Fantasy’s Reality and Paradox in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”

What does one do with a sad sleepy boy such as Keats? Although I pushed back a bit on the idea from last class that Keats is merely morose, and instead proposed that he was very well aware of his “romantic” persona as dealt “on down through chivalry” in the Western poetic canon (from Chaucer to Shakespeare to even Milton), I do believe that this mask and this person can be, and maybe should be, read together. After all, is Keats really concerned with what is “real” – a real sadness vs. a performative poetic melancholy. His poems are filled with so many dreams and imaginings, so many fairies and fantasies, “the Queen-Moon on her throne / Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays,” (36-37), the pleasurable kinds that are still somehow wrapped up in Death’s cloak – and so we are led to the question: what is real in Keats? Fantasy seems to make one more aware of reality.

I’m leading class discussion tomorrow on “Ode to a Nightingale” and am tempted, therefore, to discuss the other Odes in this post not to give myself too much away; but this Ode is so wonderful and rich and I’ve never actually written anything on it so I’ll use this space (here, now) to pose some thoughts and questions before going “unto the breach.”

Paradoxically again, we’ll start at the end: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?” – the final lines of the poem. This question seems to be the final and eternally-there query for Keats in his poetry and letters. Even in his more “objective” narrative romances like “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” both of which we read for last class, the tension of sleep plays such a pivotal role that without it Keats might have no verse of which we could speak. “ ‘This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline…My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!’ ” muses Porphyro, in “St. Agnes,” hoping to rouse his lover to wakeful reality but taking joy in her identity as “sweet dreamer” (326 and 334). Keats makes a similar move in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” where the femme fatale is adored by the “knight at arms” for being a “fairy’s child” (14) but he is then hoodwinked and perhaps cuckolded after the sleep event brought on by her: “And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dream’d” (33-34). Even the “Ode to a Nightingale” features a “deceiving elf” (74). Whether one is waking or sleeping has immense repercussions in Keats, on both the identities of the dreamer and the other (presumably) non-sleeping wakeful one, and the reality that is built by both of them together.

In the “Ode” we have a more direct happening: Keats himself, perhaps, as speaker, musing on a “real” bird and its (his? her?) song. The “Odes” tempt us to read them more literally – or more rooted in reality – than the narrative poems, perhaps because we have to suspend less disbelief to “understand” them, but also because the things that are being written about are “real” and physically present in some sense: the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, even the Psyche and Melancholy. Yet the tone of the poem is practically poisonously psychedelic: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as thought of hemlock I had drunk” (1-2). The poet cannot even notice or note what is around him: “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs” (41-42) – although he is somehow able to describe them in absence. His imagination gives him more than what the nightingale has – joy, yes, but too much happiness – and it also takes as much away. “I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,” the poet claims, vs. the bird who is immortal and “was not born for death” (61). The bird represents a kind of life and “happy lot,” but it cannot imagine: it represents a fading away into the unreal forest, a loss of life that is not death, but not living either (20).

Ode to a Nightingale

In "Ode to a Nightingale", Keats is sitting under the shade of the trees and listening to the sound of the Nightingale singing. 

Within the first stanza, he lets the sound of the bird make him forget about his troubles and pain. 

This idea is repeated in the second stanza as he is also drinking wine and lets the alcohol and the bird's song give him the power to "leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim:" (19-20). 

It's in stanza three that I first see Keats contradicting himself. 

"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou amon the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;"

Instead of forgetting the troubles that are outside of the trees that he sits underneath, he contemplates them. It is sickness and death that he would like to forget as he listens to the bird, and yet he uses the whole stanza to explore them. 

In stanza four, it's as if he realizes that he's thinking about them and startles himself. "Away! away! for I will fly to thee" (31). 

Though Keats is making it seem as though the Nightingale is making him forget about death, I think instead, he is using the ode to beg the nightingale to help him forget. 

There also seems to be a jealousy of the nightingale, who Keats claims "wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" (61). This jealousy also supports the idea that he is asking the Nightingale to take him far away from his troubles and help him forget about death.

Keats’s “Priestlike” Love

Keats’s poetry presents the contrast between love that is the result of overflowing emotions and soberer love – that which requires patience and careful consideration.  Keats’s opinion of which style of love is more fulfilling is confused in this regard, for his narrators extol the benefits of both spontaneous, joyous love and love which is born out of labor and of a sense of duty.  Keats also suggests that pure moments of love and extended worship can both have possible pitfalls.

