familiar, ‘almost a remembrance’ of his or her own feelings, experiences, and thoughts. So what do we know of the poem’s origins? It was probably written in the late spring of 1819. It was most likely composed in Hampstead where Keats was sharing a house with his friend, C.A. Brown. Brown famously wrote: ‘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 feelings on the song of the nightingale’. Recording of Nightingale’s Song Some commentators have considered Brown’s account overly proprietorial but it may well give us some insight into the creative moment which was the catalyst for the poem. We also know that on 11 April 1818, Keats went for a long walk on Hampstead Heath with Coleridge, by then a well-established poet and some years older than Keats. In a letter to his brother George, Keats described how the two of them had talked about ‘a thousand things,... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics.’ It is unlikely that the poem came as spontaneously to Keats as Brown suggested.

Before we hear a reading of the poem and embark on an exploration of it, it is worth considering the ‘ode’ as a type of poem. The ode (from Ancient Greek : ᾠδή ōidē), is a type of lyrical stanza . A classical ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe , the antistrophe , and the epode . The English ode is a lyrical stanza in praise of, or dedicated to, someone or something, that captures the poet's attention, or serves as poetic inspirationfor the ode. The earliest English proponent of the ode in English was Edmund Spenser . In the seventeenth century, the most important odes were by Abraham Cowley . A better understanding of the classical metre of Pindaric form of the ode in the eighteenth century led to something of a revival. Thomas Gray wrote a number of Odes based on Pindar’s form. Around1800, Wordsworth revived Cowley's Pindaric for one of his finest poems, the ode, Intimations of Immortality (Inspired by Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale). Others who also wrote odes include Coleridge and Shelley.

But the greatest odes of the nineteenth century are arguably Keats's: Ode on Melancholy , Ode on a Grecian Urn , Ode to Psyche , To Autumn , and Ode to a Nightingale. After Keats, there have been comparatively few major odes in English. One major exception is W.H. Auden who wrote a poem simply entitled, Ode which satirizes people's ignorance over the reality of war. In an interview, Auden said that he had first intended to entitle the poem My Silver Age as a parody of the idea of the Imperial Golden Age. The English ode's most common rhyme scheme is ABABCDECDE and Keats’s poem conforms to this pattern. There are eight stanzas and each has ten lines. So why did Keats opt for the ode form? Beth Lau points out: ‘As several critics have noted Keats’ use of the ode in 1819 grew out of his desire to discover a form that would allow more room to develop ideas than the restricting sonnet, but less freedom to range in than the shapeless verse epistles or long, open-couplet poems of his youth.

(Beth Lau, ‘Associationism and “Ode to a Nightingale”’, Keats Shelley Journal.) David Perkins has also demonstrated the function of the strong central symbol of the nightingale helps to focus the train of thought. (David Perkins, The Quest for Performance (Cambridge, Mass;Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 242-245)The ode form and the strong central symbol combine to allow Keats to fulfil his ambition: to write ‘independently and with judgment’. What exactly did he mean by this? Keats believed in the concept of ‘Negative capability’. By this he meant an ideal of open-mindedness, of ‘let[ting] the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts’. He did not want his mind to ‘irritabl[y] reach[ing] after fact and reason’, ‘hungering… after truth’, or ‘always trying at it’. (Letters, II, 213; I, 193, 185).

We should be able, especially if we are poets, to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysterie, doubts’ and of ‘remaining content with half knowledge’ (Letters, I, 193-4). It is this idea of ‘half knowledge’, or indeterminacy’ that I would like to inform my commentary on the ode. But first let us hear a reading of it. [ The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a drug (‘hemlock’ (a poisonous plant which produces death by paralysis), ‘opiate’, ‘Lethe’ (a river of the lower world from which the shades (spirits of the dead) drank, and thus obtained forgetfulness of the past)), moments earlier. His addressee, ‘thou’ (line 7) is a nightingale that he can hear singing in the forest. His ‘drowsy numbness’ is not a function of envy of the nightingale’s ‘happiness’, but rather from sharing it too wholeheartedly. The speaker is ‘too happy’ because the nightingale ‘singest of summer’, hidden in a plot of ‘green’ and ‘shadows’.

