Keats' Odes

Listening to Keats' Odes 

Below are some recent readings of Keats' odes, which remain immensely popular with readers and listeners. Cumberbatch's reading, for example, has nearly 800,000 views.

Benedict Cumberbatch reads Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale."

Ben Whishaw reads Keats' "To Autumn."

Some Notes and Questions on "Ode to a Nightingale"

Conflicted nature of human life

• the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy
• intensity of feeling/numbness of feeling
• life/death
• mortal/immortal
• the actual/the ideal
• separation/connection.
• Move from concrete to abstract
• concrete imagery and sensual language
• becomes symbol
• Stanza 1
• reverie while listening to an actual nightingale sing
• feels joy and pain, an ambivalent response
• what words express his pleasure and what express his pain
• which words express his intense feeling and which his numbed feeling
• What qualities does the poet ascribe to the nightingale?
• Real bird > Symbol but of what?
• pure or unmixed joy,
• the artist, with the bird's voice being self expression or the song being poetry,
• the music (beauties) of nature
• the ideal.
• Stanza II. move into a world of imagination or fantasy
• alcohol: what are the effects alcohol has; which one or ones is the poet seeking?
• drinking and of the world associated with wine is idealized
• The image of the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" is much admired. Does it capture the action of sparkling wine? What sounds are repeated? What is the effect of this alliteration? Do any of the sounds duplicate the bubbles breaking? Say the words and notice the action of your lips.

• Stanza III. real world pulls him back from imagined world
• What is the effect of the words "fade" and "dissolve"? why "far away"?
• What kind of world does the poet live in?
• What is the relationship of the bird to the world the poet describes? See line 2.
• Characterize the real world which the poet describes. By implication, what kind of world does the nightingale live in? (is it the same as or different from the poet's?)
• Stanza IV. Turn to fantasy again
• What does it mean to choose “Poesy”?
• He contrasts this mode of experience (poetry) to the "dull brain" that "perplexes and retards" (line 4); what way of approaching life does this line reject?
• In line 5, he succeeds or seems to succeed in joining the bird. What’s it like being with the bird?
• Stanza V.
• cannot see in the darkness, he must rely on his other senses. What senses does he rely on?
• Even in this refuge, death is present
• What words hint of death?
• Do these hints help to prepare for stanza VI?
• Was death anticipated in stanza I by the vague suggestions in the words "Lethe," "hemlock," "drowsy numbness," "poisonous," and "shadowy darkness"?
• What season is it? What significance might we attach to that?
• Stanza VI. Distance from the nightingale
• yearns to die, a state which he imagines as only joyful, as pain-free, and to merge with the bird's song.
• The nightingale is characterized as wholly blissful--"full-throated ease" in stanza I and "pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!" (7-8).
• mixed nature of reality and its transience suggested by the contrasting phrases "fast-fading violets" and "the coming musk-rose"
• What does the speaker realize about death at the end of the stanza?

• Stanza VII. Human mortality => Bird immortality (or song)
• but the bird will die: is this an error? or can we read it another way?
• Is he saying that the bird he hears is immortal?
• or is he saying something else, like "the bird is a symbol of the continuity of nature" or like "the bird represents the continuing presence of joy in life"?
• Deepened “meaning” of the bird:
• Does the bird symbolize ideal beauty, which is immortal?
• Or is the bird the visionary or imaginative realm which inspires poets?
• Or does the bird's song symbolize poetry and has the passion of the song/poem carried the listening poet away?
• Has the actual bird been transformed into a myth?
• Does this one bird represent the species, which by continuing generation after generation does achieve a kind of immortality as a species?
• Hungry generations
• Where is the bird located in this stanza? Do we see a shift?
• Stanza VIII. Identified or separated from the nightingale?
• What delusion is the poet waking from?
• Bird is not a symbol anymore, now the actual bird. The bird flies away to another spot to sing. The bird's song becomes a "plaintive anthem" and fainter.
• Is the change in the bird and/or the poet?
• Is Keats's description of the bird's voice as "buried deep" a reference only to its physical distance, or does the phrase have an additional meaning? It is the last of the death images running through the poem.
• With the last two lines
• true insight or experience (vision) or daydreaming
• the validity of the experience the poem describes, or is he expressing the inability to maintain an intense, true vision?
• transience; a false vision, or true?
• Has the dreamer in this poem changed as a result of his visionary experience? For instance, has his life been improved in any way? has he been damaged in any way?
• What is the tone of the ending?