The Forlorn Nightingale

In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Keats takes a deeply emotional and ambivalent stance on matters such as the interconnection or mixture of pain and joy, the intensity of feeling and numbness, life and death, mortality and immortality, the actual and the idealized, and finally separation and connection from reality. He begins with an aching heart which he promptly numbs, or at least attempts to do so for he describes a paradoxical ‘numbness pains.” He then rejects his own idea of jealousy when he hears the purely joyous song of the nightingale and fills himself with the nightingales joy to become “too happy.” He falls into a brief fancy of wine until he remembers wine’s tendency to make him “fade away into the forest dim.” He again falls into another fancy, a dark one, of poesy where he follows the bird’s song. This vision is also brief for “like a bell” the word “Forlorn!” drags him out of his imaginary state to face reality. It is interesting that this word has such power; it has more influence than the nightingale itself, for it is in fact the word “forlorn” that the poem centers around. Forlorn is the “shadows numberless” the “never known” feeling of being forlorn lingers like the vibrations of a ringing bell, mustering sensations of “weariness, fever and fret.” Keats is of course very aware of his eventual death, however the bird is immortal because “Thou wast not born for death.” Bells are often rung to alarm a certain time and the word forlorn struck him like a bell as a constant reminder of death. In order to cope he pretends to be numb and he pretends to have visions. He is unable to have a sustained vision, instead he has brief daydreams to escape for as long as he can. However he cannot create a world of painlessness because his imagination is limited to what he knows from the actual world. Thus he cannot successfully escape in either of his reveries, they are both forlorn. He tries to make the experience of the nightingale’s song itself transcendent but he cannot because he must face the fact that each individual experience is limited by reality. His first daydream cannot unfold the way he would like because alcohol (or “vintage”) has a dark side and cannot match the joy of the bird’s song. He also cannot follow the bird’s song in poesy because his mind is unable to create such joy and in trying so hard to be “too happy” and to dance around his forlorn truth he accomplished nothing.