The alliteration – plenty of it in the poem - ‘singest of summer’ reflects the ‘ease’ with which the nightingale sings. In the second stanza, the speaker longs for fine wine, ‘a draught of vintage’ and the slow but steady oblivion it might bring (‘fade away’). ‘Sunburnt mirth’ is a wonderful synesthetic expression eliding a feeling or look, ‘sunburnt’, with an abstract noun denoting good cheer, ‘mirth’. Synaesthesia, [define], and ‘half-knowledge’. The image of the ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ is much admired. The alliteration of ‘b’s captures the action of sparkling wine and suggests onomatopoeia.? The ‘winking’ is suggestive of bubbles forming and bursting like an eye opening and shutting. In the third stanza, he declares his desire to ‘fade far away’, ‘dissolve and quite forget’. What he wants to leave behind is the intensity of human suffering. It will ‘dissolve’, lose its substance, and be forgotten - ‘weariness’, ‘fever’, ‘fret’, the ‘palsy’ of the old.

The nightingale, ‘thou among the leaves’ has never known these and has no consciousness of ageing and death while the speaker knows that youth does not last, it ‘dies’, and Beauty fades: ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’. Beauty is personified here and her ‘eyes’ are singled out. Of course it is our eyes that behold beauty. Again there is an indeterminacy that suggests ‘half-knowledge’. In the fourth stanza, the speaker invites the nightingale to fly away - and he will follow. This will not be facilitated by wine (‘Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards’ (‘leopards’)), but by poetry. He sets up an opposition between the ‘viewless (i.e. invisible’) wings of Poesy’ and the ‘dull brain’ which ‘perplexes and retards’. Rational thought tethers the imagination to the known and familiar but this brings no revelation (perplexes). [Re-cap ‘Negative capability’ - an ideal of open-mindedness, of ‘let[ting] the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts’.

He didn’t want his mind to ‘irritabl[y] reach[ing] after fact and reason’, ‘hungering… after truth’, or ‘always trying at it’. (Letters, II, 213; I, 193, 185). We should be able, especially if we are poets, to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysterie, doubts’ and of ‘remaining content with half knowledge’ (Letters, I, 193-4).] Weight is associated with the mundane, in turn associated with negative states of feeling, e.g. ‘leaden-eyed despairs’ in the third stanza. And already, by the fifth line of the fourth stanza, the speaker has caught up with the nightingale, ‘Already with thee!’ The night is moonlit and starry (again there is personification - ‘Queen Moon’, ‘starry Fays’ (‘fairies’)),although there is ‘no light’ except when the breezes cause the trees to part (‘Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown’). So there is both ‘no light’ and yet some light.

In the fifth stanza, the speaker addresses the nightingale only by implication. There is no second person pronoun (‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’); these occur in all the other verses. ‘I cannot see’ the speaker declares, but ‘in embalmed darkness’ he can guess ‘what flowers are at’ his feet: white hawthorn, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose. (Lines 43-49 appear to echo Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.249-52 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997): I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine ... But in Keats’s poem, the stanza is one of presences and absences, or life and death, of indeterminacy.

Alone, the speaker experiences the intense poetic epiphany. He does not need ‘to see’, in order to imagine, or to see ‘in his mind’s eye’, as the expression goes. Perhaps the reverse: we instinctively close our eyes when trying to imagine. Some of the structure of the poem can be accounted for in terms of antithetical pairings: pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness of feeling, life/death, mortal/immortal, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection. And the ‘half-knowledge’ of which Keats spoke, is suggested by the indeterminacy, the space between these pairings. The speaker may be alone, in ‘embalmed’ darkness, an image of death. This then leads to the contemplation of the attractions of death of which the speaker tells in stanza 6: ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death’ (line 52). There is a hint of irony here as the nightingale sang, in the first stanza, ‘in full-throated ease’.

This moment of ‘ecstasy’, listening to the artless exquisiteness of the nightingale’s song strikes him as an ideal moment at which to die: ‘To cease… with no pain,/While thou art pouring forth thy soul’. And the speaker would die in the knowledge that the nightingale’s song would not cease, even if he were no longer able to hear it. There is an ambiguity, indeterminacy, about the word ‘Still’ in the penultimate line of the sixth stanza, ‘Still wouldst thou sing’. The ‘still’ could either denote temporal continuity or physical lack of movement. The first suggests immortality while the second death (mortality). The idea of the speaker’s mortality, in contrast to the nightingale is introduced and then expanded upon in the famous first two lines of the seventh stanza: Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; Extracts from article, ‘The Immortality of the Natural…’ I’d like to suggest a further possibility. Poetry is constantly being re-written. Poets borrow from the dead poets and Keats knew that others would in turn borrow from him after his death.

