Ode to a Nightingale

-Brian Mendonca

As one hears the sounds of birds one thinks of one bird which inspired a poet to write a poem. The bird is the nightingale. The nightingale is not normally found in India. Because the koel is believed to sing at night it is referred to as the Indian nightingale. The koel, as Baljit Singh informs us in the Tribune is usually heard during April-July during the breeding season. It is not heard at other times of the year.

But can one bird - the British nightingale is even smaller - inspire an ode? What kind of a mind would be so sensitive as to peel his thoughts to the sound of a tiny bird? One hears several birds during the livelong day - particularly during Lockdown - and never give it a thought. Such are the themes of poets. 

The British poet John Keats (1795-1821) was inspired by a nightingale. He was attentive to nature and listened to it as a restorative for the soul. Keats died young at 26. What must have been his feelings when he had an inkling that he was going to die?  His 'Ode to a Nightingale' (1819) - written two years before he passed - is one of his final poems. It attempts to distill the meaning of life and understand the inevitability of death. More than the spatial differences between Britain and India, the poem speaks to us because all have to face death. 

Listen to a reading of the poem by G.M. Danielson. In the background you can hear the sounds of the nightingale.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCyum3UN5ys (Press the CC icon to get the text of the poem as it is being read.)

Reading

In the first verse (v.1) the poet begins by saying he is in pain. Nicholas Roe maintains that Keats, being a physician,  had access to the drug Laudanum. He administered it to his brother Tom who was suffering from Tubercolosis. Keats contracted TB from him and was regularly on opiates to ease the pain in his throat. Keats addresses the nightingale and says his discomfiture does not arise from jealousy of the nightingale's happiness - but being too happy about it. The Dryad is a Greek word for tree-spirit. By this association the nightingale is already invested with spiritual powers. 

In v.2 the poet is in a Summer mood. He looks for the warmth of the Hippocrene - a fountain which inspires poetry. The dying poet wants to have one last swig of this fountain and slip away with the nightingale into oblivion. The bird can be seen as a sign of his end. 'Forest dim' and 'shadows numberless' in v.1 suggest a  mood of brooding beauty. He does not want his demise to be heralded. 

Keats castigates the world in v.3 saying that its beauty is fickle and impermanent. Youth is superceded by old age. The only purpose to remain in the world is 'to sit and hear each other groan.' The grim picture of the world includes weariness, fever and fret.

'I will fly to thee,' writes Keats in v. 4 - addressing the nightingale. His vehicle will be poetry not wine. He contrasts the moon and the stars in the heavens surrounded by the fairies (Fays), with the shadows on earth. This is his lot in his mortal existence. 

He is crippled by normal vision. But his sight is enabled by darkness. The 'embalmed darkness' in v. 5 is a salve and a door to experiencing the season of May. Hawthorne, violets, eglantine and musk-rose are all mentioned as the Summer flowers that the 'seasonable month endows.'

The death-instinct, described as Thanatos by Freud, is experienced by Keats in v. 6. The poet addresses Death in an apostrophe and prays that his 'sod' /corpse becomes material for Death's funeral song (requiem).

Keats reflects on the voice I heard 'this passing night' i.e. last night. Keats is believed to have written the poem in one day while soujourning in Hampstead in the English countryside with his housemate Charles Brown. 

There is a biblical reference to Ruth - a Moabite -who went to take care of her mother-in-law Naomi after Ruth's husband passed away. Ruth and Naomi return to Jerusalem when the barley harvest was beginning. 'She stood in tears among the alien corn' reconstructs this scene. Keats says that Ruth may have heard the plaintive call of the nightingale reminding her of her home. (v.7)

In v.8 Keats expresses his disillusionment with Fancy. He feels he is losing his creative powers. The 'plaintive anthem' fades. The music of inspiration grows fader and fader. And the reader / listener is returned to the dreamy death like sleep induced by an opiate.

Keats's friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote a moving elegy to Keats after Keats passed on in 1821. Read about it here: https://lastbustovasco.blogspot.com/2020/05/adonais.html

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Pic courtesy (top) 'Ode to a Nightingale' by DanSpier(dot)com; dryad by Ali Denny; hawthorne flower by Steven Foster. Updated 28th July 2020.