The Art of Poetic Seeing
My own eyes are not enough for me. We seek to understand the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end; to explore paradox and to chart courses through intellectual territories wherein thought itself is stretched thin: into infinity, multiverse, heaven and hell, limbo and purgatory. John Keats’ burning desire for union with the mystical Other in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ draws from this uniquely human impulse. It is this same impulse that enabled Emily Dickinson to write so beautifully of the sea without ever having seen it in person. As Lewis writes, ‘Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own.’
Harold Bloom, in his essay, The Art of Reading Poetry, wrote that ‘All great poetry asks us to be possessed by it’, and it is this same possession that ‘is the true mode for expanding our consciousness’. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale (1819) is about a poet that seeks to share in this same identification, and who, in doing so, reaches heights of ecstasy that are both perilous and enchanting.
Now, I am aware the above description from Bloom may sound rather aloof and fanciful. And perhaps it is, especially to our modern minds that are becoming increasingly reliant upon technology to do our imagining for us. But anyone who has lost themselves in a poem, novel, or a piece of art or music, has experienced this same inter-mingling and strengthening of consciousness. C.S. Lewis writes well of this in An Experiment in Criticism (1961):
The nearest I have yet got to answer [why we read] is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. […] We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. […] We demand windows.
Lewis goes on to describe what it is that great literature does to us, providing us with a helpful bridge to more deeply understand Keats’ desire for union with the nightingale:
Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny word. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me. […] In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a thousand eyes, but it is still I who see.
My own eyes are not enough for me. It is this axiomatic impulse that drives the artist and philosopher to pursue their work. Why did the medieval scholastic write hundreds of pages about the inner life of God, or of the life of the Trinity in the aeons before the world was made, if not because human beings are not satisfied with our own limited psychologies? We seek to understand the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end; to explore paradox and to chart courses through intellectual territories wherein thought itself is stretched thin: into infinity, multiverse, heaven and hell, limbo and purgatory.
Having explored, if only partly, the drive behind our human desire for finding strength in the consciousness of others, I think we are on firmer ground to understand the heart of John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, in which a poet explores his desire for, and attainment of, union with a mysterious nightingale. A close friend, Charles Brown, wrote in his memoir, Life of John Keats, that Keats had felt ‘a tranquil and continual joy’ in the song of a nearby nightingale one morning, such that ‘he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, and wrote continuously for two or three hours’.
For Keats, the nightingale represents the ideal of Romanticism: a flight from our world of Circumstances into a realm of pure, imaginative felicity—the grasping of an eternal now that is free from change and process (and therefore loss). The poet longs for this transfiguration with such intensity, feeling that his ‘heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’.
But what does union with the nightingale represent? Keats scholar, Andrew Kappel, identifies this as the fulfilment of the desire for ‘ontological change’; a change in our being and objective experience. Here below, to experience joy is also to notice its passing. This awareness of loss, of ‘The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’, to quote Hamlet, is what the poet in stanza three desires to leave behind:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we see this same depiction of mortal life, where the prospect of being doomed to ‘grunt and sweat under a weary life’ is unbearable, the only escape of which is the sleep of death. In stanza six of Keats’ Ode, as the poet inhabits the nightingale’s perspective, he declares that ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain’. In Kappel’s analysis, this dark temptation is borne out of the poet’s taste for the excessive: it is not enough for him to momentarily share in the nightingale’s freedom from change and process—he wants
‘an ultimate and irrevocable forgetfulness, far greater than inebriation or night, and it seems “rich to die” because this more secure forgetfulness promises a freer field for Fancy and a richer garden of delights.’
Yet this allure of death, as with Hamlet, is only temporarily entertained, and does not survive until poem’s end. For Keats, what happens to a soul after death is ultimately unknowable. As in Hamlet’s soliloquy, death is ‘The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns’. Kappel casts Keats’ rejection of death as the realisation that, after all, ‘the nightingale is a living creature whose song is heard only by living ears’. ‘Still wouldst thou [the nightingale] sing’, sighs the poet, ‘and I have ears in vain.’ Ultimately, to take part in this exchange of energies one must be alive and alert, and it is necessary for one to have experienced the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in order to feel more keenly the contrast between a life here below and a life of bright Elysium above. Unlike mortal men, doomed to die, the poet declares (shouts!) in the penultimate stanza: ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!’. The nightingale’s being is seperate from the rushed world of circumstances and contingencies, which T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his Preludes (1911): a world where men are ‘trampled by insistent feet / At four and five and six o’clock’.
