Dean Exikanas

Ode to John Keats

“They believed that the imagination stands in some essential relation to truth and reality” (Maurice Bowra) shows how the romantics believed to find truth and reality, not through reason, such as that of the era before, but through the imagination. The romantics saw beauty through nature and isolation. Keats is no exception using his language to bring forth his vivid imagination and in doing so brings forth a truth that can only be reached through the journey of his poetry. This can be seen in both “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.

Through “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats is trying to escape reality and go on a journey using the euphoria that he feels when listening to the Nightingale. In the first few stanzas, Keats relates the song of the Nightingale to a drugged state, feeling as if he had drunk hemlock or “emptied some dull opiate to the drains”. The melancholy that appears from this language, along with the slow rhythm, is contradicted with his happiness which that the melancholy has stemmed from (“being too happy in thine happiness”). This though shows Keats realisation that he cannot escape reality, and that the happiness cannot last.

Keats though tries to fight reality by drinking yet realises that this is not possible. While he invokes beautiful images of wine – further emphasised by the alliteration of “beaded bubbles winking at the brim” – he also realises that reality is not far away, as in the third stanza where he is overwhelmed with sad images of reality and death – “men sit and hear each other groan”. The enjambment if “Here” emphasises the harshness of reality while the personification of “sad, last grey hairs” is evocative of the harshness of reality.

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Through this revelation, Keats realises he must not escape reality “by Bacchus and his pards” but through poetry and its language. Keats brings a new truth to reality through his imagination. Using his language and senses, Keats paints a new picture of reality, focusing on the unseen beauty of reality. Words such as “embalmed darkness” sets the seen for the imagination while the descriptions such as “musk-rose, full of dewy wine” shows the garden through his senses. Through his imagination he is able to come to a new truth of reality, for even though it is through imagining, it ...

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