Ode to nightingale analysis5/21/2023 ( Romanticism was a broader European artistic and intellectual movement that developed over the first half of the nineteenth century.) It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had recently ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. The late 18th and early 19th century, during the time of King George III, was known-ironically, given the terrible social conditions of the time-as the Romantic era in English literature. The Romantics were generally also Pantheists that is, they believed that God was manifested in nature. A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and on man’s insignificance compared to the natural world. Keats was one of the “big six” British Romantic poets (the others being Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and Lord Byron). 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: 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. 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. 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 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. 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: 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. 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 Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! 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: 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 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.
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