Andrew Kappel rightly points out, however, that although in Ode to a Nightingale there is the ‘conviction of death’s inadequacy as an agent of ontological change’, elsewhere in Keats’ poetry there is more openness to this prospect, as in his sonnet, Bright Star, and in the following lesser-known poem, Can Death be Sleep:
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? The transient pleasures as a vision seem, And yet we think the greatest pain's to die. How strange it is that man on earth should roam, And lead a life of woe, but not forsake His rugged path; nor dare he view alone His future doom which is but to awake.
Keats may have gone back and forth over these ideas, yet it seems clear at least that Ode to a Nightingale should be read not as a denial of life (though the reality of mortal life is painfully recounted), but as a call to revivify it with our poetic faculties. He takes care to note that he achieved this felicitous union with the nightingale not with the aid of ‘Bacchus and his pards’ (the Roman god of wine and his leopards), ‘But on the viewless wings of Poesy’ (the craft of poetry). This union gives rise to an overflow of pictorial impressions for the poet:
Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
The tactile and olfactory realm of pastoral plants and scents, with little light except that which blows through ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’ from the canopy above, bears no resemblance to ‘The weariness, the fever, and the fret’ of stanza three. It is the world of ‘swimming sense’ that we read of in Coleridge’s poem, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison (1797). After Coleridge’s wife spilt burning milk over his foot (poor guy), he is forced to stay behind, under a tree, while his friends venture out on a walk among the hills. Utilising the same powers of poetic-seeing as Keats, however, he finds himself participating in the walk through an imaginative vision. In doing so, ‘A delight / Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad / As I myself were there!’
As I myself were there. This is the fruit of a lively poetic imagination that has been cultivated through much reading and writing. It is this same power that enabled Emily Dickinson to write so beautifully of the ocean—Rowing in Eden, ah, the Sea!—without ever having seen it in person. Think even of theological territories, such as the awe-inspiring introduction to St. John’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
The poetic and visionary impulse that courses through the great voices of humanity extends even into unseen realms. We cannot help but throw open our windows and look beyond. Indeed, the ‘apex and the climax of the imaginative experience’ in Ode to a Nightingale, according to Keats scholar, Richard Fogle, is to be found in the penultimate stanza, where the nightingale’s voice is described as one ‘that oft-times hath / Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’ A casement is a vertical window that opens like a door. Like Lewis’s imaginative ‘windows’ referenced above, Keats describes the journey with the nightingale as employing an energy and agility that spans both the natural realm and the realm of faery. These images, according to Fogle, ‘rise gradually to a climax’ in the final stanza, and the word ‘forlorn’ stuns the poet like ‘a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’, bringing the poet back from his vision, returning him to mortal life and toil:
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Keats acknowledges that in taking part in this rich, imaginative experience with the nightingale, one does not come away unscathed, but also suffers loss. In a letter to his brother, George, written on 19th March, 1819, a few months before writing Ode to a Nightingale, he writes of the cycle of loss inherent in life on Earth:
This is the world—thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure. Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting. While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events—while we are laughing it sprouts [and] grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck.
This is the world. Indeed, the poet’s acknowledgment that ‘the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do’—the result being that his union with the nightingale must end as all other joys must end—‘is not a rejection of imagination’, according to Fogle, but rather the acceptance that this loss is ‘part of the total experience’ of the poetic imagination. Here below, even the best experiences are tinged with loss, and though ‘In a higher world it is otherwise,’ in the words of Cardinal Newman, ‘here below to live is to change’. It is this same sense of joy mingled with grief that is described in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring:
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.
The poet of Keats’ Ode has left this mystical encounter with a mere taste of the nightingale’s eternal joy, a partial joy that can never wholly satisfy. He is now left to piece together the appearances and impressions of his own reality—do I wake or sleep?—wondering whether the world of Circumstances that he has returned to, or the pastoral sublimity he has just left, is the real thing.
To embark on the journey of poetic-seeing is to recognise, indeed to remember, that there are nightingales all around us, and that our noticing them is not the result of a chance encounter, but is in fact a cooperation with the mysterious inner logic of nature. In order to strengthen our own consciousness, we must intermingle with the consciousness of others, a process which begins in earnest when we set aside the time to read the best of what has been written.
Sources:
Essay, The Art of Reading Poetry, by Harold Bloom, 2004.
Journal Article: The Immortality of the Natural: Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale", by Andrew J. Kappel, 1978.
Journal Article: Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, by Richard Harter Fogle, 1953.
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 1961.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954.
Cardinal John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845.
The single best and most brilliant explanation of a poem/poetry I have ever read
This was beautiful. Thank you.