Page 327 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and
spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast
not born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in
“Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from
experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,”
as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the
human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the
second stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his
meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by
Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried
by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to
follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
6. The nightingale experiences a sort of death and even the God ...... experiences death, but his
death reveals his own divine state.
(a) Artemis (b) Apollo
(c) Greek mythology (d) Hera
7. Of keats mix major odes of 1819, ...... was probably written first and “To Autumn” written
last.
(a) Ode to Psyche (b) John keats
(c) Cupid and Psyche (d) Ode on a Grecian Urn
8. There is also an emphasis on words beginning with ......, especially those that begin with
“b”, “p” or “v”.
(a) Palatal consonant (b) Consonant
(c) Alveolar consonant (d) Velar consonant
9. Furthermore, keats began to reduce the amount of ...... based words and syntax that he relied
on in his poetry, which in turn shortened the length of the words that dominate the poem.
(a) Vulgar latin (b) Roman empire
(c) Old latin (d) Latin
10. According to Keats’s friend, ......, a nightingale had built its nest near his home in the spring
of 1819.
(a) John Keats (b) Charles Armitage Brown
(c) London (d) Charles Brown
The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music
and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened
forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly
succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing any further
pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes
back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the inescapable
(“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”). As the nightingale
flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether
he is awake or asleep.
In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to embrace the
creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds
a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world,

320 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY