ODE TO NIGHTINGALE ANALYSIS WINDOWS

The fact that the nightingale’s song induces a feeling of exquisite happiness in the poet cannot be separated from the fact that there is also something druglike – indeed, toxic – about its influence.

Right from the beginning of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the song of the nightingale is altering Keats’s perception of the world around him: he feels as though he is under the influence of chemical stimulants, and anybody who knows the story of Socrates doesn’t need to be told about why it’s a bad idea to drink hemlock. In this respect, the nightingale – often gendered as female – is not so different from the deceiving fairy-like creature who seduces the knight-at-arms in Keats’s great ballad-poem ‘ La Belle Dame sans Merci’. The nightingale is a ‘deceiving elf’: unearthly and also distorting the reality or truth of the world around us. The poem is not Wordsworth’s encounter with the daffodils, where the poet is inspired and buoyed by nature alone the nightingale’s power is in transforming the poet’s mental state altogether, like a drug or a strong wine, and taking him away from the rather humdrum world that surrounds him. For running throughout ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a desire to leave behind the real world, even the world of nature as it is, for a world of ‘fancy’ or ‘fairy’. Yet it is not quite so simple as all that. This is partly, of course, what makes ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ clearly a Romantic poem: it is the individual coming into contact with the natural world, and finding kinship with it.

It’s worth recalling that there is a longstanding tradition whereby the song of the nightingale is likened to the ‘song’ of the poet: in this sense, then, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ can be analysed as an encounter between two ‘singers’ or ‘poets’, one from the world of nature and one from the world of human society. In summary, did he really leave behind the real world for an enchanted world with the nightingale? The nightingale’s song recedes, and the poet is left wondering whether it was all a dream. In the final stanza, Keats picks up on the last word of the penultimate stanza – ‘forlorn’ – and so we return to the beginning of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, with Keats’s ‘heart aches’, just as the word ‘forlorn’ recalls Keats to himself, and to reality.

ODE TO NIGHTINGALE ANALYSIS WINDOWS

We then leave the world of mythology and religion for the world of full-blown fairyland, as Keats imagines the song of the nightingale accompanying the opening of magic windows that open out onto the sea. Keats then refers to the Old Testament story of Ruth, who chose to remain with her mother-in-law after she was widowed, rather than returning to her own people (the Moabites): this is why she was ‘amid the alien corn’. However, the ‘immortal bird’ of the nightingale was not made to die, and both high-born and low-born people in ancient times heard the nightingale’s song.

Ode to nightingale analysis