Ode to a nightingale analysis PDF

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Ode to a nightingale analysis...

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Resonances with Bright Star Campions film is a representation of negative capabilities

Campion film analysis Keats - “Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry doesn’t come as naturally leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all. [...] The point of diving in a lake isn’t immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”  - Natural imagery - “n  aturally leaves to a tree” -

Didactic statement - how poetry should be - connotation of “the point of” Analogy to compare poetry to lake

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Metaphor (last sentence) - Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery. - Poetry is medicine

Intertextual references - Bright Star’ twice, first upon Fanny Brawne’s chest, and second at the end of the film after Keats’s death - ‘When I have fears’ at supper, although he is unable to finish, citing that he has “gone blank” - ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ during the closing credits of the film - ‘Eve of St Agnes’, which Fanny recites to Charles Brown (34:30) - ‘To Autumn’, obliquely, at the garden with Fanny, Keats and Toots (1:31) - ‘La belle dame’ recited by Keats to Fanny - “There is a holiness in the heart’s affections” (to Benjamin Bailey) - “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity – he is continually in for and filling some other body” (to Richard Woodhouse)

Overview Ode to a nightingale -

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Eight stanzas of ten lines each Like ‘Grecian Urn’ in its dual lamentation and celebration of beauty and transience, demonstrating the inherently paradoxical nature of the ideal The nightingale’s song is the subject of the speaker’s yearning. It possesses an active power to soothe man’s mortal pain is Keats's perception of the conflicted nature of human life, i.e., the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness or lack of feeling, life/death, mortal/immortal, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection. - Discuss each opposing ideas in each paragraph - Chronological focus on immediate, concrete sensations and emotions, from which the reader can draw a conclusion or abstraction.

Stanza 1 Analysis My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of h  emlockI had drunk, Or emptied some dull o  piateto the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, S ingest of summer in full-throated ease.  -

Repetition of happy -

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Polyptoton Does not reinforce but dilutes the meaning/ reinforces his state of being - Transition into tlaking about the sinister aspects of the nightingale - Foreshadows his epiphany - Sibilance - reflects the lyrical quality of nightingale song The bold either reinforces the lyrical and happiness of nightingale OR Conceals a sinister outlook

Stanza 2 Analysis O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:  

  Stanza 3 Analysis ade 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; Where but t o 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.  -

Referencing human struggle with mortality and problems - Conveys the negative aspects of living as a human

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but to think is to be full of sorrow

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allusion to the enlightenment era ans its over dependence on logical thinking and how it has led to disastrous consequences 

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Stanza 4 Analysis Away! away! for I will fly to thee, N  ot charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 

Stanza 5 Analysis I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, i n embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.   - Laid in natural imagery “mid-May's” - Portrays his context is in a vulnerable state right now 

Stanza 6 Analysis Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 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, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. 

Stanza 7 Analysis Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foampp Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.  - Keats moves from his awareness of his own mortality in the preceding stanza to the perception of the bird's immortality. On a literal level, his perception is wrong; this bird will die. Some readers, including very perceptive ones, see his chracterization of the bird as immortal as a flaw. Before you make this judgment, consider alternate interpretations. Interpreting the line literally may be a misreading, because the bird has clearly become a symbol for the poet. - Does the bird symbolize ideal beauty, which is immortal? Or is the bird the visionary or imaginative realm which inspires poets? Or does the bird's song symbolize poetry and has the passion of the song/poem carried the listening poet away?  Ode to a nightingale is a desire to be one with the nightingale again

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Stanza 8 Analysis Forlorn! the very word is like a bell T  o toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: W  as it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? - Asking if hed rather exist in the ideal realm, which is unknown to exist or remain in realtity with its horrible struggles

Paragraph How does Keats’s poem ‘Ode to a nightingale’ convey the romantic notion of imagination 1. Topic sentence: talks about imagination as an ideal realm whereunto we can escape from human/mortal afflictions, or the imagination as occupying the same space (an embodiment of nature) 2. FIrst analysis initial representation of the nightingale and its song (stanza 1-5) a. Repetition of happy i. ii.

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Polyptoton Does not reinforce but dilutes the meaning/ reinforces his state of being 1. Transition into tlaking about the sinister aspects of the nightingale 2. Foreshadows his epiphany Sibilance 1. reflects the lyrical quality of nightingale song

Dance, and Provençal song, i. greek allusion to drinking and being blissful c. The weariness, the fever, and the fret i. Tricolon to suggest why he wants to be one with nightingale

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3. Second analysis: transition into his reflection on his own impending mortality (stanza 6) a. Hyperbole b. Euphemsism for wanting to die 4. Third analysis: a mournful resolution wherein the persona questions the legitimacy/veracity of the nightingale (stanzas 7-8) a. Mythical imagery b. Rhetorical question 5. Conclusion

Exemplar paragraph

Similarly, Textual Conversations suggest that resonant human ideals are nonetheless inflected by particular contextual intrigues, where ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ continues Keats’ fascination with mortality in line with the Romantics’ pantheist worldview. In ‘Nightingale’, the speaker’s “dull opiate” metaphorically locates the poem as taking place within a realm that intersects

pure nature with imagination, a fundamentally Romantic ideal wherein the titular bird symbolises a graceful eternity as countered by the futile transience of a human life. The “full-throated ease” of the bird’s song suggests innocence, as the animal is conceived of as lacking the stifling self-awareness that defines humanity, liberating it from the suffering of the human condition. This idea of a ‘pure innocence’ was seductive for the Romantics, who sought the capacity to forget death, realised through microcosms for ageing: “weariness... fever... fret”, and paralleled by Campion in Fanny’s earnest desire to “dance and flirt and talk” independent of the rigours of existence.Such liberation is, however, brief, as the prominent exclamation and repetition in the final stanza: “Adieu!... Adieu! Adieu!” and alliteration “sole self” indicates the speaker’s returning to the mortal realm, where the open-ended aporia of rhetorical question “Do I wake or sleep” suggests pessimistically that uncertainty and anxiety are inherent to our condition. Thus, through Textual Conversations, we’re reminded of fundamental and immutable tensions within our existence, where their diverse representation across texts suggest a variety of responses and modes of understanding catalysed by the particular fixations of a given epoch....