comment-A Suicidal Aesthetic and The Gift of Immortality-1 A Suicidal Aesthetic and The Gift of Immortality

Thoughtful. This essay attempts a full reading of Keats’s richly complicated poem, arguing in the end that he charts the breakdown of divisions imprisoning the speaker in self-consciousness. It’s a very romantic reading, attuned to John Keats’s development of first-generation themes. Several times you put your claims across with a deft correlation to Coleridge in a similar state. And you make nice use of your classmates’ readings; offering your reader the feeling of synchronic tracking of themes, you heighten your credibility.

The reading is open to objection, and I’ll get to some in a minute. First, the strengths: a persuasive linkage of falling into self-consciousness with Ode to a Nightingale’s expansive verse pattern; nice consideration of the purpose of an ode, with comparison to JK’s actual use of such address; aforementioned attention to other texts; and a conclusion that wrestles in a plausible way with ON’s notorious final questions. I also get the feeling that you’ve worked to make your words as straightforward as possible – only once did I run across a “utilize” in place of “use” – a welcome effort, given the complexity of your argument and this poem.

I think the essay peaks on the top of page 4, where you describe John Keats’s narrator populating “embalmed darkness” with familiar yet refreshed imagery, thereby “profit[ing] off his own poetic construction.” This seems to predict your final reading of the poem, in which a harsh divide between a submission to imagination and the awareness of mortality resolves into a fertile limbo state, in which it’s unclear what the poet is making and what he’s perceiving.

An attractive argument – but in pitching it you seem to overlook both your notion of a one-way transmission and the indications in the second half of the poem that the nightingale is gone gone gone. It seems odd to claim of an anthem that so literally passes over into the next valley, and touches off such repeated Adieus, that “it never really fades.” Similarly, I think you underplay the hovering possibility of death, rerouting grim references to mortality into, primarily, a celebration of the bird’s “transcendence.” As a result, John Keats’s final two lines get idealized as “newfound success,” an “answer,” that ignores some contradictory evidence (not only “Fled is that music,” but maybe also the artificiality of those Fairy lands, recalling Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s popped bubbles).

It’s an indication of your effort here that you’ve steered towards a debate that seems to get at the very heart of Ode to a Nightingale. I’m sorry, though, that you seem to drop that fine consideration of a one-way transmission. It may be that more literal attention to who is speaking to what could lead to a reading of those final questions that would discover, in the midst of self-consciousness, a real crisis of address, or – to honor the romantic imperative of your paper – a richer address – a turn to us.