'Ode To A Nightingale And Ode On Melancholy'

All written in just one month "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy" were a result of Keats’ feelings during that time. These feelings were, “the intense awareness of both the joy and pain, the happiness and the sorrow, of human life” (Thomas). Keats greatly contemplated human beings need to placate their craving for happiness in a “world where joy and pain are inevitably and inextricably tied together” (Thomas). This amalgamation of elation and agony is the integral part of human experience that Keats recognized and established as truth.

In “Ode to A Nightingale,” a prominent significance to Keats is his idea of the conflicted interplay in human life of living and death, mortal and immortal, and feeling versus the lack of feeling or inability to feel. “The ideal condition towards which Keats always strives because it is his ideal, is one in which mortal and immortal,…beauty and truth are one” (Wasserman). The narrator plunges into a dreamlike state when hearing a nightingale sing. As the nightingale sings, he shares its elation and feels the conflicting response of agony when he comes down from his dreamlike ecstasy and realizes that unlike the nightingale in his imagination, “Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird,” his life is finite (61). “Where palsy shakes a few, sad last gray hairs, where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (25-26).

In lines 51-58, the narrator longs for Death, and even woos Death so that he may no longer have to experience the pains and agonies that come hand in hand with the joys and ecstasies he also experiences. He longs for the continuing happiness of the song of the nightingale:

Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love w...

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...s doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain in the midst of other woe (44-47).

In "Ode on Melancholy," Keats welcomes the truth before him. He understands that bliss and suffering are one. To be able to completely have joy, one must also experience sorrow or melancholy to its fullest. “Ode on Melancholy” can be distinguished from "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where the poet is a dreamer that is trying to escape his own reality into the sorrow less, eternal world of the nightingale and the urn. “Keats valued intensity of emotion, intensity of thought, and intensity of experience; fulfillment comes from living and thinking passionately. Keats does not shrink from the implication that feeling intensely means that grief or depression may well cause anguish and torment” (website junks).