Ode to a Nightingale

Just a little more Keats. I am reading other things and I want to share those too- but first this.

I chose Ode To A Nightingale because to me it feels the most personal of all the odes, and of all the great poetry that Keats wrote in the last year before he became ill. All the odes touch on similar questions- the place of art and poetry in life, the meaning of suffering, the development of human consciousness among them- but they each explore them differently. Often in his poetry Keats used mythological figures and stories to illustrate his points; this makes the directness of the third stanza of Ode to a Nightingale standout so much:

Fade far away, dissolve and quiet forget
What thou among the leaves has 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 grey haris,
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.

This is something a reader today can understand without any notes or secondary commentary. It's immediate. One of Keats's preoccupations was the direction of poetry itself, and how it seemed to be turning inward and becoming much more personal that the poetry of Shakespeare or Milton which he admired. Keats was conflicted about this, but here he seems to give over to it and he gives us something that sounds very modern in an age where everything is personal.

The poem also displays what every commentary I've read acknowledges as one of Keats's strongest characteristics, his extraordinary empathy. Here it shines through as he addresses the nightingale throughout the entire poem, but it also comes across in a two line description of, "...the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,/she stood in tears amid the alien corn;"

This is another wonderful poem to read aloud. Pure, lovely genius.