The Ode's Of Keats
...It's how powerfully he is able to evoke the beauty in things that are so ordinary to the normal viewer. He gives a lot more in-depth meaning to the words in his poems that capture all of the reader's senses. Keats uses this beauty to create a central theme in three of his poems, "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to Autumn" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn". It is the beauty that he sees in the world which makes it apparent that society is destined to perish and die. The beauty in "Ode to a Nightingale" is that of the Nightingale's song, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn", it's the beauty that Keats sees in art, and in "Ode to Autumn", it's the beauty he sees in the seasons and how immortal they are because they are part of an earthly cycle.
Keats shows the deepest expression of human mortality in his poem "Ode to a Nightingale". In this Ode, Keats discusses the relationship to Old age and how it compares to the fluid song of the Nightingale. The man in the poem longs to flee from the world he lives and join the bird in its world. However, in the third stanza, after thinking about it, he chooses against the idea of going to the bird's world. In the fourth stanza he says he will "Fly to thee, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but on the viewless wings
". This is where he embraces those "viewless wings"(Keats 1097).
In "Ode to a Nightingale", the central figure of beauty is this nightingale. The song of the nightingale is reminding the poet of his own mortality by singing to his senses. The poem begins with "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
" (Keats 1097). In this first line, Keats is showing that he is mortal and the "drowsy numbness" is him sinking into the world of the nightingale. He is opening himself to the song of the bird. The nightingale is singing "of summer in full-throated ease" (Keats 1097) even though the poet later says that it is Mid-May. This...
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