Could not the poets of the future be the ‘hungry generations’ who will ‘tread down’ the poetry of the dead? But the nightingale’s song retains its integrity. The very same song goes on being sung by generation after generation of nightingale. In this sense it is ‘immortal’. To substantiate this reading I contacted Professor Christopher Perrins, from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University to ask whether it was likely that the song of the nightingale had changed over time. Could it be that the birdsong we hear today is exactly the same as the song Keats heard? This is his reply: I am afraid that this is not a very helpful reply, but I suppose no one really knows the answer to your question. My guess is that the answer is that we are hearing the same song that Keats heard. However, without good quality recordings, I do not see how anyone could answer your question. My guess would be that it had not changed. Small local differences have been noticed between birds of the same species which sing in different habitats; this includes those which sing in urban areas being slightly different from those in rural habitats. But I know none that relate to nightingales.

Christopher Perrins The voice he hears singing (line 53) has always been heard, by emperors and clowns, and by the Biblical homesick Ruth (the corn is ‘alien’ because Ruth was not an Israelite but a Moabitess, gleaning in the barley fields of Judah (Ruth 2:1-2). In the eighth and final stanza, the word ‘forlorn’ tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale back to himself, ‘my sole self’, in lines reminiscent of Gray’s Elegy that we explored a few weeks ago. This means, of course, that he is alone but ‘sole’ is a homophone for ‘soul’. In the sixth stanza, it was the nightingale’s: ‘Thou art pouring forth thy soul’. Now it is the ‘soul’ of the poet that is alluded to. The ‘fancy’, that is the imagination, cannot sustain the speaker’s ‘vision’. The ‘plaintive anthem’ that is the nightingale’s song now ‘fades’ and ‘’tis buried deep/In the next valley-glades’.

The ‘buried’, picking up on the idea of ‘embalmment’ of the fifth stanza – both referring to death. The verb ‘fade’ has occurred three times, denoting the movement from presence to absence which mirrors that of life to death. The ‘half-knowledge’ and the indeterminacy are intimately bound up with the idea of ‘fading’, moving from one state to another – from light to shade, from day to night, from life to death and so on, but imperceptibly undermining the all-embracing antithetical pairs. The bird’s ‘anthem fades’, not the bird. In fact there is an important distinction to be made between the speaker’s ‘half-knowledge’ and the bird’s ontological status.[‘Ontology’ is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations]. As Andrew J. Kappel points out in an article entitled ‘The Immortality of the Natural: Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (EHL, John Hopkins, vol.

45, 2 (Summer, 1978) pp.270-284), ‘The trajectory of the bird’s withdrawal at the end of the poem is an indication that its ontological status as a natural being is maintained to the end. As it withdraws, it moves from one natural setting to another, never ventures outside nature and seems, indeed, to retreat ever more deeply into the natural world: Thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep In the next valley-glades. The use of hyphens ‘hill-side’ and the more original ‘valley-glades’, again suggests ‘half-knowledge’. Is a ‘hill-side’ the same as the side of a hill? Are the ‘valley-glades’ the same as ‘glades of the valley’? The poem ends with two questions: was what the speaker has described ‘a vision, or a waking dream’, is he ‘[a]wake or asleep’? It would be a great irony if Keats’s great exploration of immortality had itself faded out of human consciousness. What of its posterity?

How has it done – in relation to the nightingale’s immortal song which we heard earlier? If you type ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ into Google 1,250,000 results pop up within seconds. Keats's influence was strong in the nineteenth century and his poetry resonates into the twentieth century - poets like Wallace Stevens , T.S. Eliot , and countless others. As I mentioned earlier, Keats died at the age of 25 and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Two of his friends added the following epitaph: This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821 They added these lines to register their deep disappointment with the cruel critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review 's derisive attack of "Endymion". Byron retaliated with the following lines in his narrative poem Don Juan : 'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

(canto 11, stanza 60) Keats was snuffed out in his youth but the poem has remained remarkably popular. To finish, I would like to point out some of the features of the poem which make it so effective. The poem is wonderfully good at creating a sense of mood. At the start of the poem the thudding alliteratives, d’, ‘p’ and ‘m’ evoke the dull ache that the poet describes. In the second half of the stanza, on the other hand, light assonantal [the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming] sounds are created by words such as ‘light’ and ‘Dryad’. There is a sensual, lingering quality in the assonantal sounds ‘beechen’, ‘green’ and ‘ease’ when the poet is evoking the joyousness of the nightingale. In terms of pace one can compare the brisk and ecstatic vitality of the second stanza which skips along at speed, with the heaviness and monotony of the third stanza. There is a marked concentration of sense impressions and frequent use of synaesthesia.

