Page 324 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

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

The stanzas in this poem actually connect seamlessly. At the end of stanza 5, the speaker moved Notes
from smells to sounds. Now he says that he is listening in the darkness.
The experience of being alone in the dark seems related to the experience of death, and he thinks
maybe death wouldn’t be so bad. “This is easy,” he thinks. “I could get used to this.”
Death would be another way to free himself of all his worldly cares. Maybe he’s confusing death for
sitting on a beach in Barbados….
Lines 53-54

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
This is turning into a love story between the speaker and death. The speaker whispers sweet nothings
to death. And by whisper we mean, “writes rhyming poetry about.”
Keats was obsessed with the idea of death, and he often wrote about it. Line 54 is mysterious: we
think it means either that he wants death to take the air from his lungs, or that the air takes his
breath along with his verses.

Lines 55-56
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
He’s really quite taken with this death idea. While in the world of the nightingale, he thinks it
would be “rich to die.” Many people are afraid that death will be empty, but richness is associated
with an abundance of good things, which is almost the opposite of emptiness.
He’d like to go out quietly, in the middle of the night. He’d just stop existing: “cease.” This part of
the poem is kind of creepy, because Keats did die very young.

Lines 57-58
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
He wants to die at midnight, while listening to the nightingale singing. We were wondering what
happened to the nightingale. He seems to forget about the nightingale at the beginning of the stanzas
and then return to it at the end, as if he suddenly remembered: “Oh, right: this is supposed to be a
poem about a bird!”
The nightingale is kind of like a poet, sending its voice into the air just as Keats sends his rhyme into
the air. The bird’s music expresses its “soul.” Birds have souls? This one does. The bird is completely
lost in the moment of pure joy and “ecstasy.”

Lines 59-60
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
He imagines what would happen after the moment of his death. Basically, the bird would keep
singing as if nothing had happened. The speaker would still have “ears,” of course: or at least. His
corpse would. But the ears would be useless (“vain”) because there is no brain to process the sounds.
The bird would be then singing a “high requiem,” a kind of church service with music sung for a
dead person. Lots of classical musicians have composed amazing requiems, like Mozart, but we’d
bet the nightingale probably doesn’t know it is singing one.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 317