Comment on the contrast between transience and permanence as you find it in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

Comment on the contrast between transience and permanence as you find it in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

It would be true to say that the odes of Keats are the product of certain inner struggles or conflicts. The principal stress in the most important of these odes is a struggle between ideal and actual. They also imply the opposition between pleasure and pain, imagination and reason, fullness and privation, permanence and change, Nature and the human, art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream.

Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale truly reflects Keatsian theme of contrast between transience and permanence. In this poem the draught of vintage symbolises an imaginative escape from reality. The longing to fade away into the forest dim results from a desire to avoid another kind of fading away, namely, the melancholy dissolution of change and physical decay. In the third stanza, the actual world of distress and privation is described. The actual world, as depicted in this stanza, is the world of weariness, fever, and fret, a world where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs, and where youth, beauty, and love are transient. This picture of the actual world is in direct opposition to the ecstasy of the nightingale and the golden world of Flora, “Provencal song”, and the nightingale’s forest as described in the second stanza. Both the ideal abundance of the second stanza and the privation of the third stanza are vividly depicted. The poet in this ode affirms the value of the ideal, but he also recognises the power of the actual. He feels agonised by the inescapable discrepancy between them. He reconciles them by a prior imaginative acceptance of the unity of experience, by means of which he invests them with a common extremity and intensity of feeling......................................................................................................................

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