In stanza 1, for example, the `plot' where the bird sings is itself `melodious' and the song contains `summer': the visual evokes the aural and the aural the visual. In stanza 2, the taste of wine is evoked by means of colour, action, song and sensation. In stanza 5, `I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs', the suggestion that the incense could be seen emphasises the materiality and headiness of the perfume: it is so strong it seems tangible. It is the processes and movement of the poet's mind that are the central focus of `Ode to a Nightingale', and the personal `I' is very foregrounded. It was this intensely personal quality of the poem married to its musical effects that F Scott Fitzgerald particularly admired. These are brought out exceptionally well in his reading of the poem. . F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great admirer of the poem and the title of one his most famous novels, Tender is the Night , comes from this poem. So we’ll finish listening to Fitzgerald’s reading which is – movingly – incomplete.

He died the same year as the recording, age 44 – of TB. Thank you. Bird Poems - a Collection of Classic Poetry Bird Poems A Collection of Classic Poems About, Addressed to or Inspired by Birds Diane Miller / Getty Images By Bob Holman & Margery Snyder Updated August 08, 2016. Birds wild and domestic are quite naturally interesting to humans, earthbound creatures that we are, and for poets in particular, the world of birds and its endless variety of colors, shapes, sizes, sounds and motions has long been an immensely rich source of inspiration, symbol and metaphor. Because they fly, they carry associations of freedom and spirit on their wings. Because they communicate in songs that are alien to human language and yet musically evocative of human feelings, we attribute character and story to them. They are distinctly different from us, and yet we see ourselves in them and use them to consider our own place in the universe.

Here’s our collection of classic bird poems in English: continue reading below our video 10 Facts About the Titanic That You Don't Know William Blake, “Leda and the Swan” (1928) Notes on the Collection There is a bird at the heart of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ”—the albatross—but we have chosen to begin our anthology with two Romantic poems inspired by the song of the common nightingale. Coleridge’s “ The Nightingale ” is a “conversation poem” in which the poet cautions his friends against the all-too-human tendency to impute our own feelings and moods onto the natural world, hearing the nightingale’s song as a sad song because the listener is melancholy.

On the contrary, Coleridge exclaims, “Nature’s sweet voices, [are] always full of love / And joyance!” John Keats was inspired by the same species of bird in his “ Ode to a Nightingale ”—the little bird’s ecstatic song prompts the melancholy Keats to wish for wine, then to fly with the bird on “the viewless wings of Poesy,” then to consider his own death: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!” The third of the British Romantic contributors to our collection, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was also taken with the beauty of a small bird’s song—in his case, a skylark —and also found himself contemplating the parallels between bird and poet: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! . . . .

In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not...” A century later, Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated the song of another little bird, the woodlark , in a poem that conveys the “sweet—sweet—joy” of God-created nature: “Teevo cheevo cheevio chee: O where, what can tháat be? Weedio-weedio: there again! So tiny a trickle of sóng-strain...” Walt Whitman also drew inspiration from his precisely described experience of the natural world—in this, he is like the British Romantic poets, despite all the differences between his poetry and theirs—and he, too, attributed the awakening of his poetic soul to his hearing of a mockingbird’s call, in “ Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking ”: “Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?

For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you, Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.” Edgar Allan Poe ’s “ Raven ” is not a muse or a poet but a mysterious oracle, a dark and spooky icon. Emily Dickinson ’s bird is the embodiment of the steadfast virtues of hope and faith , while Thomas Hardy’s thrush lights a tiny spark of hope in a dark time. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s caged bird epitomizes the soul’s cry for freedom, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ windhover is ecstasy in flight. Wallace Stevens’ blackbird is a metaphysical prism, viewed thirteen ways, while Robert Frost ’s exposed nest is the occasion for a parable of good intentions never completed. D.H. Lawrence’s turkey-cock is an emblem of the New World, both gorgeous and repulsive, and William Butler Yeats ’ swan is the ruling god of the Old World, the classical myth poured into a 20th century sonnet.

