Page 322 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 28: John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Autumn

The speaker continues to explain why the world of human time is such a bad place. Neither Beauty Notes
nor Love can survive there for long. Beauty loses her glowing (“lustrous”) eyes, probably when
they become “leaden” from depressed thoughts.
And new Love cannot fawn (“pine”) over Beauty’s eyes once they have lost their luster. Love is
fickle like that, and, as anyone who has ever been through junior high school knows, it often doesn’t
last “beyond to-morrow.”

Stanza 4 Summary

Lines 31-32
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
All this thinking about how depressing the world is makes the speaker think, “Get me outta here!”
He needs to hatch an escape plan.
He wants fly away to join the nightingale in its refuge from the world. But he knows that the booze
isn’t going to take him. He can’t rely on Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, or any of Bacchus’s buddies
(“pards”), which is what he wanted earlier in the poem.
Lines 33-34
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Instead of wine, he’s going to fly on the wings of his own poetry. Poetry’s wings are invisible, or
“viewless.”
He’s hopeful that poetry will take him to the nightingale’s world even though his brain is not so
helpful in making the trip. His brain confuses him and slows him down.

Lines 35-36
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
And, the, all of a sudden, he’s with the nightingale. How did that happen? Count us slightly
suspicious of how he can be “already with” the bird, even though he just complained about how his
brain was such a big roadblock.
One possibility is that he joins the nightingale in his dreams, because the imagery in this section is
associated with darkness and night.
He is in the kingdom of the night, which is soft and “tender,” and the moon is visible in the sky. The
imagery is more fanciful and imaginative here.
The phrase “tender is the night” was made famous by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who
used it as the title of one of his novels.

Lines 37-40
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.

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