Keats Ode to Nightingale and Shelleys Adonais - Essay Example

Keats’ “Ode to Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Adonais” Among the second generations of Romantic poets,some names that remain at the tip of the tongue are Keats and Shelley. Their works are celebrated even today as the best ever produced. Both these poets were mutual and affectionate friends. Shelley wrote “Adonais” on Keats death in 1821 and drowned to death the very next year. He was very fond of Keats’ works. Several of Keats’ poems were found in his pocket after he drowned (Sandy 5). Both had a tendency of elaborating the “spiritual and psychological drama of romance” (Sandy 31). Keats was a Romantic poet who died at a very young age but his works have left a lasting impact on the lovers of poetry and nature. He wrote “Ode to Nightingale” in 1819 which is said to be an unmatchable poetry whose merit no poet could meet before him. The poem offers a unique sense of the “deathly nature” of man while having the “will to celebrate the imaginative richness of morality” (Bloom 7). Through this poem he joins the nightingale in the dark hours of the night and imagines himself to be a part of the dark forest where, just like the nightingale, he would be free of all the troubles of life. The nightingale has a dizzying effect on the speaker through the song it sings in the forest. The speaker seems to escape from the miseries of life and envies the nightingale the way it sings deep in the forest The ode is an open confession of the process of life that every man has to endure when he comes on this earth. But the depths of the lines convey a strange reality to its readers who realize that death is not only inevitable but to some it is a longing and desire just like the speaker, who wishes to escape from life to embrace death. He wishes to be poisoned like Socrates and experience the unfelt happiness in a drunken state so much so “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/ And with thee fade away into the forest dim…” (Lawall et al 2002). The speaker wishes to flee the troubled world. Keats felt skeptic towards the desire of imagination’s revelation in a humorous fashion. This poem is the first to make a wholehearted declaration that “death is the mother of beauty.” Keats has beautifully embodied this concept in the verses of this poem with the most “wonderful lack of self-consciousness” at its freedom from the history (Bloom 7). Keats represents a realistic image of immortality. To him, fantasy cannot provide the actual escape from the pain of existence. Towards the end of the poem he deliberately vanishes the bird whose song had a soothing effect on the speaker, refraining him from transcending above the mundane realities of life; “Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades” ((Lawall et al 2002). The fourth stanza is the real beginning of the poem whereby the speaker floods the lines with imagination which elevates him drastically from the melancholic state of the previous stanza. It is through the recognition of the sorrows in his life that he is able to feel the joy to the maximum because he knows that it will be very brief (Bloom 9). He delivers a sound and mature message to his readers that human beings are meant to be positioned in a manner they are destined by nature. Hence, as the speaker of the poem confronts reality towards the conclusion he conforms to the fate of imagination which disappears “Past the near meadows, over the still stream, /Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep /In the next valley-glades…” and he thinks if it was something that he saw or whether it was a dream in his sleep from which he has just risen (Lawall et al 2002). The nightingale is a symbol of reverence since ancient times. It is the immortality of the bird which is contrasted with the temporality of the listener of its beautiful voice. In the seventh stanza, the notion timelessness and temporality are brought together in harmony in reality they raise from actuality. They are the essence of life and cannot be separated from it. Keats endorses this reality through the speakers’ sentiments and the imagined nightingales song along which he longs to unite. This unity is only conceived in imagination because when he awakens from his day dreaming, he is no longer in touch with the song but instead feels the harsh realities of the surroundings. These realities might constitute the loss of the beloved or a loss of material goods or anything that is precious and causes grief. The elegy which Shelley wrote on Keats’ death is an expression of compassion towards his beloved friend. This can not only be studied in comparison to the ode but also stands as Keats’ contemporary poetry. Shelley, in the poem, is mourning his friend’s death and wishes to remember him forever. To express his love, he compares Keats to a Greek god, Adonis, who loved Venus but died at a young age. The god is mythically known as having several lovers. Shelley wants his readers to develop such a unique memory for Keats that they remember and love him forever. The loss of his friend is in reality a loss of nature, because Keats was an original poet and did not seek for artificial reality. The essential concerns of the Romantics remain more or less the same; their admiration of nature and connection between imagination and creativity, along with the transience of human life are a hallmark of each of the poets (Shady 7). Unlike Keats in “Ode to Nightingale” Shelley mourns at the loss of his friend throughout “Adonais”. The tone is that of wailing and crying, pleading the readers to do justice with his works. Just when the poem is about to come to an end, Shelley compromises and admits the loss which he was denying all along. He comforts the readers and indirectly himself that as long as Adonais is respected and elevated in the eyes of his readers and his spiritual resurrection is celebrated at all times, he will remain alive forever. In “Ode to Nightingale” Keats concludes by reminding the readers that the state of escapism is temporary and one needs to face the reality at one point in his life. The reader does not flee this world forever but he does wish to keep the nightingale alive only when he starts to realize its tentative presence and its soothing effect on his mind. In other words, Keats is also trying to remind the reader that he needs to choose what kind of life he wants to live. This is a very practical approach to life. He does not suggest the reader to constantly indulge in fancy but he proposes the reader that he might live with the vision in his mind, knowing that it will remain with him forever in the form of powerful imagination or feel a constant deprivation from the joys of life and never attain pleasure even if it is available in the form of this vision. Shelley seems to be in a state of inspiration for Keats when he dies. He was too young to have implemented all essence of Keats’ poetry in his life but he was only starting to understand the true meaning of life when he lost a very dear friend. He does attempt to warn his readers not to mourn for too long because he himself believes that mourning leads to the death of one’s own self. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. John Keats. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. Print Mark, Sandy. Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Print Lawall, Sarah N, and Maynard Mack. “John Keats’ Ode to Nightingale” & “Percy B. Shelley’s Adonais” from The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Volume E. New York: Norton, 2002. Print Read More