Ode to a Nightingale | BirdNote Shows » Ode to a Nightingale Ode to a Nightingale Support More Shows Like This The Common Nightingale is a shy and plain-looking bird, but its song is lovely. In Ode to a Nightingale, the English poet John Keats wrote: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; ..." You can learn more about the nightingale from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Read the full poem at EnglishHistory.net. from Ode to a Nightingale By John Keats This is BirdNote! [Song of the Nightingale] The beauty of bird song will abide as long as the natural world abides. In Ode to a Nightingale, his famous poem about death and immortality, the English poet John Keats wrote: 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 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 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 fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades 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? [Song of the Nightingale] To read Ode to a Nightingale in its entirety, come to birdnote.org. I’m Frank Corrado.

### Song of the Nightingale provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by A.B. Van den Berg. Producer: John Kessler © 2013 Tune In to Nature.org July 2013 Narrator: Frank Corrado ID# 062906KeatsKPLU keats-01FCr Ode to a Nightingale - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar read this poet's poems English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother's death, Keats's maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.

Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "O Solitude." Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . The group's influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood's declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats's genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published.

Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews. Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing "Hyperion" upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as "The Fall of Hyperion" (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his "posthumous existence." In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.

Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished "Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode to a Nightingale." The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion. The fragment "Hyperion" was considered by Keats's contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor's orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn.

He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. Selected Bibliography The Poems of John Keats (1978) The Poems of John Keats (1970) The Poems of John Keats (1970) Collections: The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1831) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.

Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) Poems (1817) Letters of John Keats: A New Selection (1970) The Letters of John Keats (1958) Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) Drama Otho The Great: A Dramatic Fragment (1819) King Stephen: A Dramatic Fragment (1819) Ode to a Nightingale: John Keats - Summary and Critical Analysis Login Ode to a Nightingale: John Keats - Summary and Critical Analysis Keats's Ode to a Nightingale is considered one of the finest odes in English Literature. It reveals the highest imaginative powers of the poet. The poem was inspired by the song of a nightingale which the poet heard in the gardens of his friend Charles Brown. John Keats The sweet music of the nightingale sent the poet in rapture and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table, put it on the grass-plot under the plum tree and composed the poem.

After he had finished the poem he came back with scraps of paper in his hand. Brown rescued the papers and found them to be the poem on the nightingale. Thus the poem is an expression of Keats's feelings rising in his heart at the hearing of the melodious song of the bird. The song of the nightingale moves from the poet to the depth of his heart and creates in him a heartache and numbness as is created by the drinking of hemlock. He thinks that the bird lives in a place of beauty. When he hears the nightingale's song, he is entrenched by its sweetness and his joy becomes so excessive that it changes into a kind of pleasant pain. He is filled with a desire to escape from the world of cares to the world of beautiful place of the bird. The poem presents the picture of the tragedy of human life. It brings out an expression of Keats's pessimism and dejection. He composed this poem at the time when his heart was full of sorrow. His youngest brother Tom had died, the second one had gone abroad and the poet himself was under the suspense and agony by the passionate love for Fanny Brawne. All these happenings had induced in the poet a mood of sorrow.

He could not suppress it. Thus the poet enjoys the pleasure in sadness/ pain and feasts upon the very sadness/ pain into joy. This complex emotion gives the poem a unique charm. In the beginning, Keats seems to be an immature youth with a melancholic heart urging to find a means of oblivion and escape. On catching the sight of a nightingale and hearing its music, which he assumes to be an immortal voice of happiness, Keats feels that his body is getting benumbed. But, he also feels an acute pain because he is conscious of his mortality and suffering. He fantasies of having drunk hemlock or 'some dull opiate': "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, / my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk." The initial situation of awareness and conflict is slowly to change and develop throughout the ode with a corresponding shift in tone. The tragic awareness of suffering inflicts on him a peculiar kind of ache because the opposing effect of dullness, which is the effect of desire, is increasing. The awareness is a burden that makes him 'sunk' gradually towards the world of oblivion.

After describing his plight, Keats acknowledges, rather than envy the bird's 'happy lot' and participates in its permanent happiness. He identifies the bird with dryad, the Greek Goddess of the tree. He contrasts the mortality and suffering of human being with the immortality and perfect happiness of the nightingale. Of course, Keats immortalizes the bird by thinking of the race of it as the symbol of universal and undying musical voice, which is the voice of nature, and also of ideal romantic poetry, of the world of art and spirit. This universal and eternal voice has comforted human beings embittered by life and tragedies by opening the casement of the remote, magical, spiritual, eternal, and the ideal. The poet is longing for the imaginative experience of an imaginatively perfect world. At this stage in the poem, the poet is trying to escape from the reality, and experience the ideal rather than complement one with the other. This dualism is to resolve later. Keats begins by urging for poison and wine, and then desires for poetic and imaginative experience.

