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.
The poem also contrasts the mortality of human beings with the
immortality of the nightingale. Of course, Keats here thinks of the race of
nightingales, and not the individual nightingale, though in the case of mankind
he thinks not of the race but of the individual human being. The bird here
represents a universal and undying voice: the voice of Nature, of imaginative
sympathy, and therefore of an ideal romantic poetry, infinitely powerful and
profuse. As sympathy, the voice of the nightingale resolves all differences: it
speaks to high and low (emperor and clown): it comforts the human home-sickness
of Ruth and frees her from bitter isolation; and equally it opens the casements
of the remote and magical. The “magic casements” are the climax of the
imaginative experience. In the final stanza, the word “forlorn” is like a bell
which tolls the death of the imagination. The poet realises that fancy cannot
cheat so well.