            In “Bright Star,” the narrator describes the star as “nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite” (4).   The narrator admires its consistency, reflecting on this desire in the line, “would I were steadfast as thou art” (1).  Moreover, the events that the star observes are the unchanging patterns of nature.  For example, the rise and fall of the ocean waves are described as a “priestlike task” (5), suggesting that an act of constant toil is required by nature.  The narrator demonstrates how he would hope to exploit the star’s qualities of stoicism, for he declares his wish to be “Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast” (10) forever.  The act that the narrator desires to perform is one of worship – pleasure that is extended over a period of time rather than existing in a fleeting moment.  If he achieves his wish, he will be no different than a priest constantly worshipping a higher deity, or the tide of the Earth rising and falling.  The act of nestling in his lover’s breast requires patience and hard, consistent work that will provide Keats’s life with structure while at the same time draining it of all spontaneous revelations.  “Bright Star” paints the possible extension of the narrator’s moment as blissful, and presents his commitment to this goal as positive. 

            “The Eve of St. Agnes” presents a more negative vision of worship.  The poem begins with the image of a Beadsman praying. Keats describes the beadsman as a “patient, holy man” (10).  However, the narrator’s opinion of the man shifts as he walks through the hallowed halls of the cathedral.  Keats writes “Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails:  / Knights, ladies, praying In dumb orat’ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails / To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails” (16-19).  The beadsman has failed to acknowledge the human emotion that lies at the core of his act of worship, and is therefore condemned by the writer.

            Keats demonstrates how these two perspectives can achieve the same end goal.  In Ode to Psyche, the narrator represents himself as being priest-like, telling the goddess Psyche, “I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind” (50-51).  This line suggests that the narrator will dedicate himself to her, constructing a shrine.  The intention of this temple to Psyche is to “let the warm Love in!” (67).  Keats’s view of religion in “Ode to Psyche” differs entirely from his beliefs in “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  Whereas Keats in “St. Agnes” saw continuous religious worship as exhausting the true pleasure from the objects one is worshipping, Keats in “Ode to Psyche” acknowledges the potential of religion to replenish and actually encourage emotion.  Keats suggests that worship can have a use if one remembers that at its core is the concept of “love” – one must be in a constant state of affection for their object of worship, and cannot simply go through the motions of worship without truly connecting with the overall intent of the worship.

            Keats’s failure to reconcile sober pleasure and the joy of spontaneous love reflects the larger mechanisms at work in his poetry.  His wish to extend his moments of pure elation, to become “priest-like” and dedicate his life to the cause of love, will result in the dulling of that joy.  All of Keats’s poetry plays on the inherent contradiction – the inability to have the ability to worship in such small moments of happiness, and to be truly happy in one’s period of worship.

Keats' Need to Challenge Shakespeare

On reading “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” by Keats I was reminded of our discussion on Tuesday of how Keats strived to be remembered alongside Shakespeare and Milton, as their equal. This is made apparent in the footnote, which reveals Keats copied this poem into his collection of Shakespeare’s poems, physically placing his poetry in the same book as Shakespeare. His approach to the sonnet form in this context I also read as a direct challenge to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Specifically the footnote’s reference to a north star reminded me of the line “It [love] is the star to every wandering bark” in Shakespeare’s sonnet 116. Keats directly challenges Shakespeare, using the same images and connections as Shakespeare but in his own way, to force the issue of comparison between them. In light of the information that Keats was dismissed by his contemporaries due to his lower class and education, these decisions in his poetry make all the more sense, he had to force the issue of putting himself in conversation with the greats, it never would have happened organically. The first part of Keats’ sonnet can be read as addressing all of these things. HEe wishes he had the steadfast nature of the star to help him as he struggles to gain acceptance as a poet, while he is currently “in lone splendor hung aloft” (2). He sees himself high above his peers but alone, removed from the ‘natural’ cycle of poets from higher class upbringings, a star removed from the natural imagery. The background information from Tuesday’s class significantly altered my reading of all the poems for Thursday. 

Star Light, Star Bright

The Speaker is talking to the North Star in this poem.The North Star doesn't move around at night, which is why the speaker admires it's "stedfastness." 