But, as the poem develops, one feels that the numbness and intoxication the poet deliberately and imaginatively imposes upon his senses of pain are meant to awaken a higher sense of experience. The vintage, dance and song, the waters of poetic inspiration are the warmth of the south together make a compound and sensuous appeal. Keats develops a dialectic by partaking both the states-the fretful here of man and the happy there of the Nightingale-and serves as the mediator between the two. After activating the world of insight and inner experience by obliterating that of the sense, Keats is revived into a special awareness of the conflict. With this awareness, he moves into a higher thematic ground moving from the ache of the beginning through yearning for permanence and eventually exploring the tension so as to balance the transient with the permanent. In fact, no one can escape into the ideal world forever. Imaginative minds can have a momentary flight into the fanciful world. But, ultimately one has to return to the real world and must accept the reality. John Keats is no exception to this. He makes imaginative flights into the ideal world but accepts the realities of life despite its 'fever, fret and fury'.

The process of experience he has undergone has undoubtedly left him with a heightened awareness of both the modes of experience. When the imaginative life wakes, the pressures of ordinary experience is benumbed: and when ordinary experience becomes acute, the intensity of imaginative reality is reduced. And this makes life and experience more complete. To sum up, Keats soars high with his 'wings of poesy' into the world of ideas and perfect happiness. But the next moment, consciousness makes him land on the grounds of reality and he bids farewell to the ideal bird. At this moment, Keats must also have been conscious that the very bird, which he had idealized and immortalized, existed in the real world, mortal and vulnerable to change and suffering like himself. Browse by Poem Example Essays: Poetry John Keats 1.

John Keats John Keats was one of the great Romantic poets greatly known for the collection of poetry called the "Odes.aE John Keats once wrote that "Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one"s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.aE John Keats rejected the Church and the pious frauds of practiced religion. Although, Keats" feelings were of this, he is very keen on religious sensibility. Keats shows he is always searching for personal faith that will eventually do him justice. ... In Keats" work on "Ode to a Grecian... Word Count: 289 2. Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats John Keats was an English Romantic poet who died in England at the age of 25 of tuberculosis. His poetry is characterized by lots of imagery and a series of odes. ... We could assume that by "Poesy" Keats possibly refers to the power of his imagination and creativeness that he transfers into his poetry. ...

Later on, Keats wants to escape real life and accompany the bird, not with wine, but with a more powerful agent, the imagination, which in turn can refer to his poetry. ... Ode to a Nightingale is considered as a very beautiful poem authored by John Keats. ... Word Count: 952 3. John Keats John Keats once said about Lord Byron "He describes what he sees - I describe what I imagine, mine is the hardest taskaE To Autumn is evidence of his way of thinking, as the poem is a vivid, lyrical portrayal of the English autumn, as he imagined it. The poem celebrates autumn as a season of abundance, a season of reflection, a season of preparation for the winter, and a season worthy of admiration with comparison to what romantic poetry often focuses upon - the spring. ... It is unclear why Keats chose to follow a different rhyme scheme for the last two stanzas, but it is certainly not ... Word Count: 618 4. Poetry of john keats What are the features that most distinguish the poetry of KeatsThe last of the great romantic poets to be born, and the first to die was John Keats. ...

One can accept Keats' poetry without any further word about it, that is the beauty. ... However, in reality we will often feel rather helpless when confronted with a poem in all its mysterious beauty, staying silent at our awe.One of the many things that attracts us to the poetry of John Keats is his extraordinary ability to inspire the reader to greater understanding of his works. ... The points of interest raised throughout Keats l... Word Count: 1359 5. Keats-When I Have Fears Analysis John Keats only lived for 26 years and faced harsh criticism to his poetry during his time but is now considered by some as one of the great Romantic poets of the 19th century. ... Keats soon left the apprenticeship to focus on his poetry. In one of Keats" most famous poems, "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to be...aE Keats explains to the reader his fears of dying before he is able to share with everyone all that he knows. ... John Keats gets his message across to the audience through his use of metaphorical and symbolic language and structure. Keats initially emphasizes his purpose ... Word Count: 529 6.

