Ode to a Nightingale Flashcards

Flashcards on Keats' Ode to a Nightingale.

Romanticism

An empirical philosophy that understood knowledge from emotions, feelings, and imagination rather than intellect.

Empiricism

A way of understanding knowledge from emotions and feelings, the imagination rather than intellect

Romanticism

A philosophical revolution that reacted against the Enlightenment or Augustan tradition, the age of reason.

Negative Capability

When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Death and Mutability

Key concepts that underpin all of Keats' poetry.

Cockney School of Poetry

Conservative reviewers coined this phrase for Keats, Leigh Hunt, and John Haslett.

Nightingale

Often acted as an allegory for courtly love in medieval literature.

Myth of Philomena

Turned into a nightingale after being raped and tortured, stressing melancholy and suffering in connection to love and song.

Nightingale's Song

Offers a nonverbal form of beauty or the music of nature, perhaps a metaphor for poetry.

Ode to a Nightingale

Written at one of Keats' happiest times despite its focus on mortality.

Ode to a Nightingale

An intense meditation on the contrast between painful mortality and the immortality beauty found in the Nightingale's song.

Stanza 1 (Ode to a Nightingale)

The speaker declares his own heartache and shares the nightingale's happiness.

Stanza 2 (Ode to a Nightingale)

The speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol to disappear into the forest with the nightingale.

Stanza 3 (Ode to a Nightingale)

The speaker desires to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known.

Stanza 4(Dark to Nightingale)

Humans are aware that everything is mortal and nothing lasts.

Stanza 4 (Ode to a Nightingale)

The speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow through poetry, describing the forest glade.

Stanza 5 (Ode to a Nightingale)

Unable to see the flowers, the speaker guesses them in the darkness.

Stanza 6 (Ode to a Nightingale)

Attraction to the idea of dying seems richer, but death would mean no longer hearing the nightingale's song.

Stanza 7 (Ode to a Nightingale)

The nightingale is immortal, its song heard throughout history, charming open magic windows.

Stanza 8 (Ode to a Nightingale)

Restores the speaker from his preoccupation; questions the reality of the nightingale's music and his state of being.

Ode to a Nightingale Theme

The poem attempts to flee tragic existence, but the mind becomes lost in an embalmed darkness, suggesting death.

The Nightingale's Song

The nightingale's song is immortal and belongs to a world of enchantment.

Word 'Forlorn' in Ode

Turns into a moment of painful self-consciousness, questioning the imagination's ability to deceive.

Conclusion of Ode

The poem ends by dismantling its own illusion—the imagination.

Imagination's Role

Allows transcendence of fleeting sensations but needs temporality; no real experience is possible apart from time and change.