One minute past, and Lethe-words had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness

The above lines from Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' seem to claim some loss of self of the poet in his subject. But despite this insistence, the connection between the poet's world and the imagined world of the nightingale is actually quite tenuous, and falters incessantly through the poem before giving way completely. He is reaching for something eternal and unshakeable, inspired by the song of the nightingale, but ends up making a wayward claim to the immortality of the bird itself. He seems to be attempting to contrast the lasting delight of the nightingale's world with the dreary death and depression of his own, but fails to realize that the two chirpers are, indeed, birds of a feather.

Keats' nightingale exemplifies eternal beauty and a constancy not native to his world where "Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes." The world in which the poet resides is the inconstant mortal world in which Death and Despair loom above all and Death holds great appeal as the poet's only recourse for escape. Even when he is drawn into the nightingale's "plaintive anthem" he wishes only to die while hearing it. His 'love' of death is made stronger by the beauty of the nightingale's song. It is this immortal, infallible beauty in which the poet wants to lose himself, and in his ecstasy (and envy) he claims: "Thou was not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down" (61-2). His insistence on the immortality of the bird is a fantasy, and important because it signifies that he has not fully grasped the significance of the nightingale's song. Yes, the bird's "voice was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown" (63-4), but that is not to say that it was the same bird who sung. Poets were also heard in ancient times, and their song, too, can last indefinitely.

The point is that the nightingale is no more immortal than the poet, and his song (and its effect) not all that different from Keats' poetry. The nightingale's song is sung against the same mortal backdrop, the same inevitable, impending fate, and the poet is overwhelmed by the beauty of it. Keats knows this concept very well, as exemplified in his conclusion to 'Ode on a Grecian Urn': "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (49-50). Against Death, only beauty is eternal and constant. Yet here he has a difficult time getting through his own weighty despair and feeling comfortable in this transcendent truth. Though he declares: "I will fly to thee on the viewless wings of poesy," by the end of the same stanza he has lapsed once again into his world where "there is no light."

Matt Smaus