Page 321 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes Stanza 3 Summary

Lines 21-22
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
A harp starts playing, and the dream sequence begins. The speaker dreams of “fading” out of the
world, of just disappearing in a very quiet way. He wants to forget about those things that the
nightingale has never had to worry about. Again, we don’t know much about which things he
means specifically, but we assume they must have to do with the stresses and cares of living in
human society. The bird is free of such cares.
Lines 23-24

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Why is he talking about these depressing things? It seems just he just can’t leave the world behind.
The world is full of tired and “weary” people, sickness (“fever”), and massive stress (“fret”). He
reduces all of society down to one depressingly exaggerated image: people sitting around and listen
to each other “groan” and complain.
That’s a pretty bleak view of the world, but it just goes to show how much of an effect the nightingale
has had on him. Compared to the nightingale’s carefree song, our voices sound like groans.

Lines 25-26
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
He decides to take the whole depressing images thing to a new level, describing the world as a
place where the uncontrollable movements of illness shake the “last gray hairs” on a dying man’s
head. Palsy is a disease the causes sudden involuntary movements, and so this gray-hair person is
no long capable of controlling his own body.
He’s also almost bald. In this section, Keats confronts one of his favorite enemies: time. After you
read this poem, check out the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in which he tries magically to stop time.
Time is the speaker’s enemy because it causes young and beautiful people to turn old, “pale,” thin
as a ghost, and, eventually, dead as a doornail. Simply, time = death, death = bad, so time = bad.

Lines 27-28
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
The world is a place where any kind of thinking leads to depressing thoughts and worries. There
are no thoughts that can ultimately bring joy or peace: thinking itself is the problem.
These sad and “despairing” thoughts make your eyelid like lead weights. You have trouble just
staying awake and conscious during the day. The world totally wears people down and tires them
out.
Lines 29-30
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

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