Hello Romanticists,
I have chosen three odes for us to discuss in our penultimate class. I have selected these because all three are about attempting to exist in two realms simultaneously. Shelley, we know, was both extraordinarily abstract in his political and poetical theories but also devoted to pragmatic social movements of the day. Similar is Keats’ enchantment with other worlds. He is drawn into worlds of gods and fairies, into beautiful and ideal worlds beyond our capacity to fully grasp. And yet, the most characteristically Keatsian move is the awakening from these dream worlds (the knight wakes up on the cold hill’s side; the reader thuds back to her own reality with the sudden ending of “Eve of Saint Agnes”). The poems for Tuesday are all attempts to reconcile ideals with lived experience, the eternal with our specific temporal moment.
I have chosen three odes for us to discuss in our penultimate class. I have selected these because all three are about attempting to exist in two realms simultaneously. Shelley, we know, was both extraordinarily abstract in his political and poetical theories but also devoted to pragmatic social movements of the day. Similar is Keats’ enchantment with other worlds. He is drawn into worlds of gods and fairies, into beautiful and ideal worlds beyond our capacity to fully grasp. And yet, the most characteristically Keatsian move is the awakening from these dream worlds (the knight wakes up on the cold hill’s side; the reader thuds back to her own reality with the sudden ending of “Eve of Saint Agnes”). The poems for Tuesday are all attempts to reconcile ideals with lived experience, the eternal with our specific temporal moment.
Unlike the other Keats poems we have read, “Ode
to a Nightingale” has no single moment of awakening but rather is a series of
awakenings, a continual process of realization that keeps the speaker balanced
between dreaming and wakefulness. “Ode
to the West Wind” and “To Autumn” take the same season as their focal
point. While Shelley’s poem is filled
with chaotic energy straining toward future fulfillment, Keats’ poem finds a
calm balance in cyclical change which is both dynamic and eternal.
Happy Reading,
Prof. M.
Autumn Sunset by English Romantic painter John Constable
Engraving of a Nightingale by Thomas Bewick, from The History of British Birds (1797)
As I read Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," I felt grossed out slightly by the death/dead bodies metaphors, maybe because I was not expecting them. Some examples: "The leaves dead / Are driven, like ghosts," "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red / Pestilence-stricken," "like a corpse within its grave," "decaying," "black rain," "oozy woods," and "dead leaf." The worst is really the comparison of colorful, fallen leaves to disease-ridden bodies. I will never be able to look at fall foliage the same way again! If these leaves are meant to "quicken a new birth" of spring, why do they contain "pestilence"? That's different than simply "withered leaves," which do indeed fertilize new growth. I do not see the purpose of including such disgusting imagery: "Yellow" makes me think of yellow fever or liver failure in general, "black" seems to refer to the black death/bubonic plague, "pale" as death, or anemic, and "hectic red," such a lovely combination, could mean fever, a rash, arterial gushing, an open mouth screaming... I hope I don't have nightmares tonight. I still don't understand how this is going to produce life/spring, or even how Shelley makes such a correlation. Keats' lambs, twittering swallows, and "mellow fruitfulness" are much nicer descriptions of autumn, although they seem to be describing the mild autumns of LA, not NY's killer pre-winters.
ReplyDeleteAnd then Shelly compares himself to the dead leaves, so I suppose he's confessing all the colorful diseases he carries.
"Ode to Nightingale" seems the most overtly dark Keats poem we've read, the sort of sensibilities that one might expect from someone with his life. "Away! Away! For I will fly to thee" - out of the pain, darkness, and sadness. How good it would be to run off with the singing nightingale, to "Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known." There is an intense yearning for escape, and through the nightingale, he is able to taste that experience. With the dash at line 20, and the transition into stanza 3, there's something like a scene change. "And with thee fade away into the forest dim -- / Fade far away"; it's like the gentle blackout as the curtains close, and then reopen. But we don't arrive at some carefree, blissful place. It's torn, difficult, but more emphatically insistent on trying to break away. "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet." You can almost hear the shouting - no, really, I'm gone, I've done it!
ReplyDeleteBut, always, even in the darkest, most melancholy lines, there is the subtle sense that actually, no, he doesn't really want to pack it all in. Right at the beginning, he mentions poison, but he did actually drink it, but it was "as though of hemlock I had drunk / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains" - as though, but not in actuality. He mentions Death, but he is "half in love with easeful Death." It is very important that there is a large second portion that is not pulled to the end. Because, even with the pain, it's worth it. His mention of Ruth at the end is a perfect example of that. He references the moment when she might have felt the lowest: widowed, alone in a strange, new land, with a job but no sense that there will be any future, better prospects. But, it was in that moment, in the field, where Ruth's ultimate bliss was being set in motion. She was meeting to Boaz who she would marry, raise a family with - become the grandmother of King David! That's the real experience of the nightingale song and flight. It all sucks, right now, but who knows what's about to happen?
Ode to Nightingale:
ReplyDeleteStanding out from his other work, 'Ode to a Nightingale' recognizably conforms to romantic conventions (encounter with nature, subjective, emotional experience, personifying love/beauty....). Keats becomes absorbed in a nightingale's song, and launches into his personal experience - painful, withering - compared to the blissful existence of the nightingale. Perhaps it's due to how it was compiled (Brown gathering the fragments of the poem), but the narrative of the poem wanders disconcertingly in different directions. It's somewhat hard to follow, but there isn't any tension in the wandering narrative for the speaker to get back on track. There's no anxiety in the blurred lines between the speaker's own self and the state he enters when listening to the night. Long story short: this work exemplifies Keat's theory of negative capability.
When describing man's mortality, the intensity escalates as the words grow shorter: "the weariness, the fever, and the fret-", only for the reader to rest on the first word in the next line: "here". It's almost a sigh, followed by an account of what it is to die. Yet, the it's not only the dying who suffer the sigh that is "here": "Where but to think is to be full of sorrow." The speaker refers not only to his death, but the innate curse of consciousness. It's a bleak thought. The bleakest. And promptly, as a response at the start of the next stanza, there begins a frantic escape: Away! away! for I will fly to thee." The meandering also serves to legitimize the speaker's escape into empty bliss.
What's most powerful, though, is the speaker's unceremonious acknowledgement of the fleetingness and falsity of escape. He knows he will always have to return: "the fancy cannot cheat so well." And yet, fully knowing it is "a vision, or a waking dream" (is there a difference?) there's still the weighty consideration: "Do I wake or sleep?"