The Theme Of Death In Ode To A Nightingale

Great Essays
Register to read the introduction… The lines passionately describe the misfortunes and sorrows attached to human life. Indeed, the world is filled with sickness, weariness, lost hope and human suffering in general. Ode to a Nightingale is a touching expression of death because Keats wrote it when he was struggling with an overwhelming sense of life’s tragedy. He also appeared to be pessimistic, expressing his own impending death, noting that everyone around him that he loves was dying. The personal yet human character expressed by the speaker outlines the poet’s sense of tragedy attached to human life as well as his sense of personal weariness and suffering. The theme of death acts as a groundwork for the introduction of nightingale’s immortality. Though the speaker attains this by referring to the bird as being immortal, he realizes that as a human he cannot attain such and that is when he comes back to …show more content…
His unique representation of mortality and immortality is evident throughout his poems, specifically in Ode to a Nightingale, a poem that he wrote while in deep sorrow. Death became an important topic for him because Keats knew that death was eminent, noting that his own mother died as a result of tuberculosis. It is this emotional and physical hurting that put the poet in despair and in contrast with a happy singing nightingale. As a result of this, Keats was sensitive to the topic of life and death and this is why he described the immortal world. Ode to a Nightingale is one of Keats’s longest odes and is often considered the most personal, with its reflections on death and the stresses of …show more content…
N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
Cook, Elizabeth. John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.
"John Keats." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.
"Literary Devices." Literary Devices. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.
Roe, Nicholas. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
Scott, Heidi. "Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale." Explicator, 63(3) (2005): 139-141. Print.
Stillinger, Jack. "The “story” of Keats. ." Wolfson, S. J. The Cambridge Companion to Keats . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 246-260. Print.
White, Keith D. and John Keats. John Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence, Volume 107. Rodopi, 1996.

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    One interpretation the reader can extract from this quatrain is Keats’s establishment of…

    • 1615 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He receives comfort and gratification from looking at his past, however with all his mistakes looking back at him. Longfellow hopes to achieve his goals with his remaining time, but is fully aware of death coming nearer and nearer with each passing day. John Keats’ “When I have fears that I may cease to be” is a English sonnet that forms three quatrains and a closing couplet. It’s main theme is death with it expressing the…

    • 757 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The setting of a poem often carries as much significance as the events in the poem itself do in regard to theme. Many poems, including “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats, and the Ex-Basketball Player” by John Updike, cannot be fully analyzed or understood without this critical element. * * * Keats’ uses vivid imagery to reinforce his theme of the dangerous and dream-like nature of love and women. The poem begins as the knight is “alone and palely loitering,” seemingly lost after his encounter with the Belle Dame who has abandoned him in the wild. This gloomy place where, “the sedge has withered from the lake,” and, “no birds sing,” symbolizes love’s fleeting nature and the very “life” it steals.…

    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    However, all through his career Keats displayed notable intellectual and artistic development. From the observation of his compositions, it is clearly seen that if he had lived, and if with broader understanding of men and more profound experiences of life he had reached to Wordsworth’s spiritual insight and Byron’s power of fervour and knowledge, he would have grown into a greater poet than either. He would have produced more and superior narrative poetry, wherein human personages depicted with psychological discernment would have moved before a background of romantic beauty. For Keats had a style- a “natural magic”- that makes his compositions higher than anything in contemporary English poetry and drive us back to Milton or Shakespeare for a…

    • 1780 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Ode to a Nightingale follows an iambic meter pattern of A,B,A,B,C,D,E. “The Raven” follows a giving the mood of the poem a softer, more fluid sense of what the author is trying to convey, It flows like a brook in the middle of a June, easy, gentle, like the touch of a lovers hand across you chest, or a mother holding her child for the first time. Rhyming Trochaic Octameter (A,B,C,B,B,B) Gives the poem a more ridging sense one that keep you on the edge and jumping out of your skin every time the dreaded words come around again “Nevermore” It is as if you can not escape the terrible end those two chilling words never more. Its repetitiveness ensures that is sticks with you long after you reach the final line of the eighth…

