Ode to a Nightingale (p.438)

John Keats must have really been a sad man.  This poem again illustrates how he feels alone and depressed to the point that he longs for death.  I don’t know how to feel when I read this poem because I read it the first time and thought how sad it must be to hear a birdsong and long for death.  I thought that the narrator’s comment that, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/ Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains” (lines1-3) clearly showed he had been thinking of, even hoping for, the opportunity to partake of a poison so he could end his sad life.  The sadness the narrator felt was not caused by envy of a bird and its seemingly happy life but was because he was “too happy in thine happiness” (line 6) and the bird was blessed with the ability to sing a happy song of summer “in full-throated ease.” (line 10)

            The narrator continued in his depression by wishing he could “drink and leave the world unseen,/ And with thee fade away into the forest dim: /Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget/ What thou among 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;” (lines 19-26) It is that third stanza that really summed it up for me because the narrator identifies the difference he sees in what he believes to be an immortal, happy bird who continually sings a beautiful song with ease and his own existence which is fraught with weariness, fever, a collection of similarly depressed people suffering from disease and old age.  I don’t know how old the narrator is when he wrote this poem but he is clearly old in spirit regardless of his age.  I can easily see how a person immersed in a life surrounded by sadness could look at a beautiful creature singing a beautiful song and convince himself that the bird suffers no sadness, endures no hardship and lives forever in a state of happiness.  The contrast is enough to depress anyone and the narrator’s depression reached the state of longing for an end to his life.  The end of the third stanza closes with, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/ And leaden-eyed despairs, /Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, /Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.” (lines 27 -31)  The narrator cannot help but think during his waking hours and to simply think is to be full of sorrow.  Even beauty and a new love can’t save the narrator from his overwhelming sadness.  Beauty and new love symbolize youth and all that is good but the narrator knows that not only are these sources of happiness fleeting, but they are barely enough to temporarily hold off the creeping malaise the narrator feels.

            After reading the poem the first time I re-read it and began to notice some recognition on the narrator’s part that he saw that, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” (line 61) and that it was possible that the narrator’s longing for death was in itself the cause of his distinctions between himself and the bird.  The narrator admitted that “I have been half in love with easeful Death, /Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/ To take into the air my quiet breath;/ Now more than ever seems it rich to die,”. (lines 52-55) When I re-read that part of the poem I believed that someone so intent on dying, someone who romanticizes the way in which they could end their life, is not just comparing themselves to someone or something else, they are convinced they want to die and then project some of the reasons for that conviction.  The narrator might have had good reason to be sad and maybe even enough reason to be depressed but I thought it sad that he described his mortality and condition in comparison to what he believed to be a perfectly happy immortal creature.

            I would like to believe the narrator found some solace in the bird and saw that his song helped the likes of Ruth in her depression and soothed sailors on “perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” (line 70)  That bird and his song hopefully was enough to bring the same peace to the narrator and strengthen him to persevere.