Comment on the sensuousness of
Keats’ poetry with reference to “Ode to a Nightingale”
Answer: Sensuousness is a quality in poetry
which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting.
Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It gives
delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful
word pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose
by arousing the sense of smell and so on. Keats is a mystic of the senses and
not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe
through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts.
“Ode to a
Nightingale” is one of the most remarkable poems of sensuousness The second
stanza of the poem is full of sensuous description of drinking wine In the
stanza, the poet expresses his intense desire for a beaker full of the warm
South’ as a mode of escape into the beautiful world of the bird’s song Phrases
like `blushful Hippocrene’, ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ and
`purple-stained mouth’ evidently suggest the colorful and sensuous
evocativeness of Keats’s poetic art. The whole stanza is a description of the
gustatory sensation of drinking wine.