John Keats John Keats was born in London at the end of October 1795. ... In The Use of Poetry (1933), T.S. Eliot referred to the letters of Keats as " the most notable and the most important ever written by and English poet, " primarily because " there is hardly one statement of Keats poetry, which ... will not be found true.aE Keats can be very easily identified as becoming one of the greatest poets in only 25 years. ... Then, in 1818 Keats brother Tom died of tuberculosis foreshadowing Keats" own death. ... John"s grandmother set aside a rather large trust fund for the children but the poorly cho... Word Count: 284 7. John Keats The poems, "When I have fears that I may cease to be,aE and "Why did I laugh to-night,aE written by John Keats, relate to death and have similarities and differences in some respects. ...

Sidney Colvin notes in the book John Keats: His Life and Poetry "in the light of the tragedy to come its two first quatrains now seem to thrill with prophetic meaningaE (259). ... John Middleton Murry states in the book Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats" Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820 "it is not a reply to his own question: "Why did I laugh?"... Keats says that world"s vanity is disappe... Word Count: 1233 8. Romanticism in Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats John Keats was a respected English writer from the Romantic Era, specifically known for his poetry. ... In John Keats's poem, "Ode to a Nightingale," he characterizes the Romantic Era through his discontent with the tiredness of the real world, and he attempts to use the nightingale as a representation of an ideal world where beauty and love are not subject to change. ... "One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. ...

This freedom allowed authors like John Keats to express themselves through their poetry like they ha... Word Count: 1565 9. To Sleep by John Keats John Keats was a major part in romantic poetry in the early 1800"s. ... Keats starts off the poem by saying "O soft embalmer of the still midnightaE. ... John Keats goes on by comparing the casket being buried to a mole that is burrowing. ... So in the end Keats creates a mood in which the reader is able to follow and easily understandable. ... Word Count: 310 10. comparison between John Keats and Alfred Tennyson English Coursework Pre 1914 Poetry John Keats and Alfred Tennyson Both "The Lady of ShalottaE and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A balladaE are pre 1914 poetry.

The poets Alfred Tennyson and john Keats wrote many other fine written poems which include "the charge of the light paradeaE, "Morte d"ArthuraE written by Tennyson and "to autumnaE and "such wordsaE written by John Keats."... The author John Keats uses many techniques in this romantic thriller.The first stanza of the poem "The Lady of ShalottaE starts with the description of the setting... Word Count: 1659 11. The Unsolved Riddle "Ode on a Grecian UrnaEThe Unsolved Riddle: a One Act Play Almost throughout the history of English poetry never came a poem so controversial as Keats" " Ode On a Grecian UrnaE. ... The urn finally sets Keats" mind, consequently his readers", to peace. ...

The paradox is that Keats seemed to be ignorant of the famous Shakespearean couplet of sonnet 18:"So long as men can live or eyes can seeSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee.aEIt is true that the urn outlived Keats in body, but never in name, for it is impossible to think of this Grecian urn without the mention... Word Count: 1325 12. Creating Meaning in Ode to a Nightingale The poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by the romantic poet John Keats is about a man sitting alone outside at night listening to a nightingale sing somewhere in the woods. ... Keats describes flying to the nightingale on "the viewless wings of Poesy" (Keats line 33). "Poesy" is another word for poetry and the wings with which poetry will carry him to the bird on are "viewless" - they can't be seen. ... Keats also uses common mystical images to describe the world of the nightingale.

Stanza four mentions, "Bacchus and his pards," a clear allusion to the god of wine (Keats 32). ... Word Count: 600 13. Ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats, a poet who attained extraordinary achievement for his short lifetime, was born the son of a London stableman. ... Keats lived to be only 24 years old and his writing career lasted only five years. ... Keats even refers to the urn as a "Sylvan historianaE declaring that the urn can tell the story the people it"s art represents even better than poetry could. ... In stanza two Keats imagines that there is music being played in the scene. ... It should also be noted that in this stanza Keats puts a negative emphasis in his wording. ... Word Count: 899 14. John Keats: The Tragic Life of a Romantic Poet John Keats: The Tragic Life of a Romantic PoetJohn Keats was born in 1795 and wouldn"t live to see his twenty-sixth birthday. ...

