Student Question
Why does Keats wish to escape reality in "Ode to a Nightingale"?
Quick answer:
Keats wishes to escape reality in "Ode to a Nightingale" to avoid the pain, sickness, and mortality that plague human existence. He envies the nightingale's ignorance of these sufferings and longs to "fade away into the forest dim" with the bird. Keats contrasts the bird's euphoric song with his own melancholy, seeking solace in nature and poetry as an escape from human despair.
In the second stanza of "Ode to a Nightingale," the speaker wishes that he could "leave the world unseen, / And with thee [the nightingale] fade away into the forest dim."
In the third stanza, he says that he wants to escape from reality so that he can "quite forget" what the nightingale "hast never known." He then lists the experiences that he supposes the nightingale has never known—and which, by implication, he feels he has known too much. He describes "The weariness, the fever, and the fret." The "weariness' could here refer to both physical and mental exhaustion, as indeed could the "fever." The "fret" seems to allude to all of the troubles and problems that Keats, like most people, has had to deal with.
In the next few lines, Keats refers specifically to the aging process and to death. He writes, for example, about how "youth...
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grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies." In other words, the speaker wants to escape from reality so that he can escape from the knowledge of his own mortality. This is knowledge that he presumes the nightingale is ignorant of, and he envies the nightingale this ignorance.
Why does the poet wish to leave the human world in "Ode to a Nightingale"?
In "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats, the poet is mesmerized by the beauty of the nightingale's song. Keats contrasts the euphoria inherent in the song of the bird with his own unhappiness, melancholy, and sense of darkness.
The poet wishes to "leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim" to escape from the pain, sickness, and death of humanity. In describing the desperation of humanity, he writes of the weariness of a condition in which people endure the groaning and lamentations of each other. He writes of old age afflicted by gray hairs and palsy, which is a type of paralysis accompanied by weakness and shaking. He describes young people dying of sickness and hunger and lovers who cannot retain their beautiful looks.
These are details of the human condition that cause the poet to despair and want to depart from the world. However, he realizes that he cannot flee literally, but rather through an appreciation of nature and myth as expressed in poetry. Keats writes of being "half in love with easeful Death"—in other words, seeing death as a release from the darkness, isolation, and pain that he feels when he contrasts it with the immortal singing of the nightingale. Instead, the nightingale's music fades, and he is left forlorn.
Why does John Keats want to enter the nightingale's world in "Ode to a Nightingale"?
When you're analyzing poetry, it's a good idea to think of the poem as having a speaker who is not the poet.
The speaker in "Ode to a Nightingale" opens the poem by declaring that he would like to experience for himself the source of the nightingale's happiness that inspires it to sing. He isn't content to merely enjoy the beautiful song secondhand.
As the poem develops, the speaker imagines the scenes and sensations that the bird enjoys and expresses his yearning to the bird to "with thee fade away into the forest dim." He envisions that world using the metaphor of drinking an elixir capable of transporting him to a place full of sensory pleasures and providing an escape from the world he finds so demoralizing.
The speaker longs to leave behind the world where he will age with "the weariness, the fever, and the fret" and escape to the bird's place, where these cares are "never known."
References
John Keats was getting overly fond of alcohol at an early age. He was often anxious and depressed because he was afraid he would die of tuberculosis, a family affliction. At the beginning of his "Ode to a Nightingale" he is wishing he had a bottle of wine, "a beaker full of the warm south," so that he might get drunk and forget about his own troubles and the world's troubles (“Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despair.”) Since he has nothing to drink, he decides he will flee the world in his imagination and join the nightingale which has no troubles since, in his poetic conceit, it is immortal and is the same bird that has been singing the same song since biblical times.
Keats wants to travel to the nightingale's world so he can escape from his own world and hide. Much of his poem is his description of the world he has escaped to in his poetic imagination, beginning with: "Already with thee. Tender is the night." (F. Scott Fitzgerald used "Tender Is The Night" as the title of his best novel.)
Keats had a powerful imagination, which was what made him a great poet. His “Ode to a Nightingale” is an outstanding example of his imaginative powers.