Experience of a Nightingale By: Shannon Hill Forlorn!

the very word is like a bell / to toll me back from thee to my sole self! laments the narrator at the beginning of the eighth stanza in Keats Ode to a Nightingale. This feeling of sorrow is an underlying tone throughout the poem. In between, there are turning points in which the narrator contemplates life. To convey this, Keats uses a variety of literary devices, such as allusion, imagery, and personification. In the first stanza of this work, the narrator observes the way the nightingale singest of summer in full-throated ease (line 10). He takes an envious tone towards the way the nightingale seems at ease with life, when in the second stanza, lines fifteen and sixteen, he wishes ...for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene. The narrator alludes to Greek mythology in this statement, the South (Greece), and the idea of the fountain of Hippocrene, which was said to induce poetic inspiration, poetic inspiration being the Nightingales song. He is looking at the way the Nightingale singest...in full-throated ease, and is dismayed to see that instead his own ...heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains [his] sense, and he feels he could never be compared the the Nightingale. In the third stanza of Ode to a Nightingale, Keats writes of ...where men sit and hear each other groan (line 24). By this he means society, and he begins the stanza by talking about how he wants to quite forget / what thou amongst the leaves has never known in lines 21 and 22. This is a contradictory prelude to what the narrator talks about in the fifth stanza, of embalmd darkness (line 43). At this point, he has ... [flown] to thee / ...on the viewless wings of Poesy (stanza 4, lines 31 and 33), or rather, attempted to follow the Nightingale. By talking about the soft incense and dewy wine in the fifth stanza, the narrator uses a stream of consciousness effect to take us into his imagination to show what he believes will happen if he follows the Nightingale, or leaves society, ...where men sit and hear each other groan. He uses light and dark to symbolize living in society and living out of it. The tone changes in the sixth stanza, when the narrator describes Death. The tone now becomes more serious, as the narrator confides in the Nightingale that I have been half in love with easeful Death (line 52). The D in Death is capitalized, exemplifying its personification, as if Death were the name of a person. This makes the narra-

tors feelings more realistic, and the possibility of death even more realistic. He then goes on to compare his feelings with the life if the Nightingale, exclaiming in the seventh stanza, lines 61 and 62 that Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down. Hungry generations is again referring to society, and the narrator is admiring how the Nightingale seemingly goes on, unaffected by it. This time, the d in death is no longer capitalized, indicating that it is no longer personified when describing the bird. From this we can gather that the narrator almost worships the birds immortality, and he wishes he was like it. The tone then shifts again when the narrator, in the eighth stanza, complains Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / to toll me back from thee to my sole self! (lines 71 and 72). This simile draws the attention back to the narrator, and how unlike the Nightingale he is. The poem ends with him once again contemplating death - Do I wake or sleep?, line 80, using waking and sleeping as a metaphor for life and death. The narrator decides he could never be like the Nightingale, for he couldnt change himself.