Ode to a Nightingale (1819) Flashcards
Second of the spring odes, alternating between synecdochical, idealizing turns and metonymic, realistic ones
glass of water becomes a draught of vintage vs life qua “weariness, the fever, and the fret”
exploration of the relationship between imagined beauty
and the harsh, changeable reality of everyday human experience
l’équilibre de l’idéal dans le réel
one must nevertheless admit the fact of death
Keats (here + in other spring odes) uses a stanza (the keatsian sonnet) that combines a Shakespearian quatrain (abab) with a Petrarchan sestet (cdecde)
The odes can thus be seen as arising from Keats’s experimentations with the sonnet and his search for a different lyric form
Aubrey de Vere noted a
“depth, significance, and power of diction”, and went on to
remark “his mental faculties [were] extended throughout the
sensitive part of his nature … His body seemed to think””
romantic poet
a poet writing in the early nineteenth century who worked through the questioning and resolution of sensuous imagery ordered by the imagination-as Donne was said to have worked through the “violent yoking together” of ideas.
i.e. not keats
how is keats not a romantic poet
his poetry thinks in a certain way – not philosophically, i.e., in “consequitive reasoning”,
but rather, it thinks through the structures imposed by the searching imagination upon familiar imagery.
“Poetry, even of the loftiest and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive, causes”.
Coleridge but applicable to Keats
“a complex Mind-one that
is imaginative and at the same time careful of its Fruits-who
would exist partly on sensation partly on thought-to whom it is
necessary that years should bring the philosophic Mind”
to bailey
of a mind that is sustained by its sensations, in part, which is constituted by them, in part, despite their unintelligibility
Allows for the ‘redigestion of our most Ethereal musings’ and increase our knowledge of things
= knowledge is thus poetic, not strictly cognitive, requires a combination of sensation and thought
tension of poem
about the music that precedes and exceeds poetical language, and by extension, the imaginative and sensible world that precedes and exceeds determinate, univocal thought
Hyppocrene
the name of a spring that the winged horse Pegasus created by stamping its hoof into the ground. Drinking from it was supposed to give poetic inspiration
O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth; / That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim
Le coeur du je lyrique a mal (my heart aches) en sourd engourdissement (drowsy numbness) pèse,
sur mes sens, comme si j’avais bu la ciguë
Ou vidé jusqu’au fond un breuvage opiacé (or emptied some dull opiate to the
à l’instant, et sombré aux rives du Léthé (One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk)
1st quatrain
literal beginning, my heart aches – on peut prendre ces mots comme référentiels
Une synesthésie apparaît : drowsy numbness, almost to the point of oxymoron… ces mots sont contradictoires ensemble, car l’engourdissement implique la privation de la sensation ; cependant, les 2 s’accompagnent souvent.
Lethwards = suggère l’acte d’oublier
= manque de conscience, de sentiment, de sobriété parfaite, de mouvement aisée, de mémoire
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot (sort heureux),
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees (ailes légères)
In some melodious plot (en un bosquet mélodieux)
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, (verdoyants, ombres infinies)
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
(Toi qui chantes l’été à gorge déployé)
premier sizain
apostrophe change, contenu change :
personification, langage figuré
la scène devient sensible à l’excès : la répétition de “happy,” light winged, assonance de “ee” in beechen green, sens de l’infinie dans “shadows numberless,” l’adjectif du mot composé full(-throated)…la siblance, le dispositif stylistique dans la poésie dans lequel un son “s” est répété plus de deux fois en succession rapide.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
l’intensité continue dans le deuxième quatrain : -assonance “ee”, coolness of vintage, taste of flora, and l’allusion à la musique
jeu de mots– goût floral, où comme les fleurs… mais aussi sensuel, goût de la déesse Flore
oxymoron : le goût du vin est à la fois frais et rafraîchissant + d’une joie qui évoque le soleil, les coups de soleil, les moments où on était brûlé par le soleil
= contradiction à l’intérieur d’un sensation
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
deuxième sixain beaker full of the warm south
+allusion à Hippocrene, where Pégase drank and where poetic inspiration was found
+ repetition of full (+ neologism blushful) = sens d’éxcès
images = bords étincelants, boire + oublier la réalité qu’on voit & commence à disparaître
synesthésie = drinking the south, winking / pétillant , quitte le monde
alliteration = b
/:. la poésie comme une manière de consommer la réalité, de l’incarner
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
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