Ode to Nightingale: Critique and Analysis/ Keatss Ode to Nightingale is a fine

piece of impersonality and journey into Negative Capability. Discuss!

The speaker responds to the beauty of the nightingales song with a both happiness
and ache. Though he seeks to fully identify with the bird to fade away into the
forest dim he knows that his own human consciousness separates him from nature
and precludes the kind of deathless happiness the nightingale enjoys.
First the intoxication of wine and later the viewless wings of Poesy seem reliable ways
of escaping the confines of the dull brain, but finally it is death itself that seems the
only possible means of overcoming the fear of time. The nightingale is immortal
because it wast not born for death and cannot conceive of its own passing. Yet without
consciousness, humans cannot experience beauty, and the speaker knows that if he were
dead his perception of the nightingales call would not exist at all. This paradox shatters
his vision, the nightingale flies off, and the speaker is left to wonder whether his
experience has been a truthful vision or a false dream. Referred to by critics of the
time as "the longest and most personal of the odes," the poem describes Keats' journey
into the state of Negative Capability. John Keats coined the phrase 'Negative Capability'
in a letter to his brothers and defined his new concept of writing:
that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
Keats' poems are full of contradictions in meaning ('a drowsy numbness pains') and
emotion ('both together, sane and mad') and he accepts a double nature as a creative
insight. In Nightingale it is the apparent (or real) contradictions that allow Keats to
create the sensual feeling of numbness that allows the reader to experience the halfswooning emotion Keats is trying to capture. Keats would have us experience the
emotion of the language and pass over the half-truths in silence, to live a life 'of
sensations rather than of Thoughts!'. Thus, Ode to the Nightingale is more feeling than
a thinking poem. Keats often deals in the sensations created by words rather than
meaning. Even if the precise definition of words causes contradiction they can still be
used together to create the right ambience. Negative Capability asks us to allow the
atmosphere of Keats' poems to surround us without picking out individual meanings
and inconsistencies.
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen
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" and chooses instead to embrace "the viewless
wings of Poesy." The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture
of the nightingale's music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine
himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the
speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while

enraptured by the nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or
disappointment.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known
The poet explores the themes of nature and mortality. Here, the transience of life and
the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale's fluid music.
Man has many sorrows to escape from in the world, and these Keats recounts feelingly
in the third stanza of his poem, a number of the references apparently being drawn from
firsthand experience. The mention of the youth who "grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies," for example, might well be an allusion to Tom Keats, the younger brother whom
the poet nursed through his long, last struggle with consumption. But the bitterest of all
man's sorrows, as it emerges from the catalogue of woes in the third stanza, is the
terrible disease of time, the fact that Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. It is the
disease of time which the song of the nightingale particularly transcends, and the poet,
yearning for the immortality of art, seeks another way to become one with the bird.
Even death is terribly final; the artists die but what remains is the eternal music; the
very song heard today was heard thousands of years ago. The poet exclaims:
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
The reverie into which the poet falls carries him deep into where the bird is singing. But
the meditative trance cannot last. With the very first word of the eighth stanza, the
reverie is broken. The word forlorn occurs to the poet as the adjective describing the
remote and magical world suggested by the nightingales song. But the poet suddenly
realises that this word applies with greater precision to himself. The effect is that of an
abrupt stumbling. With the new and chilling meaning of forlorn, the song of the
nightingale itself alters: it becomes a plaintive anthem. The song becomes fainter.
What had before the power to make the sorrow in man fade away from a harsh and
bitter world, now itself fades and the poet is left alone in the silence. As the nightingale
flies away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken, unable to
remember whether he is awake or asleep; thus "Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well.
The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without
record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the
speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in
favor of the other senses. In "Nightingale," he has achieved creative expression and has
placed his faith in it, but that expression--the nightingale's song--is spontaneous and
without physical manifestation. This is an odd poem because it both conforms to and
contradicts some of the ideas he expresses elsewhere, notably the famous concept of
Negative Capability,. This can be taken several ways, but is often linked with the
statement he made:
If a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and
pick about the Gravel.

While Keatss begins his poem with a drowsy numbness pains the poem that follows is
anything but numb. But the opening ties in with the words that end the poem: Fled is
that music Do I wake or sleep? Life is or may be a dream a very Shakespearean
image but, dreaming or awake, perception and empathetic participation are rooted in
Keatss own consciousness. It is only in dreaming, Keats says, that we can become
conscious of, and merged with, the life around us. Thus, Keats heads towards Negative
Capability in the poem. Keats is not as great as Shakespeare but he has the same power
of self-absorption, that wonderful sympathy and identification with all things, that
Negative Capability which he saw as essential to the creation of great poetry and which
Shakespeare possessed so abundantly.