Ode To A Nightingaon Analysis

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In Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats and Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats, the bird image is used by both poets in a search for gaining immortality through it by making use of artistic elements. They both describe the birds in a way that they want to be free of the burden of the material world. In A Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes a poet as “a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feels that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why” (qtd. by Khan, 78). In his poem, Keats seeks for a way to join the joyful world of the nightingale and leave his dark, frustrating world, whereas Yeats looks for a way to become a golden bird with an eternal youth. Therefore, as sensitive poets, they refuse to accept that they belong to this restricted world of harsh realities, but a world where they will no longer feel alone with their songs, far away from those who are not capable of understanding their artistic qualities.
At the beginning of Ode to a Nightingale, though it seems that the ache the poet feels refers to "poisining", it becomes more apparent that he immediately lightens with the splendid, lively song of the nightingale when he explains he is not jealous of the bird’s happiness: “Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, / But being too happy in thine happiness” (5, 6). The poet is struggling to go into the artistic, spiritual world of the bird that he thinks is "country green" (13). With “a draught of vintage” (11), he thinks of a magnificient world filled with "Provençal song" (14) and "dance" with sunshine, which takes him away to a joyful place by ma...

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...cial birds that sang” (qtd. by Dume 405). Having been influenced by the charm of what he read in the past, Yeats apparently finds his solution to get away from his mortal, deteriorating world in being a golden artificial bird in Byzantium, but at the end of Keats’s poem, the lack of certainty excites attention when the poet who realizes that the bird is flying away arouses a question about whether he is awake or in a sleep, which also resembles to the question of Edgar Allen Poe in the last lines of his poem “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (23-24). Like Poe, who is asking if he is far away from reality with the words “a dream within a dream”, Keats is not or does not want to be sure of reality because he does not want to be a part of the harsh reality of the world to which he unfortunately has to return after the nightingale leaves him.

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