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;
3
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
spondee = sad last gray hairs = lourd, difficile à dire, ralentir le poème/l’ode
metonymy = palsy shakes a few sad last gray hairs
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Iambic pentameter sauf “bacchus and”= pyrric, syllables faible, donne l’impression d’une digression
pour intensifier le reflexive, presque métaleptique idée poétique et donc le contraste entre la poésie (et le sensation) et la philosophie (la pensée pure)
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
tender = polysémique : la nuit est jeune, et rempli de tendresse & d’affection.
personification de la lune et des étoiles
“here” = métaleptique, renvoie au poème lui-même, sur le plan métapoétique, il n’y pas de lumière, sauf l’ombre de la verdure où serpentent les mousses
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
évoque “sleep, soft embalmer” = un monde des rêves où l’important n’est pas la chose, qui est visible, clair, déterminé– mais notre expérience qui prête les couleurs, les émotions, les affects, et les sensation au monde.
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
naturalism = l’inspiration, poésie, l’imagination vient naturellement (et sinon, mieux vaut qu’il ne vient pas du tout)
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
notion keatsienne de l’intensité : l’extraction de l’ensemble de nombreux sensation afin d’en créer des formes éternelles.
die = no time = stop at midnight; midnight évoque l’éternel
ex-stase = sortir du soi pour en être extérieur
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
but such a a death is not really a death, only a death to the forms of thought, univoques
l’apostrophe : l’adresse à l’oiseau immortel (l’immortalité de sa chanson, les sensations–images et musicalité des mots–qui excède et précède la poésie)
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
word is not referential but sensuel, evocative à ce sens-là
ils sonnent. donc ils sont partagés, et on se rappelle qu’on n’est pas seul mais fait partie d’une société, et d’un monde.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
was it a vision or a waking dream, do i wake or sleep?
idée ontologique, métaleptique, et métapoétique : ce qui est plus réel que le rencontre de l’expérience au monde sensible, c’est notre sensation de celui-ci. Donc rêver dans un état veille, c’est le réel, c’est être réveillée.
Keats described the essential quality of the poet as “negative capability,” or a receptivity to uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and the mutability of things.
This poem, the longest of his 1819 odes, can be read as a study of this capacity, with the poet, at one point, “embalmed” in the darkness of the forest, literally unable to “see what flowers are at [his] feet.”
He is ushered into this darkness by the nightingale bird, whose singing seems to promise both eternity and oblivion.
The poem ends with neither—instead, the poet is returned to his “sole self” and the bird “buried deep / In the next valley-glades.” If the nightingale’s music has “fled” by the end of the poem, Keats’s own ecstatic singing is its residue, his rich stanzas full of rhyme and assonance, surprising stress and dramatic caesura.
dramatic caesura
A caesura refers to a pause added into a line of poetry, whilst enjambment removes a pause from the end of a line to allow two or more lines to be read together.