During the time in which John"s mother came back into his life, he was beginning to write and it is said that due to his mother"s death, he began to take interest in schooling and poetry because of the loneliness that he felt when she died. ... With the illness of Tom came the feelings of guilt by John for wanting to still pursue poetry while his brother was deathly ill (Ward 221). ... After the death of his brother Tom, John Keats had himself and his own problems... Word Count: 1584 15. Personification in Ode on a Grecian Urn ." (Keats). ... The urn "speaks to him (the speaker) silently out of the past and in return, the speaker believes that the urn can speak more truth than his own poetry can. ... In the Bible, Jesus said (as recorded in John 14:6), "I am the way and the truth and the life..."  (Zondervan). ... Jorge Luis Borges once stated that his first encounter with John Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life (This Craft...). ...

Keats leaves a legacy to future generations by teaching though his poetry, literary devices, sensual imagery, and great knowledge.... Word Count: 1262 16. Harlem V. Ode On A Grecian Urn The Death of the Human Spirit in "HarlemaE and "Ode on a Grecian UrnaEAlthough Langston Hughes"s "HarlemaE and John Keats" "Ode on a Grecian UrnaE were written about 130 years apart and they differ in their structure, they seem to share a similar underlying theme. ... In order to understand the meaning behind John Keats" somewhat longer poem, "Ode on a Grecian UrnaE, the reader has to look past the words written to reveal their true meaning. ... Both Hughes and Keats have thrown questions into their poetry. ... Keats appears to be questioning man"s existence. ... Word Count: 891 17.

Comparison/Contrast The Death of the Human Spirit in "HarlemaE and "Ode on a Grecian UrnaEAlthough Langston Hughes"s "HarlemaE and John Keats" "Ode on a Grecian UrnaE were written about 130 years apart and they differ in their structure, they seem to share a similar underlying theme. ... In order to understand the meaning behind John Keats" somewhat longer poem, "Ode on a Grecian UrnaE, the reader has to look past the words written to reveal their true meaning. ... Both Hughes and Keats have thrown questions into their poetry. ... Keats appears to be questioning man"s existence. ... Word Count: 891 18.

âKeatsâs Odes of May 1819 articulate a Profoundly Divided Se "Keats"s Odes of May 1819 articulate a Profoundly Divided Self.aE Discuss.The poetry of John Keats articulates an astonishing literary liturgy, which has influenced much of the study of nineteenth century literature; though during his short lifetime he was deemed to be a "lower class cockney," and an ignorant, unsettled "pretender" to a higher culture. ... These two are polar opposites and show to great extent the profound and deep intensity with which Keats constructs his poetry. ... As readers, we can see these strengths brilliantly manifested within the poetry and that Keats has a pre... Word Count: 2837 20. Ode on a grecian urn John Keats, a well-respected poet of the late 1700"s, early 1800"s is known for the Odes he has written. ... Keats has chosen the preposition "on" instead of "to" as a way of reflecting a connection between the narrator and the pictures the urn depicts. ...

As time passes the urn will continue to evoke a story from its observer as does poetry that may merely be written lines on a page; however, it too stimulates a response from its reader. ... Word Count: 2302 21. Time's Anguish Time"s Anguish John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley both use a material object as a metaphor in their poems to demonstrate the ability or inability of anything to endure temporal change. ... Music and poetry are both dependent on time to interpret and understand their forms. ... Keats is uncertain of the possibility and the desirability of eternal and immortal beauty. For Keats, the figures on the Urn are free from time, yet they are simultaneously frozen in time. ... Although Keats"s Urn preserves history unchanged over time since it lacks sensual fulfillment, Keats wonders if the sacrifice... Word Count: 982 22. WHAT IS POETRY? Yet, it is hard to talk about poetry. ... Thus, defining poetry is not an easy task. ... Cummings defines poetry emphasizing its impact upon a man. ...

John Keats wrote in his "LettersaE that poetry "(...) should surprise by a fine excess, (...) it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a RemembranceaE. ... Poetry is one of the things that can"t be made bigger and better. ... Word Count: 799 23. What is Poetry Yet, it is hard to talk about poetry. ... Thus, defining poetry is not an easy task. ... Cummings defines poetry emphasizing its impact upon a man. ... John Keats wrote in his "LettersaE that poetry "(...) should surprise by a fine excess, (...) it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a RemembranceaE. ... Poetry is one of the things that can"t be made bigger and better. ... Word Count: 752 24. Question Responds There are many questions that arise when reading poetry. ... As for me I do not only question the poetry, but the poet himself. ... One such poet whose work piques the interest of many is John Keats. Just as any other poet, Keats has a very unique style. ...

Did Keats come up with this poem in a dream of some sort? ... Word Count: 1065

Question: Which bird was the subject of an ode by John Keats?
Answer: Nightingale