Resumo de Ode To Nightingale, Melancholy, Grecian Urn

THREE ODES OF KEATS: THEMATIC PATTERN IN MELANCHOLY, NIGHTINGALE & GRECIAN URN ODES

Indeed, the Odes are the finest efflorescences of Keats? genius. As a rare confluence of joy and sorrow the Odes record the poet?s passionate search for some immutable principle of Joy and Beauty on the face of the ubiquitous operation of Time, whose face is changed and decayed. Keats began as an ardent and unsuspicious votary of Beauty and Joy, and made a simplistic equation that to extract beauty from whatever sensuous object lying before the poet was the only sacred human prerogative. He believed in the beginning that mankind was galloping towards a millennial destiny, and that Nature presented a fun-fiesta of the senses; and such a spectacle only waits to be decoded and enjoyed by man.
When we come to the Odes, we find Keats completely changed self - a battered man with shattered nerves. The battery of trenchant criticism unleashed against his poetry, the death of his brother Tom, the emigration of George and the long agony of his love-passion was wearing out his spirits, while health was beginning to fail. Gone are his high, unquestioning presumptions about life, Joy and Beauty. Gregarious salvation, or even the more tenuous hope of the poet?s sacred prerogative for personal salvation through a heightened sensitivity and creative imagination, seems to vanish like an embarrassing dream. The poet has passed through an ordeal of fire which life exposed him to. Life is hopelessly moored in the mire of time and change, and any hope of relief seems impertinence, not to speak of salvation. With life creeping on all fours, and souls becoming ?leaden-eyed?, the dream of Beauty and Joy appears to totter and shrink back almost in embarrassment- their very validity, even in terms of the swiftest imagination, is now under the shadow of doubt.

In his desperate attempt to fall back on at least some assurance Keats in the Odes radically renovates his version of Beauty and, with it, the proposed means to achieve the same. Beauty is no longer viewed in pure sensuous terms. It now consists in the intensity and permanence of a feeling an object or experience evokes; for only that way one could leap out of the mortal dimensions of time and space. Obsessed at the distressing limitations of reality Keats? romantic exuberance tries means after means in the Odes to grasp on some undying essence that shall beat Time in its own game. In a mode which is Shakesperean, he shifts through alternative possibilities - what if it is the bower of the Nightingale, or, how if it could be the enduring art-world of the Urn? However, thanks to his artistic fidelity to his own experience and his ?negative capability?, he does never forego his solid fund of common sense and declares the results of each flight of fancy as tentative and invalid. Reality cannot be finally fought off or ignored. It is because Reality throughout keeps lurking in the backdrop that his quest for immutable Beauty attains greater veracity and elusive charm. The humanity of Keats is affirmed as his religion of Beauty is enveloped by an honest recognition of life?s real terms. The goddess of Beauty, once the veil is lifted, is no other than the goddess of Melancholy:

?Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil?d Melancholy has herSovran shrine.? [ Melancholy- ode]
True melancholy, as Leonard Unger suggests, is to be found in the fullness of living, in beauty, joy and delight for, these experiences make most poignant the passage of time through which such experiences and life must come to an end.
The ? Nightingale-ode? reflects the poet?s pre-occupation with Beauty in the backdrop of universal onslaught of time:
?Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.? [ Grecian-Urn ? ode]
The poet?s attempt to climb the sensuous ladder or ride on the flight of imagination prove pathetically delusory. The strained emotional bid to immortalize the bird also does not succeed, but perishes in the ?perilous seas?; the princess must still await for an unknown age her unknown deliverer.
Imagination is once again embraced with high expectations in the ?Grecian Urn-ode?. The semi-permanent existence of the Urn excites in the mind of the miserable poet exaggerated imaginative proddings about eternity:
?For ever piping songs, for ever new.? [ Grecian-Urn-ode]
But the idyll also turns out to be abortive and the vision seems to fizzle out as cold winds of rationality stirs in : ?Cold Pastoral?.The continuous shift in the poet?s mood - now rising to Olympian heights of ecstasy, now falling to the abysmal depths of despair- reflects the tension between Beauty and Mutability. The statement about Truth and Beauty with which the poem ends is an affirmation that Art takes its truth from life and then returns it to life as beauty. The paradox that teases us ?out of thought?, as Cleanth Brooks suggests, is that in a work of art there is a kind of life which is both dead and immortal. It is a melancholic truth that only the dead are immortal, but it must be realized that delight is inseparable from melancholy because it is not conceivable apart from the mortal predicament.

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