Discuss 'Ode to a Nightingale' as an ode. What are the characteristics of an ode?

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Discuss 'Ode to a Nightingale' as an ode. What are the characteristics of an ode?

Ans. Keats is pre-eminently a poet of odes, as Shelley is that of lyrics. He has written a good number of odes, some of which have reached the high-water mark of excellence and have been regarded as the noblest achievements of English verse. His Ode To A Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Autumn, Ode on Melancholy are well-known.

Now, an ode is an elaborate lyrical poem with its slow, leisurely movement, expressing the meditative mood of the poet often breaking into poignant feeling. The ode originated in ancient Greece, where it was sung to the accompaniment of dance and music during religious festivals. (According to Edmund Gosse, it is "strain of enthusiastic and exalted lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." An impression of elevation and spaciousness in the mind of the reader is what the ode mainly aims at.) There are two types of odes Horatian and Pindaric (named after the poets Horace and - Pindar). The first kind consists of a series of uniform stanzas, while the latter is highly complex in structure.In English literature Spenser, Gray, Collins, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats are the great writers of odes.

Keats freed the ode from its old classical associations of sublimity and grandeur and over-intellectual elements and made it a proper vehicle for a mind which is soaked in the beauty of the earth, indulging in thrilling sensations and passions in human life. His odes are full of rich sensuous beauties of earth; colour, scent and a spirit of brooding quiet and a zest to the enjoyment of the beauties in nature and art. They are unsurpassed for dignity, haunting pathos, magic of suggestion and richness of imagery. The 'Ode to a Nightingale' reaches the perfection of poetic workmanship.

Again, Keats's susceptibility to delight is 'close-linked with after- thought - the pleasure with pang'. The initial mood of joy induced by the song is mixed up with a pathos that springs out of the contemplation of life. The ode is a "richly meditative one". The poet soon passes from the world of sensation to the sphere of thought. The view of life expressed here is highly tragic and this finds concentrated expression in the third stanza where he speaks of the weariness, fever and fret, the changes of life, the transience of youth, love and beauty. It is the bird's freedom from these sorrows that fills the poet with a longing to escape into the dim forest of the bird and be absorbed in it. The spell is complete and for a few moments the poet remains in a paradise of joy. But the spell is soon broken; he is awakened to the reality of life. Thus the poem is rich in its emotion and thought-contents.

Other elements of Keats's poetry of the ode illustrates are Keats's love of nature, love of romance and Hellenism. The description of the woodland scene with its rich treasure of fragrant flowers is wonderfully done. The spirit of romance is embodied in the bird itself. To the poet the nightingale is no creature of flesh and blood. The nightingale singing in the dark cannot be seen by the poet. His imagination is set on fire by the ideal blessedness of the bird and it becomes to him to be the spirit of joy and beauty that has been singing from the remotest days of history to the present moment. This is the meaning of the line - "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird." Again the whole spirit of mediaeval romance has been condensed in the highly suggestive lines "charmed magic casements' etc. As we read the lines we are transported to the days of mediaeval romance and seem to see actually before our eyes the imprisoned princess in some enchanter's castle in a kingdom by the sea listening to the song of the nightingale, sitting in charmed, magic casement. Lastly, Keats's love of the beautiful mythologies of Greece and Rome is evinced by the "surfeit of mythological allusions which heighten the beauty of stanzas". Lethe, Dryad, Flora, Hippocrene, Bacchus, Queen Moon are some of the glaring examples.