'Ode to a Nightingale'

Ode to a Nightingale summary:

• speaker is experiencing a sadness, translated into a drowsy numbness

• he becomes deeply aware of the happiness of the nightingale he hears singing

• resulting pleasure is so intense it becomes painful

• he longs for an intoxicant, letting him achieve union with the nightingale → take him out of the world

• he wants to escape the worries + concerns of life, forget human suffering and despair and the transience of all experience

hemlock:

poisonous plant

Lethe:

a river that runs through Hades → if consumed, drinkers forget everything

hypnogagia

a kind of weary ‘inner-voice’ that comes out → Ode to a Nightingale

Dryad:

Dryads live a long time, not subject to time

“deep-delved Earth” is a…

Homeric epithet!

“Provencal song”:

song from Provence, a region of the South of France. The phrase suggests both grape harvests + the songs of medieval minstrels

Hippocrene:

The Hippocrene spring (see the etymology) was sacred to the Muses, and its waters were said to imbue the drinker with poetic inspiration.

Summary of stanzas 4,5, and 6 - Ode to a Nightingale:

• Wine is rejected in favour of the poetic imagination

• enters a twilight region of the mind

• he can see nothing, the senses feed his imagination

• uses poetry to join the nightingale’s world of moon + stars

• Keats can’t see the flowers in poems, but he can smell them

• contemplates leaving the world altogether

Bacchus painting:

Painting of Ariadne + Bacchus by Titian in the National Gallery:

“not charioted by Bacchus”

Keats rejects wine in favour of the intoxication of poetry

“Queen-Moon”

Selene, the goddess of the Moon

myth of Bacchus and Ariadne:

Bacchus gives Ariadne a crown of seven stars, which becomes the constellation Corona Borealis - a literal elevation to the heavens. Ariadne is rescued by Bacchus’s divine gift - something that Keats rejects.

“winding mossy ways” of the intangible forest in Ode to a Nightingale:

• labyrinthine

• Theseus must escape the Labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. He follows a thread given by Ariadne, guiding him out of the winding and confusing passages.

• Keats’s forest labyrinth is a liminal space between mortality and immortal song

vision in Ode to a Nightingale:

“I cannot see” → this transient experience is all in the imagination

Stanza 5 of Ode to a Nightingale makes references to…

Oberon’s speech in Act II Scene I → A Midsummer Night’s Dream

• toying with the temporary and escapist wonder of fiction

• “violet, musk-rose, eglantine” taken directly from Oberon

  • fusion of senses in a dreamlike atmosphere - nature as an otherworldly threshold

what is a violet a symbol of (stanza v, Ode to a Nightingale)

innocence, but they are fast-fading → youth and imagination fades

“the murmurous haunts of lies on summer eyes”

gaudy + macabre undercuts the mood

“Darkling”

shift in mood towards death

what does Keats realise in the final stanza of Ode to a Nightingale?

that the nightingale will keep singing, even if Keats does not

“ease” is use 2x in Ode to a Nightingale → first to describe the nightingale’s song, and then to describe what?

death

Shakespeare Sonnet 73:

nature is cyclical → human life is not!

ekphrasis:

poetry about poetry

Philomel + the nightingale:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Philomel is raped by her sister’s husband, Tereus. Tereus cuts off her tongue, so that she cannot speak. Philomel embroiders a tapestry to tell her sister, Procne, about it.

Nightingale’s song → interpreted as a lament for death

Keats wants to find the same kind of escape that the nightingale finds

only in death is Philomel able to use her voice

images of death in Ode to a Nightingale:

• hemlock

• Lethe

• embalmed

• darkness

• requiem

• tolling bell

how long did it take Keats to write Ode to a Nightingale?

2-3 hours

Ode to a Nightingale:

• Poetry as an alternative to intoxication

• morality v immortality

• desire for oblivion

• nightingale as muse / poetic inspiration

• ambiguity of the vision

what is Oberon doing in his speech?

ordering Robin Goodfellow to “streak [Helena’s] eyes” with a magical flower

what kind of rhyme scheme to Ode to a Nightingale have?

a Keatsian ABABCDECDE rhyme scheme - rhyme scheme never goes unbroken.

final 2 lines serve as an allusion to…

Hamlet (1599) - “to be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”

reference to “Ruth” in stanza VII

Moabite women who remains loyal to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi, after the death of her husband.

Embodies faithfulness and devotion

“was it a vision or a waking dream?”

escapism and sadness go hand in hand