As October unfurls with brisk winds, leaf-littered streets, and the mid-semester blues, I find it fitting to revisit an equally gloomy poem of the Romantic period: John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’
In it, Keats reflects on human mortality, nature’s unchanging beauty, and art. The speaker addresses a nightingale in a forest, expressing his disillusionment with the transience of life. In contrast, the beauty of the nightingale’s song appears eternal; it has been heard by generations and is unchanging, unlike the fleeting nature of beauty and love: “Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”
The unchanging rhyme scheme in each stanza mirrors its song and the immortality it represents, enveloping the reader in it as well. This sing-song cadence is continued by chirp-like assonance (“beechen green”) that echo the nightingale’s joy. Its ability to be carefree captivates him; it appears so otherworldly that he deems it a “Dryad” (a nymph). This metaphor begins a trend of mythological terms that reveal the speaker’s preoccupation with a greater, more artistically pleasing truth that would give meaning to life’s brevity.
As the poem progresses its song enthrals him and becomes symbolic of an idealised world where reality and time do not affect art either; one may drink from the Hippocrene (a mythological fountain providing poetic inspiration) and turn to painless inaction.
The speaker’s attempts to escape his fear through the imaginative qualities of poetry fail, and he finds that all he can see in the bird’s forested home are “fading violets” and the “haunt of flies.” By this point, nature shifts from a place of refuge from transience to something that, too, inspires his dread. As the speaker realises that “fancy” (poetry) “cannot cheat so well” he is brought back to the “forlorn” present and wonders if the bird’s untroubled song was real at all.
“portrait from ‘The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes. Illustrated by 120 designs, original and from the antique, drawn on wood by George Scharf, Jun’.” is marked with Public domain mark 1.0.