fact or fiction?
...he Nightingale in this poem symbolizes Keats need to escape the harsh realities of human life. He describes the nightingale as “being to happy in thine happiness” (6), meaning that he recognizes the happiness that lies with in the bird and envies it. Keats then makes a comparison between the carefree bird to the pain that exists within him as well as all mankind. There is something about the beauty and carefree spirit of the nightingale that makes Keats think about his own life. After seeing how happy and content the nightingale was, Keats feels the desire to discover what makes man feel that way? Then in line ten he mentions the “full-throated ease.” This is when Keats longs for the escape that alcohol gives him. By drowning his sorrows in wine, Keats is able to create a false sense of happiness. In the third stanza Keats is once again aware of certain realities that we cannot escape. This realization takes Keats out of the idealistic world he was living in, where everyone can drink away all of his or her problems and places him back into reality. Now that he is out of that state of mind he starts to think about aging and death when he says, “Where palsy shakes a few, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies.” Here he begins by describing the physical signs of aging by mentioning gray hairs and the once fresh skin of youth will grow old and pale. Then Keats points out the inevitably of these physical changes and portrays them as signs of dying. It is in the fourth stanza that Keats is once again in his imaginary world regardless of his mental state of consciousness. Keats lets us know he is back in the imaginary world when he mentions that his mind will allow him to “fly” (31) up into the trees to rest with the nightingale. Only in an imaginary world, under the influence of drugs, that could make a person be capable of doing a superhuman actions such as flying. During the fifth stanza Keats remains in his imaginary world. He explains the extent of his numbness. Unfortunately it is not possible to know whether it was the pain or the drugs that caused Keats to go numb as a way to escape. Keats numb state of mind is expressed when he says; “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet” (41). But the question still remains is it his sadness that blinds him from seeing what lies at his feet or is it the intense effects of the opiates playing tricks with his mind? Throughout the poem Keats goes in and out of a conscious state of mind. At times it is questionable what state of mind he is actually in. By the last stanza his body and his mind reconnect. However Keats ends the poem with “Was it a vision, or a walking dream.” It is in these very last words that we wonder if this whole experience actually occurred in reality. This is what causes any reader to wonder what was Keats purpose in writing this poem. Was it simply a way of Keats expressing his emotions through the arts or just a creation of the mind itself? Keats wrote Ode to the Nightingale after going through a variety of traumatic experiences. When something traumatic happens to a person there is only so much emotion and sadness that a person can take before they need to find a means of escape. It is unclear to the reader if Keats is escaping by writing a poem as a type of therapeutic relief for coping with his emotions or the reminance of drugs he uses as a means to escape his overwhelming emotions. Throughout the poem Keats uses descriptions that are so intense that one would almost have to be sedated to think that way. Since we do not know exactly what Keats is trying to express in the poem, a reader must pay attention to every word to draw any type of conclusion. These descriptions are what make this poem so visual. As a visual aid, an array of colors is used by Keats to express both happiness and sadness. These colors allow the reader to paint a clear mental image while reading this poem. In line thirteen it says “Tasting of Flora and the country green.” By describing the country as green the mental image of spring beauty is created for the reader. The way he associates green with beauty is similar to the way he describes his overpowering sadness in line forty-seven, “Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves.” The image of fading color in the violets depicts death and the sadness than blinds him to the beauty in the world. The use of colors can imply optimism or pessimism but regardless of what the are s...