A Suicidal Aesthetic and The Gift of Immortality

A Suicidal Aesthetic and The Gift of Immortality

In Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, the act of transmission between poet and audience becomes complicated. At first glance, the poem would seem not as much a dedication to the physical form of a bird, but instead an ode to the idea of the bird and the subsequent feelings it evokes. Keats discovers greater meaning in the Nightingale’s song that seems to transcend mortality and hint at something more divine. Further complicating the act of transmission, the poet projects his own hopes and wishes onto the birdsong, leaving us as readers, still uncertain of what is to be read as truth and what remains fixed in the poet’s imagination: “do I wake or sleep?” (Keats, line 80). The poem’s entire narrative structure centers itself around a similar paradox, as the act of transmission becomes a one-way road. While appreciating the sublime in a Nightingale’s song, Keats also finds himself unable to return to that normative state now left behind him in the wake of ecstatic experience. In other words, Keats’ dilemma lies in his inability to fully divorce himself from the Nightingale’s beautiful song. Unable to fully relinquish what came before, locked in a present state of melancholy and half-existence, the poem displays this struggle.

Defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as a “lyric poem, often in the form of an address and having an elevated style and formal structure”, the word ode arises from the Greek word for song. In this sense, Keats constructs each verse through the repetition of a specific internal rhyme scheme. After fashioning the first four lines of each verse in ABAB, Keats eases the reader into the poem’s more musical qualities. Reflecting narrative structure, the beginning of each verse can be seen as that part of the Nightingale’s song, which is both beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. In contrast, the second half of each verse follows a more inter-woven rhyme scheme with CDECDE, both putting more emphasis on the end line as well as drawing-out the latter half of each verse. Similar to the second layer of the narrative, the rhyme reflects a more profound dynamic, mirroring that part of the nightingale’s song that flirts between life and death hinting at transcendence.

Through juxtaposition in his first verse, Keats exhibits his own personal wants and needs vis-à-vis the nightingale. He explains that his “heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains” (Keats, line 1) as his senses and entire being become “emptied” (line3) seeming to invest themselves in the bird’s song. More fully explained in the second verse, he speaks of a wanting “for a draught of vintage” (Keats, 11) “that I might drink,” (line, 19) “And with thee fade away” (line20). The bird becomes a kind of fountain of youth, presenting a separate reality that is purer and more divine than that which he is accustomed to. He writes of wishing to cross “Lethe-wards” (Keats, 4), alluding to the river in Hell from which sinners drank in order to forget their past as a kind of purification.

Continuing the trope of the Nightingale’s song as a kind of liquid substance flowing forth, Keats in line 17 writes “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”, possibly alluding to the kind of divine inspiration seen once before in Coleridge’s poetry. K. Duglin in her snip entitled Bubbles , speaks of a similar image in the rising bubbles at the fountain of Kubla Kahn revived again in the The Eolian Harp. She speaks of a “release of the conscience or …inspiration”, reflecting the poet’s appeal to a higher knowledge and experience. Similarly, Keats in his beginning verses appeals to a divine vintage that can only be tapped through the sustained song of a nightingale. The song itself represents a kind of Garden of Eden before the fall. Yet not soon after, the poem takes a sudden turn in narration as its sense of impossibility and the unattainable both loom on the horizon.

The figure of the nightingale can be seen as a double-edged sword. For in verse 3, where the Nightingale once sang of “summer in full-throated ease” (Keats, 10), instead now bears gloomy reflection of Keats own mortality. He asks to forget “What thou among the leaves hast never known, / The weariness, the fever, the fret” (Keats, 22-3) and describes the sad shortcomings of his own existence. He ends the verse by glorifying the uncanny abilities of the bird to affect greater forms of Love and Beauty. Here we see the poet’s initial recognition of the one-way road I spoke of earlier. For while the Nightingale presents an ecstatic inspiration not unlike those seen in Coleridge, it also evokes in Keats, the recognition of his own mortality and limitations. The paradox becomes even more apparent through each consecutive verse as he seems to fly between both modes of interpretation: either delving deeper into the imaginative consciousness, drunken off the spiritual music (line 19) or submitting to the mundane reality “where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;” (Keats, 26).

This strange binary existence continues in Verse 4 in what would seem an appeal to escape, to “fly to thee” (Keats, 31) where “Tender is the night” (35). Verses 4 and 5 describe both what is lacking- “But here there is no light”(Keats, 38) and what could be- “in embalmed darkness guess each sweet” (Keats, 44). Employing the metaphor of a summer evening, Keats is able to convey that dual sense of darkness and disorientation without fully eclipsing familiar senses and natural phenomena. As we will see, Keats profits off his own poetic construction implying a kind of limbic half-state. Reminiscent of another of Coleridge’s pieces, the poet appears literally locked behind the bars of his own imagination. His inability to break free from his own mental capacities, which some may argue as a form of neurosis (*refer to A Sinful and Most Miserable Man by lbridger), closely aligns Keats with This Lime Tree Bower My Prison. As a reader we can almost sense the heightened state of tension that seems to build throughout the poem between two sides never able to fully reconcile.

In what seems a non-sequitor at first, Keats dedicates verse 6 to speaking on Death. He says “I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme;” (Keats, 52-3) and that “Now more than ever seems it rich to die;” (Keats, 55). Not only does Keats personify death (capitalizing the first letter of the word as one might God), but he also flirts with the idea of death and dying. Is Keats here alluding to his own suicide as a means of breaking free from the restrictions of mortality and escaping everyday sorrows “where men sit and hear each other groan;”(Keats, 24)? Or is he simply utilizing the concept of Death as a means of further honoring the immortality of such divine song? The latter seems closest to the truth. He refers here to an aesthetic and pleasure arising from a song so completely transcendent of all natural laws that a weighty decision such as suicide and the passing to another world would seem easy. He speaks of the pure ecstasy evoked by such hymn as easing the pain of such a difficult transition. But the question remains as to what Keats fully implies when he speaks of Death. It is my belief that in one form or another, the poem in and of itself reflects a kind of suicide. Verse by verse the poet slips into an altered state, less and less certain of his own reality. Ultimately unable to divorce himself from the idea of the nightingale, Keats experiences a death of sorts.

While it can be argued, as seen earlier, that Keats wishes to “Fade far away, dissolve,” (Keats, 21), and explore the need to become fully immersed in the Nightingale’s song, the poet also in somewhat self-deprecating fashion, appeals to no end. The tragedy occurs in the positioning of the poet at the end of his poem. Neither here nor there, he embodies a half-existence forever embedded in a state of melancholy. What once was divine and ecstatic experience now flutters away with the bird and now remains only in nostalgia. Accordingly he says, “Forlorn! The very word is like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!” (Keats, 71-2) and “Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades” (Keats, 75). Yet it never fully fades. His remaining two lines question, first, the validity of his primary experience and secondly, the feelings that it evokes in him. What follows is confusion and a subsequent investigation into the feasibility of his own existence.

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep” (Keats 79-80)

Why does Keats choose to end his poem with a set of lines that feebly call into question the nature of existence perhaps doing more harm than justice to the original intent of his poem? If the poem in full is to be understood as an Ode to a Nightingale why then complete this lyrical dedication by showing the disorientation of the poet? The answer may lie in the question. For in so doing, though a changed man himself, Keats exemplifies in his bewilderment the pure power and force that natural phenomena such as a nightingale’s song hold. The threshold, which once separated mind from body, heart from imagination, now opens as Keats castes himself somewhere in between. What once appeared a suicide now is trivialized by his newfound success. The struggle still exists yet no longer is for nothing. Keats accomplishes his task best through his own loss.