Comment
on the contrast between transience and permanence as you find it in ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’.
It would be true to say that the odes of Keats are the product of
certain inner struggles or conflicts. The principal stress in the most
important of these odes is a struggle between ideal and actual. They also imply
the opposition between pleasure and pain, imagination and reason, fullness and
privation, permanence and change, Nature and the human, art and life, freedom
and bondage, waking and dream.
Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale truly reflects Keatsian theme of contrast between
transience and permanence. In this poem the draught of vintage
symbolises an imaginative escape from reality. The longing to fade away into
the forest dim results from a desire to avoid another kind of fading away,
namely, the melancholy dissolution of change and physical decay. In the third
stanza, the actual world of distress and privation is described. The actual
world, as depicted in this stanza, is the world of weariness, fever, and fret,
a world where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs, and where youth, beauty,
and love are transient. This picture of the actual world is in direct
opposition to the ecstasy of the nightingale and the golden world of Flora, “Provencal
song”, and the nightingale’s forest as described in the second stanza. Both the
ideal abundance of the second stanza and the privation of the third stanza are
vividly depicted. The poet in this ode affirms the value of the ideal, but he
also recognises the power of the actual. He feels agonised by the inescapable
discrepancy between them. He reconciles them by a prior imaginative acceptance
of the unity of experience, by means of which he invests them with a common extremity
and intensity of feeling.
