# Keats’
view of reality and imagination
# Contrast
between reality and imagination, between art and reality
The
word escapist is often entitled to the name of Keats because of his escaping
tendency (from the real world to an imaginative world). Having been experienced
from the bitter realities of his life, wherever he sees some beautiful pictures
depicted on an ‘Urn’ or hears the song of a nightingale, he tries to dip into
or to fly to an ideal world of happiness, beauty, music and imagination
(through his ‘viewless wings of Poesy’), forgetting his reality in the world.
But this little moment of pure happiness does not last long; he is to come back
to this world again. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an excellent example of Keats’
escapism in his poetry.
Keats’ escape is from his real life to an imaginative and
ideal world. But why is this escape from the inevitable place? – Because,
according to Keats, reality of human life is full of suffering, pain etc; this
world is not a desirable place. He has summed up his individual as well as
common sufferings of life in the following lines of stanza 11 of the poem ‘Ode
to a Nightingale’ –
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 can not keep her lustrous eyes,
Or, new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
Here he remembers the bitterness of his own life and reminds
us that of our life. He considers that life is full of misery, sorrow and disease,
of tiring struggle, of restlessness and pain; that life is nothing but a series
of groans and complaints; that old men’s life is helpless and pitiful, having
lost the control over their limbs and their hair being grey; that even the
young are dying of terrible disease- that is, the poet here thinks of his young
brother Tom, dying just before his eyes; that for thoughtful or sensitive but
thoughtless persons, there is no happiness in reality; that beauty is
short-lived; that one’s love for another does not last long – that is, he
remembers his beloved Fanny Browne’s rejection of his young love and turning to
others. This is the view of reality by Keats.
When does Keats think of escaping from the reality of his
life? Is there any particular time? – Yes. Keats life-long creed is ‘A thing of
beauty is a joy for ever’ (Endymion). So wherever he sees any beautiful picture
or scenery or hears any attractive melody or song, he feels joy, and forgets
his harsh reality, and becomes one with that, and thus he escapes. For examples,
having seen a beautiful Urn in British
Museum , he forgets his
position, even he talks with the pictures depicted on the Urn, e.g. –
Ah, happy, happy boughs
that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever
bid the Spring adieu.
Again,
having heard the song of a nightingale, his sense begins to loose in excessive
joy as if he has drunk hemlock. As a result, he says,
“One
minute past, and lathe-wards had sunk.
Here lithe is a river
of Greek mythology; he
who drinks from it forgets all. So, the poet has forgotten all, having heard
the song.
How does Keats escape from reality? What is his medium or
transport? – Keats’ own word gives answer to these questions –
“Not
charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless
wings of poesy.”
That is, his is not any transport of physical existence like
Bacchus, the God of wine. Rather he has poetic imagination for this sake. It is
more suitable to him than anything else.
Hearing the song of the nightingale which is singing,
probably, away from him, Keats forgets his reality. Now, through his poetic
imagination, he depicts in his mind the nightingale’s happy abode, its healing
surroundings which have made him forget all pains of life. Now we can look at
that imaginative world.
Keats imagines the happy nightingale and its happy
surroundings in the following lines through excellent images and word selection
–
“That thou, light winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious
plot
Of beechen green, and
shadows numberless
Singest of summer in
full-throated ease.”
That
is the nightingale, compared as a nymph, is singing, without hesitation, in
such a plot which is full of melody, greenery and dreamy shadows and where
summer is remaining.
Moreover, Keats longs for a draught of long-aged vintage, for
a beaker of warm southern wine, compared with the foundation of the Muses, so the
poet says,
‘That I might drink, and leave the world
And
with thee fade away into the unseen forest dim
But he rejects this
way of escaping.
Then,
through ‘the viewless wings of Poesy’, ‘though the dull brain perplexes and
retards’ his mind, he has already come, as if physically, to the imaginative
world of the nightingale. He says –
“Already with
thee! Tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne
Clustered around by all her story Fays.”
In this way, in stanza 5,6 & 7 of the ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’, Keats leads us to such a place where he feels the existence of
various flowers in the dank night from their smells; where he feels death better
than life, but again thinks that if he dies he will not be able to listen to
the beautiful and permanent song.
In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats, seeing the pictures on the
Urn, dissolves in them through imagination, as if he is with them who seem to
be alive.
But Keats’ world of imagination remains only a short while.
When he thinks that the Urn and the
song of the nightingale will remain for ages but he will not, rather he is
‘forlorn’, he comes back to reality. He says in the last stanza of ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’ –
“Forlorn! The very would is like a bell
To toll me back from
thee to my sole self”.
That is the word ‘forlorn’ reminds his position in ‘the
weariness, the fever and the fret’, like the ‘alarm clocks’ of our mobile
phones turn us from our dreamy sleep to the world of bitter reality. He calls
‘fancy’, ‘deceiving elf’. Moreover, “the music which almost succeeded in making
him ‘fade far away’ now itself fades and in a moment is ‘buried deep in the
next valley-glades’(lines:77-78)” (Clearth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren)
Therefore, we see that Keats is so disgusted with the real
life that he always tries to escape from it. C.D. Thorpe says –
“The moment of insight
with him was a moment of complete emotion, absorption in which the poet lost even his own
senses of being in intense pursuit of his imaginative query. The extreme of
this activity was a flight, far away from the fret and fever of life into a
realm of imaginative delight into a region of abstractions of the poets own
creations.”(The Mind of John Keats)
Even
he has no revolutionary concerns of the age in his poems, while other Romantic
poets, e.g. Wordsworth, Shelley have eagerly greeted the revolutions and Byron
deals with social problems. Though Keats’ escapism is individual, it sometimes
becomes common, when we seek a suitable place to relieve from the bitterness of
our life.
Sir thank you very much
ReplyDeletethat's an amazing paper to understand the escapism in John Keats Odes.
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This is how it should be. Thank you.
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ReplyDelete