Tragic Consolation in “Ode to a Nightingale”

Abstract

'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3 THE CONFIDENCE OF JOHN KEATS's WRITING IN 1819 WAS ACCOMPANIED by continuing uncertainty about the moral office of poetry. Most of the more ambitious texts of Keats's great year interrogate their own imaginative logic in some way and many of them, Keats critics can attest, expressly seek to understand how poet can in fact qualify as a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men. (1) It should occasion no surprise, consequently, that in to Nightingale, the nightingale's beautiful song both ravishes the poet's senses and fills him with disquietude. It is disquietude which soon affiliates itself with the tragic catalogue of the poem's third stanza. Doubts of the real worth of poetry were crowding in upon Keats as he wrote those opening lines, David Bromwich speculates; for at worst is done out of vanity may be judged by posterity to have been done in vain. Is not every poet an egoist, compared to every nurse? How is Tom's death to be weighed in the balance with the composition of an ode? (2) These questions, I agree, were deeply implicated in the occasion of Keats's Ode. The project of is both to commemorate lapsing happiness and to ask, what then? What solace can Keats's poem or any poem offer to the victims of world Where but to think is to be full of sorrow (27)? In addressing such questions, the procedure of to Nightingale becomes historicist in James Chandler's sense of the term: as historicist exercise, the Ode is unavoidably concerned with its cultural modernity, and concerned to investigate that modernity by placing it in dialogic interplay with past texts and discourses. (3) That imperative explains in fact the typically Keatsian literariness of Nightingale: as elsewhere in Keats the poem's intertextual linkages serve as historical references to previous poems and their defining values, among which the poet must then find his own way. Here, though, Keats's historicist intertextuality works in tandem with his Ode's dramatic rhetoric. is still frequently regarded as sublime or visionary poem which charts the poet's progressive rejection of transcendent flight. In my view, the Ode overrules transcendence right from the start: Keats assumes the inadequacy of idealizing dream rather than making it his poem's lesson and story, and so sets himself to tell different kind of story. The earthbound meditation of takes the form of dramatic soliloquy detached from its theatrical context; and indeed the poem reflects both Keats's appreciation of Edmund Kean's innovative acting and William Hazlitt's dramatic criticism, especially his Characters of Shakespear's Plays. These are the chief influences on the defense of modern poetry's consolatory office that finally hazards. By its analysis of the psychology of idealism, the Ode dismisses the traditional consolations of western philosophical and religious tradition: they cannot provide modern poetry with effective consolatory resources, and their various defenders, Wordsworth in particular, must be firmly resisted. The secular alternative that dramatizes Keats takes from his understanding of tragic representation. 1. to Nightingale has been often declared one of the most densely echoic of Keats's lyric poems. (4) The Ode reveals creative mind well-stored with its reading and habituated to incorporating that reading into even its most personal, emotionally urgent efforts of self-expression. Yet the imagination which announces itself in the poem's bold opening lines is from the beginning functioning in an intellectually associative fashion and recalling some texts rather than others because of their pertinence to the poem's thematic concerns. …