Romanticism is considered to be one of the most important historical events to have taken place. It began in Western Europe in the mid-18th century in the works of artists, poets, philosophers and subsequently spread all across the world from 1750 to 1900. Romanticism is best understood as a reaction to the birth of the modern world and some of its key features – industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and consumerism and it dramatically changed the preexisting notions people had of looking at love, sex, money, and children. Though the writers of the time did not call themselves ‘Romantics’, a common emphasis on individual thought, personal feeling, and nature was seen in the works of the poets like William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, and John Keats which bridged them together. John Keats (1795-1821) was one of the most important Romantic poets who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. “Ode to a Nightingale” is one of the six odes written by Keats, composed in the summer of 1819, in which the central symbol of the poem, “The Nightingale” holds the focus of the poem together or keeps his train of thought running to mediate between the claims of the imagination and the claims of reality.
“Ode to a Nightingale” is riven with tensions that produce a crisis of the self. In the poem, we see the representation of two worlds – the world of the poet and the world of the nightingale. Keats presents a contrast between the two worlds which is augmented by the poet’s longing for the world of the nightingale. The entire poem is filled with the desire of the poet to escape his world and become one with the nightingale but a failure in his intentions becomes evident at the end as the poet is brought back to the self. Along with that, a doubt is cast upon the entire experience through the lines at the end, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” putting forth the dominating question of the mortality of human consciousness. With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!” Keats deals with the questions of human mortality in the poem through the nightingale which is a symbol of immortality, having lost his younger brother, Tom around six months before in December, 1818 to Tuberculosis and he was also very much aware of his own approaching death, as the same can be seen in his correspondence with his close friend Charles Brown, in the letters written in November, 1820. Another form of concern towards mortality that Keats had was regarding the uncertainty that he saw in himself and the transient nature of the works he had produced which was also evident in the correspondence with his friends and something which stayed with him till his death, as it is inscribed on his epitaph in Rome, “Writ in Water.”
The poem is based on the pattern of Negative capability, an idea which was phrased by John Keats himself. Writing to his brothers, George and Thomas, in a December 1817 letter found in Selected Letters, Keats coins the phrase that has come to be the single most emblematic phrase of his entire surviving correspondence, even though he only makes mention of it once: “Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity. Triggered by Keats’s disagreement with the English poet and philosopher Coleridge, whose quest for definitive answers over beauty laid the foundations for modern-day reductionism, the concept is a beautiful articulation of a familiar sentiment — that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what derives science, that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. So, for Keats, Negative Capability was an ideal of a certain open mindedness. He didn’t want his mind to be hungering after truth. He believed that in order to be a poet, one should be able to open their mind to the passage thought and be more accepting of ideas. “As poets we should be able to remain in uncertainty, mysteries, doubts and remaining content on half knowledge.” Similar to what he writes in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” “Ode to a Nightingale” is an illustration of Negative capability where we see the poet pursue a train of thought with uncertainty, the platform for which is provided by the symbol of the nightingale. This can be used to resolve the uncertainty that is posed by the end of the poem, as the uncertainty or not knowing itself is the answer to the looming question.
Why did Keats choose the nightingale’s song as the basis of meditation in this poem? Critics like Helen Vendler believe that in the choice of music Keats finds a symbol of pure beauty, non-representational, without any reference to ideas, to moral or social values. The nightingale’s song is vocal, but without verbal content, and can serve as a pure expressive beauty. Others have argued that it represents the music of nature, which can be contrasted with human art, verbal or musical. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, 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 through the lines, “The weariness, the fever, and the fret”, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace “the viewless wings of Poesy.” The ecstatic music even encourages the poet 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 ( ‘I have been half in love with easeful death,’ ‘Now more than ever does it seem rich to die’). But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn” at the beginning of stanza eight, he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is, an imagined escape from the inescapable.
A sudden realization through the lines “still woudst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – To thy requiem become a sod” at the end of stanza six causes a change in the tone maintained throughout the course of the poem. He realises, however, that the ultimate form of forgetfulness, of escape from the troubles of life, would be death. Death at such a moment, listening to the nightingale pouring forth its soul in ecstasy, would be the supreme ending. And yet death is rejected. As the poet realises, the bird would sing on, and he would be unable to hear it. While all humans must die, the nightingale is, in some sense, immortal. The poet, thinking back to the classical world of the Roman emperors and to the Old Testament world of Ruth, considers how its song has been heard for so many centuries. This realization leads to a withdrawal of the poet from the world of fancy and puts forth the crisis of the inescapable self. But, Keats does provide a resolution to the crisis within the poem itself. In other words, we now become aware of a stiffening ambiguity throughout the poem: the world of fancy is shot through with reality, and therefore with time, death, and paradoxically, life again. Once the consciousness has been jogged into readmitting death into its Cognito, the outcome is renewed life. The escape offered by fancy has failed; Keats becomes aware that only a world that includes death can offer plentitude of life. The same has been pointed out by the critic Walter Evert, ‘the brutal fact is that escape from the world of mutability entails as a necessary correlative the loss of that same world’s beauty.’ Also, another problematic point is Keats’s final question on the status of his experience: `Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’ which can be correctly resolved by the remarks made by the critic Katherine Wilson, “The experience of the nightingale’s song was a reality – a reality experienced for too short a time. That an experience comes to an end does not mean it never was. Keats does not repudiate it.”
Through “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats has been successful in pursuing his idea of Negative capability, as he does in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and Shakespeare had done in his 1603 play, Hamlet. By using the symbol of the Nightingale, he has been able to raise concerns over his own fears, mortality, and consciousness and found an answer to them within the uncertainty and by means of acceptance of the human condition. Keats, in spite of his short career as a poet and humble beginnings, continues to be one of the most celebrated Romantic poets and has clearly become an integral member of the canon of English poetry. Over 100 years have passed since the end of the Romantic era but the ideas formulated by that generation of artists, poets, and philosophers continue to shape our understanding of different notions like life, romance, and love even in the contemporary world.