Keats's ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE Scott, Heidi Explicator; Spring2005, Vol.

63 Issue 3, p139-141, 3p Heldref Publications

Keatss ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE In an April 1819 letter to his brother and sister, Keats confessed his struggles with finding his ideal poetic form, struggles that manifested themselves in his abandonment of the Miltonic blank verse of Hyperion. In the letter, he included several sonnets that showed a diversion from both the English and Italian forms:
I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate [Petrarchan] does not suit the language over-well from the pouncing rhymesthe other kind [Shakespearian] appears too elegiac and the couplet at the end seldom has a pleasing effectI do not pretend to have succeeded. (Perkins 1249)

Keats was on the verge of one of the more famed periods of mania in literary historythe summer of 1819, during which he produced all the great odes, Lamia, and The Fall of Hyperion. He created an ode stanza that evolved from the sonnet tradition, but permitted him to have a more fully developed progression than the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Helen Vendler, in her famous analysis of the odes, reminds us that Keatss development of each ode from its predecessors reveals the energy with which the poet is pursuing experiments on his own linguistic and figurative resources (29192). The ode form is appropriate for prolonged mental excursions, yet the momentum remains alive with the tight, regular meter and rhyme, the footprint of his ode stanza. In May, Keats embarked on the Ode to a Nightingale, a Horatian ode extemporaneously composed in the garden at Hampstead Heath. The Horatian ode is meditative and restrained; it is not so much a celebration of its subject as a deep contemplation sparked by some externality. It provides the most regular stanzas of any of his odes, with a rhyme scheme (ababcdecde) that is, in actuality, the quatrain of a Shakespearean sonnet joined with the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet. It forsakes the rhyming couplets, with their jocular but irreverent and pouncing effect. Each line of the ten-line stanza is (roughly) iambic pentameter, except for the eighth line, the second c rhyme, which is trimeter. The short line allows the poet to refer back to the central line of the stanza (by virtue of the rhyme), and to open out to the concluding lines of the stanza (by virtue of the rhythm), with the effect of a sonnet ending:
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been Coold a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 139

And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: (1120)

This stanza is an ode to wine, or more specifically Bacchus, with the synechdoche of purple-stained mouth. The first four lines, self-contained in the Shakespearean quatrain, are reiterated in the fifth through eighth lines, which are tied together by the South/mouth rhyme. The trimeter line pulls that passage together two feet before the readers expectation, providing a surprising tightness in the verse and leaving time for a pause before the concluding lines, which therein take on an additional gravity. The final two lines are not a couplet, but they are set apart by the trimeter line, so the stanza draws to a distinct but graceful conclusion. Line 20 is one of the rare deviations from form: it is an alexandrine, which in its extra foot extends the remoteness of the poets imagined wanderings. Keats could easily have made the line pentameter; away is not necessary for a proper construction of the image. But away into has the effect of both going and coming, a mutual inclusion of place that accords with the vagueness of the forest dim. The line could be seen as a microcosm of the poem as a whole, which dwells on a vagueness of place, a waning of the senses, the passage of time in a world of hungry generations (line 62). Keatss efficiency and art with this form are hardly surprising, considering his extended self-training in sonnet writing. He assumes a confident, if lugubrious, voice as he takes on subjects that are both external (the song of the nightingale) and internal (his perception of a transient world). The poet seeks to leave behind the weariness, the fever, and the fret (23) of a world of mortals, who are slaves of time and subservient to pain, aging, and death. Keats crafts his poem with a familiar sonnetlike turn that occurs, instead of after an octave or before a closing couplet, a full seventy lines into the ode. He concludes:
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 famd to do, deceiving elf. (7174)

The spell is broken. Filled with the company of the birds song and the thought it inspires, the poet is brought back to earthly consciousness by a knell-like word to the retreating song. He is left in a state of confusion, between whatever reality might be and what the fancy creates, raising questions of ontology. He has lost his muse: Fled is that music:Do I wake or sleep? (7980). The final word, sleep, is rhymed with buried deep, which may give the reader a sense of Keatss own conclusion. HEIDI SCOTT, University of Maryland
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WORKS CITED Keats, John. Ode to a Nightingale. John Keats: Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. 27981. Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Poes TO ONE IN PARADISE

Thou wast all to me, love, For which my soul did pine A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine. Ah, dream too bright to last! Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise But to be overcast! A voice from out the Future cries, On, on!but oer the Past (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies Mute, motionless, aghast! For, alas! alas! with me The light of Life is oer! No moreno moreno more (Such language holds the solemn sea To the sands upon the shore) Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, Or the stricken eagle soar! And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams.

Edgar Allan Poe originally introduced To One in Paradise (18331849), an inscription to a lost love, in a context that, interestingly, pluralizes the very notion of loss. For if the concept is commonly indicative of deathas the mention of Paradise seems to corroboratethe short lyric also points at its figurative signification. Indeed, T. O. Mabbott, in his introduction to the poem in his scholarly edition of Poes work, informs us that Poe inserted it in his tale The Visionary (subsequently called The Assignation) as the
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