Poison:- “My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk.”
Alcohol:- “ That I might drink, and leave the world unseen.”
Using his imagination to escape to the world of the Nightingale through poetry:- “ But on the viewless wings of poesy.”
In the Grecian Urn he wants to escape to the timeless world of the urn:- “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave.”
In the Nightingale poem Keat’s chooses his poetry as his method of escape. He find he is successful in reaching the Nightingale’s world:-
“ Already with thee! tender is the night.”
Although he finds when he gets there that it is not what he had hoped for and he doesn’t fit in their. Displayed through language such as:- “ She stood in tears amid the alien corn,” and “in faery land.”
This is because in this supposedly perfect world his senses are numbed and so he can’t appreciate the beauty of it as fully as he could in the mortal world:-
“ I cannot see what flowers are at my feet…….. But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.” He realises then at the end of the Ode to a Nightingale poem that escaping to the nightingale’s world is not as good as the mortal world. He bases this decision on the fact that in the mortal you experience both the good and bad intensely but this is better than no intense feeling at all.
Initially though Keat’s is attracted to the imaginary world of the Urn and the Nightingale because these places stay the same for ever. He wants to be immortal like the Nightingale and the people on the Urn because he believes as a human that as you get old life goes downhill because you grow less attractive and die. Here are two contrasting quotes from him describing mortal life in Ode to a Nightingale:- “ Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,” and describing the immortal life and Ode on an Urn:-“ For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.”
Although when he reaches the still immortal world this is the very aspect of it which puts him off and makes him want to return to the mortal world. He feels the immortal world lacks excitement, interest and intrigue because there is no movement. This happens in both on a Grecian urn and Nightingale, in Nightingale he misses the interesting changes of season:-
In Ode on a Grecian Urn he does not like it because there is no movement at all, all the people on the urn are completely static and there is nothing happening:-
“Is emptied of this folk , this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore will silent be.”
The fact that things cannot be experienced fully in the immortal world described in Ode to a Nightingale is also shown in Ode on a Grecian Urn. When Keat’s describes a couple shown on the urn, they are frozen at a good time in their relationship but they will never have sex and reach the pinnacle of their relationship, when they are intensely experiencing happiness together. Keat’s again decides that he would prefer to have extreme feelings of good or bad than always feeling ok:-
“ Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.”
The final poem called “to Autumn” is very different to the first two poems. Throughout he seems content and is not looking for any methods of escape unlike before when he spent a lot of time trying to find alternatives to normal life. Although, in the end he just had to settle with it and not be happy with it. This is because in the previous two poems he has been terrified of growing old and dying which he represents as the seasons of autumn and winter. He did not want to move on from the summer season of his life and wanted to escape to the timeless worlds of the nightingale and the urn where he would always be in summer. Although in “to Autumn” it seems he has accepted he is growing old and finds beauty in it:-
“ Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”
In Autumn he even finds that he no longer wants to be in summer at all and is eager for it to end. It is not as if he is just resided to the fact that he is growing old and into his autumn months:-
“ Until they think the warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimmd their clammy cells.”
This I feel is representative of the fact that he is no longer afraid of death but finds old age an attractive, comforting, full, mature and wholesome existence:-
“ Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.” The quotation is Keat’s describing how he is going to live his remaining years. Enjoying his life winding down and feeling content.
The reason Keat’s is no longer afraid of death is because he realises that mortal death is not the absolute end. He sees a constant cycle of life in the world around him, trees leaves fall off but they soon re-grow:-
“ touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” This is regarding the corn after harvest and is important because the corn has seemingly reached the end of its life when cut but then he sees that it re-grows and is new and fresh. He then concludes that this could apply to his life that when it seems he is dying he could be being reborn and so he is not afraid.
