Chapter 17 - Keats’s Nightingale and Other Nightingales

Summary

When I first read Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” I took it simply to be a poem written out of admiration for a nightingale's song, a poem celebrating a momentary encounter between bird and poet in an English garden. However, I knew that that did not account for the perplexing effect of the poem, a certain sense of tumult that arises from it. Why these clashing chords of anguish and happiness, weariness and exultation, despair and serenity?

When I reread the poem on a later occasion, I did so much more slowly in the attempt to allow for the rhythm of the work's unfolding, where the ode itself begins with a strange sense of an inexplicable slowing down.

Keats's ode begins with the lyric poet's expression of a simultaneous sense of heartache and drugged numbness. The expression “a drowsy numbness pains” begs the question of how a loss of sensation and loss of awareness can be painful, and it seems that the experience being described is not so much one of drifting into sleep but one of being put to sleep by what the poem calls “some dull opiate,” some drug, and calls also “hemlock’” a poison. With this, the question became for me: does the heartache or piercing sadness attested to derive from an anaesthetizing predicament that cannot be avoided?

In thinking of this sense of undergoing an anaesthetic, I recalled a memory from my childhood when I injured my mouth in a playground accident and was taken to a dentist who decided that to stitch up the injury he would need to “put me to sleep,” as he phrased it. It sounded alarming to me, since I had only heard of animals being put to “sleep,” a euphemism for mercy-killing them. The dentist clamped a chlorophyll gas mask over my nose and mouth, and as I began to lose consciousness, I had the harrowing feeling of fervently wishing I could resist what I could not resist, the helpless imposition of being plunged into oblivion.