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    Ode To A Nightingale: Transience Vs Permamnence

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    Arijit Das
    This document provides an analysis of John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale". It discusses how the poem explores the themes of transience versus permanence through Keats's desire to escape the troubles of the human world by joining the nightingale's world where beauty is eternal. The nightingale represents the undying beauty of art, unlike the ephemeral nature of human life. Through the power of imagination and poetry, Keats seeks to find permanence and overcome the mutability of human life, though the poem acknowledges the limitations of using imagination to fully achieve this.

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    Ode To A Nightingale: Transience Vs Permamnence

    Uploaded by

    Arijit Das
    2K views1 page
    This document provides an analysis of John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale". It discusses how the poem explores the themes of transience versus permanence through Keats's desire to escape the troubles of the human world by joining the nightingale's world where beauty is eternal. The nightingale represents the undying beauty of art, unlike the ephemeral nature of human life. Through the power of imagination and poetry, Keats seeks to find permanence and overcome the mutability of human life, though the poem acknowledges the limitations of using imagination to fully achieve this.

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    A study in transience and permanence

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    Ode to a nightingale: Transience vs permamnence

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    This document provides an analysis of John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale". It discusses how the poem explores the themes of transience versus permanence through Keats's desire to escape the troubles of the human world by joining the nightingale's world where beauty is eternal. The nightingale represents the undying beauty of art, unlike the ephemeral nature of human life. Through the power of imagination and poetry, Keats seeks to find permanence and overcome the mutability of human life, though the poem acknowledges the limitations of using imagination to fully achieve this.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    2K views1 page

    Ode To A Nightingale: Transience Vs Permamnence

    Uploaded by

    Arijit Das
    This document provides an analysis of John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale". It discusses how the poem explores the themes of transience versus permanence through Keats's desire to escape the troubles of the human world by joining the nightingale's world where beauty is eternal. The nightingale represents the undying beauty of art, unlike the ephemeral nature of human life. Through the power of imagination and poetry, Keats seeks to find permanence and overcome the mutability of human life, though the poem acknowledges the limitations of using imagination to fully achieve this.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 1

    Graham Hough, while analysing Keats's odes, once averred that Keats's major odes are

    "closely bound up with the theme of transience and permanence." Keats was, in essence, a
    worshipper of beauty. It is his romantic urge that forces him, after acutely feeling the tragic
    loss of all that is lovable and precious in life, in the inevitable flux of the world of reality, to
    discover an imaginative resource of permanent beauty that would defy the decaying power
    of time. In his "Ode on Melancholy", Keats realises the joy of beauty and the agony in its
    decay. The sight of a morning rose gives as immense pleasure but it fades away as soon as
    it occurs in our mind that the same rose will wither in the afternoon. Keats's mission is to
    enjoy life where beauty is eternal and therefore in his poetry, he continually makes an
    attempt to reconcile the contradiction between the mutability of human life and permanence
    of art.
    This conflict between sensuous beauty and eternity takes an acuter form in Keats's magnum
    opus "Ode To A Nightingale." As the poet listens to the mellifluous song of the "light-winged
    dryad", his "heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains his sense." The nightingale's joyous
    melody is symbolic to the undying beauty of art. The intensity of the contrast between the
    Nightingale's world and the painful, troubled and decaying human world is brought into sharp
    focus in stanza three where Keats describes that the Nightingale "among the leaves" is free
    from "The weariness, the fever and the fret" of the human world. Keats expresses his desire
    to escape from a world where "Youth grows pale, spectre thin and dies" or "where beauty
    can not keep her lustrous eyes or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow." Here the focus
    is predominantly on the ephemeral character of all those that are precious in human life.
    Human sorrow and suffering is mainly due to the fickleness and decay of youth, beauty,
    health and love. The quickly perishable charms of life, under the ruthless domination of
    "time's winged chariot" only leaves a sense of inconsolable gloom and despair.
    Keats yearns to forget himself with liquor and live the reality-this veritable inferno. He seeks
    to escape to the nightingale's world where beauty is eternal. Though at first he chooses wine
    to forget the morbid reality and to escape "among the leaves" but soon he dismisses the
    thought and pines to escape with "the viewless wings of poesy." As he rides on the wings of
    imagination, he visualizes himself to have already reached there. His ecstasy is so intense
    that he wishes to die in the middle of it as it is the only way of giving permanence to his state
    of being at the apex of sensuous joy: "Now more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease
    upon the midnight with no pain."
    Keats says that the nightingale is "immortal"-" not born for death" and its song is literally
    timeless and defies all the barriers of space. The poet imagines that the nightingale which is
    singing to him now, has gladdened the hearts of the monarchs and fools in ancient times,
    relieved the gloom of Ruth's mind, and even consoled the captive princess of fairy tales.
    Thus the imagination sweeps all over the universe and blends together the real and the
    imaginary. In contrast to this, Keats seems to say, no human poet or singer can attain the
    state of immortality like the nightingale.
    The poem ends by admitting in a sensible manner the impossibility of achieving freedom
    from the tethers of struggles and frustration through imagination for ever as "the fancy can
    not cheat so well/As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf." Earl Wasserman has rightly
    observed:"The core of the poem is the search for mystery, the unsuccessful quest within its
    darkness. And this leads only to an increasing darkness, or a growing recognition of how
    impenetrable is mystery to mortals."
    (Arijit Das)

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