    • 1694 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the pictures, buildings’ surfaces and window sills are neatly portrayed depicting order in “boring” objects. It is the new exciting experiences which bounce creating off-details. This comes into place again in Keats’ depiction of shapes. The “boring” buildings and window sills are solid and geometric representation plainness and stability. The great piles of snow and shadowing trees are round and misshapen representing comfort and spontaneity.…

    • 926 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Death is a frequently explored theme in poetry. Despite the prevalence of this theme, each poet has their own distinct viewpoint about it and portray it in such a way that reflects their beliefs. These differences are both in attitude towards death as well as the point of view of the speaker. Some authors take on an optimistic portrayal of death whereas others use a pessimistic perspective. Point of view can be either through the eyes of someone who has died or someone who has lost a loved one.…

    • 1296 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ezra Jack Keats

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Biography Keats was a city kid, as were many of his protagonists. He himself had grown up in Brooklyn, New York. He was the third child of Benjamin and Augusta Podgainy Katz, Jewish immigrants…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This poem approaches a more beautiful sense of what death might be. It confronts death as something blissful with an elegy to proceed. Here is a line from this poem, “Oh, there will pass with your great passing” (Millay 105). Once more does she use death in her poems to portray a message; a very powerful, yet sometimes confusing message. This poem has more of a confusing feel to it, but regardless it is on the subject of…

    • 1211 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Keats American Dream

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Through Keats's use of dreams, the reader sees that he or she must let go of expectations and live the true…

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    William Butler Yeats is a poet who is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century (“William Butler Yeats”). “William was born in Ireland, June thirteenth, 1865. He had his first works at Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art while a student there. His early achievements in his life were The Wanderings of Oisin and Countess Kathleen. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for his Literature in 1923” (“William Butler Yeats Biography”).…

    • 1003 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    But even at the very end, it is not yet over. The final image compares the completion of the cycle to a person sitting “by a cyder-press, with a patient look/ Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours”. This long, drawn out process of the end of autumn, or the end of a life, has been extended almost to the point of over-exaggeration. Even when there is literally no time left at all to spare, Keats has made it seem as if there is so much left.…

    • 1142 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Kipling's Sleeping Devices

    • 1756 Words
    • 8 Pages

    After Fanny Brand and after the not-so-intoxicating drink, Mr. Shaynor seems to rewrite Keats’s poem as Keats himself, the narrator questions the man, and a few subtle but important clues can be gleaned. When asked “if [he has] ever read anything written by a man called Keats,” Mr. Shaynor says that he “[hasn’t] much time to read poetry.” However, as other commentators have pointed out, Mr. Shaynor is a liar. William Dillingham makes an astute observation in that while Mr. Shaynor claims that he “has no knowledge at all of who Keats may be” and “does not remember ever hearing his name,” he somehow “knows [that Keats] was a poet” despite the narrator not supplying that piece of information.…

    • 1756 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Although having lived a very short life, John Keats is arguably one of the most remarkable poets that the Romantic Era produced. His poetry explores the human condition by asking deep philosophic questions. Written in 1819, the poem ”Ode on Melancholy," captures many complex emotions, and focuses on the intertwined connection between joy and sadness, hope and disappointment. He reasons that in order to fully experience and appreciate one, we must also experience the other. Only if we can truly accept that pain is inevitable, can we hope to find beauty and happiness in the world around us.…

    • 958 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet III, ‘To a Nightingale’ could be considered to be a mournfully romantic tale of a nightingale singing a song of such sadness that the poet begins to question the tragedy of the nightingale, and then to consider a cause for its song of such profound despondence. The narrator then admits to being envious of the nightingale for its freedom to sing the song. The meaning of this sonnet will be explored through key elements of prominent moods, language and figurative language devices, sound devices, poetic meter and rhyming patterns. Prominent moods portrayed in Smiths sonnet are sadness, curiosity, and envy.…

    • 932 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays