Significance of Death in Ode to a Nightingale - Essay Example

Significance of death in "Ode to a Nightingale"The fundamental concept of the poem is that it is based on Keats’s imagination. While considering himself dead, Keats loses his connection with the materialistic world. This reflects in the poem in the form of Keats’s desire to break free of his worries in the world and roam about the forest with the nightingale. He enjoys each and every feature of the new world he has entered into with the nightingale. Keats uses his imagination to die and become immortal to spend a care-free life with the immortal nightingale in a completely new world.

Keats tends to fool himself by thinking that nightingale’s song is immortal as it has survived through time. People have been listening to the nightingale’s song since the earliest of times and will continue to hear it after Keats’s death. Basically, he subconsciously transforms into a meadow over which the nightingale comes and sings. In fact, the nightingale that Keats talks about in the poem dies in a way, but continues to live through its song. This makes that nightingale very special as it is luck which humans cannot anticipate.

In the end, Keats reaches at the point where he considers pleasure as immortal and acknowledges death as something that is inevitable. Paradoxically, Keats tends to feel more life in death than it was in life. Although death in itself is a bitter reality, yet to Keats, a more bitter reality is the fact that many people have to turn old before they die. “All diseases run into one, old age” (Emerson). This transformation of youth into old age is very upsetting. As they say, “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity” (Stoppard).

Works Cited:Emerson, Ralph W. “Age Quotes.” 2012. Web. 29 Mar. 2012. .Stoppard, Tom. “Age Quotes.” 2012. Web. 29 Mar. 2012. .