Bright Star is airy and beautiful while still managing to focus on a very complicated human desire. In the very first line, the speaker tells “the Bright Star” that he wishes to be like that star. We learn the speaker’s desire without (ever) finding out who the speaker is, when he is speaking, or where he is speaking. What we do know about the speaker is that he wants to be like the bright star. In the second line of the poem, the speaker says what he doesn’t want. This is an immediate switch from desire to lack of desire. He then goes on to explain what the bright star does for the next six lines in order to emphasize what he hopes to not be like. I found this very strange at first because he unexpectedly spoke of things he wouldn’t want to have in common with the star after saying he wanted to be just like the bright star. 

In line nine the speaker reveals his true desire, the one trait he truly wants to have in common with the star is stedfastness. The speaker desires to never change and to be forever still on his lover’s breast and if he can’t, he rather die swooning over her. I find it interesting that we know nothing about the speaker, especially his placement in time, besides his desire to be unchanging like the bright star. The language the speaker uses made the timing of this poem really stand out to me. The spelling of some words are archaic and I believe uncommon in 1848. One example would be eremite. I understand that Keats probably used this word out of the respect of the rhyme scheme and music of the poem but the language still makes me question the speaker’s placement in time. Overall, I think Keats did a phenomenal job describing a complicated thought without giving much detail or background about the person who thinks that thought. 

Blurred Lines between Imagination and Reality

While reading “The Eve of St. Agnes” I kept asking myself, why is the speaker telling this story. Or rather, why is this speaker telling us this story. The poem begins with a Beadsman praying in the woods who stumbles upon a lively party in a castle on the eve of the feast of St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins. Inside the castle at the party is a young lady named Madeline who is eager to go to sleep so she can dream of her lover, Porphyro. While Madeline is fervently waiting going to sleep, Porphyro concocts a plan to trick and older woman named Angela into letting his hide in Madeline’s closet until she goes to sleep so he can convince her to run away with him. The poem ends with Madeline and Porphyro seemingly successfully running away. The speaker does not reveal what happens to Madeline and Porphyro after they escape, but he does include that the Beadsman and Angela both die. This poem left me confused and pondering many questions. The significance of the narrative within this poem is unclear, the characters and speaker are not particularly complex and the ending reveals nothing of the star-crossed lovers’ future. Maybe all these unclear, unanswered questions are the point of the poem. The lines between fantasy, dreams, imagination and reality are continuously blurred, making a statement on how these lines are blurred in real life. Everyone has experienced waking up from a deep sleep and not realizing whether or not the dream has ended. It is also unclear if Keats’ commentary on the mysteries of the imagination were intentional or if “The Eve of St. Agnes” is a failed attempt at a romantic poem who’s only redemption was the ambiguous lines between fantasy and reality was accidental.

Bird song in La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Something that I found odd about La Belle Dame Sans Merci was that the mention of bird song is only the lack thereof. In many of our readings bird song is used to show the beauty and happiness in something as simple as one small aspect of nature. Although this poem describes the emptiness and unhappiness that exists without bird song, I thought it was interesting that Keats did not mention bird song in the happy memories of the Knight. I began to wonder how mentioning bird song in a positive way would have changed the meaning of the poem. I think had he referenced a happier song, or just the existence of bird song during his tryst with the woman, it would have made the relationship more real and less superficial. The footnote describes the woman as a "supernatural femme fatale" and in the poem, it is clear that she has always taken advantage of men, telling them she loves them and then leaving them. This is evident in stanza ten, when Keats describes the dream, "I saw pale kings, and princes too, / Pale warriors, death pale were they all;/They cried --"La belle dame sans merci/ Hath thee in thrall!" (37-40). Here, Keats points out that this woman seduces any and all men, from royalty to warriors, and leaves them all broken hearted and emotionally devastated. He then goes on to say that this knight is just another one of her conquests, further proving that this woman only uses men and then leaves them. This moment in the poem cements her character as being superficial and cruel. If he had used the bird song to describe their relationship when the knight was happy and the relationship appeared loving, it would have made it seem much deeper than surface value. I think this would have ultimately weakened the poem. Bird song would have heightened the joy and added value to the love that the knight was feeling. This may have made the emotional reaction of the knight more pitiable, but it also would have changed the meaning of the poem. The woman's character would've been changed and it wouldn't have made as much sense because if the audience thought her relationship with the knight was genuine, the knight's dream would have made him a lot more conflicted. If that were the case, the poem would most likely have had to go on for several more stanzas, or risk the ending seeming too abrupt.