THE IMMORTAL BIRD

An approach to the meaning of Keat’s

“Ode to a Nightingale”

E. BHARADWAJA

In the lecture halls of our colleges it has become customary to talk of the poem being one of the greatest lyrics in English. But very few have tried to understand the apparent illogicality of Keats calling the bird “immortal.” Many speak of the escapism of Keats from the Sorrows of human life but few have adequately realised that what Keats has struggled for is not an escape from reality but an escape from the realistic illusion in which man’s intellect has trapped him, not an escape into fanciful imagination but into the heart of reality from which man is perpetually withheld by his own “dull-brain.” The thrust of Keats in this poem indeed at a vision of reality which is undistorted by his meddling intellect, the Kantian “thing in itself,” the Buddhistic rending of the veil of ignorance that keeps man a thrall of illusory wisery, the Advaitic realization of the bliss that the Real is. Did Keats succeed? If so, how far? It is, however, not less than the realization of a T. S. Eliot of Man’s eternal predicament, no less than that of Conrad’s Mistah Kurtz who could acknowledge and affirm the horror of human life and not merely of human civilization or culture. Only, in Keats it is of a gentler, a pleasanter, tone. A deep sympathy sweetens “the still sad Music of humanity” in the poem of Keats. The dismal realization is hallowed by a gratitude for the vision of reality that the song of the nightingale had afforded him. The poem is a positive assertion, “sweet though in sadness,” of the chance that life gives of glimpsing that reality. For in the end Keats rejects even the idea of courting death. Let us examine how Keats affirms this great truth of life.

The poet tells us in the opening stanza that he heard the song of a nightingale on a summer evening when the full moon and the stars were in the sky. The full-throated song of the bird seems to render musically the beauty of summer. The bird sings from a “plot of beachen green and shadow, numberless.” The song seemed heavenly, free from the least hint of sorrow. For a moment the poet is oblivious to the world in his ecstacy. No wonder he calls the bird a Dryad. For like the tree-nymph, the nightingale lives amidst tree, invisible, being hidden by the foliage and the shadows, and like the Dryad, it enjoys unalloyed joy; and sings heavenly; and like the Dryad it is winged. This reference to the bird as a Dryad prepares us for the reference to the “viewless wings of poesy” in the third stanza and prepares us for the poet’s recognition that the ecstacy of the bird’s song is of a different order, unattainable by man by any means. It prepares us for the poet’s acknowledgement of his despair that the dull, perplexing human mind would never permit man to free himself from the sorrowful impressions of human life around him. The momentary ecstacy he initially shares with the bird only plunges him later in a bitter realization of the human condition.

The initial ecstacy fading into this despair is what causes the poet’s heart-ache. The poem expresses the poet’s state of mind in this borderland of experience. He is too happy in the bird’s happiness but, by implication, he is too bitter in his own human plight. The song of the bird, while flaunting the realms of ideal happiness before his heart, also threatens him with the fear of what must follow, his failure to recapture that moment. The very rapture of the song makes him realize, in the flash of a moment, that in human life (“here”)

“………there is light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown.”

For as man he is “embalmed” in the “darkness” of human sorrow and he cannot “see” through direct experience, “the flowers”, “the incense”, “each sweet” that are about him as the bird can. The objects are symbols of the ideal beauty inherent in nature which weary, sorrow-ridden, human sight can hardly recognize for what they are but which the bird can. At best he can only “guess” and that predicament accentuates the sense of his inadequacy. The bird, its perception of beauty undimmed by such grief-orientation, can perceive it, and can sing of it “in full-throated ease.” In this, the bird is non-mortal, different in from man.

The “darkness” which surrounds the poet, disabling him from seeing the beauty at hand, is symbolic of all the human miseries he catalogues in stanza III. The momentary glimpses of perfect joy which the song of nightingales down the ages afforded man, as it did to Keats, now, can thus be compared to the occasional “light” “from heaven is with the breezes blown.” Now we can recognize how the same glimpse was afforded to emperor, clown, and to Ruth in ancient days. Their’s was otherwise a weary, sorrow-ridden life, like that of Keats. The magic casements in “fairy lands forlorn” described in medieval and ancient tales are symbolic of the forlorn state of man in regard to the ideal beauty of nature that surrounds him (his “alienation”, to use a modern term, from the beauty which the bird can freely partake of in nature); and such casements are at times “charmed” as happens to Keats in the opening lines, by glimpses of ecstacy afforded by the bird’s song. The glimpses of unalloyed beauty thus afforded are “the magic casements”; but as they inevitably throw man into the subsequent despair, they open “on the foam of perilous seas,” being ungraspable; the seas are to Keats, as to Hamlet, the sea of troubles of life. It is the organic oneness, the identical nature of this glimpse of ecstacy experienced by man down the ages through the song of the bird that makes the poet call it “immortal bird.”

The bird is immortal in the sense, too, that no mortal had experienced, had lived to the real beauty that surrounds him, as does the bird. The poet, like all mortals, is ever surrounded by “embalmed darkness” (“embalmed” suggesting the anointing of a dead body and entombing it in darkness), incapable of experiencing the “sweets” at first hand. His is a living death. If ever he catches a glimpse of the bird’s perfect joy, as Keats does now, he realizes his predicament and he too seeks an escape from his living death through wine, fancy and death. He longs to die to his living death, to die before he sinks back into the living hell of misery. He finds it rich to die. But by implication the bird ever finds it rich to live. No dull brain perplexes or retards its perception of beauty that is in nature, no darkness dims its vision. The bird is its life and its life an ecstacy and it can afford a glimpse of this real, natural, life to unfortunate man. Its rapture never dies, and thus figuratively, the bird never dies. Death has any meaning only when one meets with the disappearance of youth and beauty, disease, sorrow of bereavement, weariness, fever and the fret of life. Where beauty of youth never fades into pale sickness or into palsied old age, ecstacy into despair, death has no meaning. The bird ever lives in the state of eternal joy. It loses its own limited identity in the experience of perpetual rapture in which it is “laid asleep in body, and become a living soul.” What if its body fades? All nightingales of all time are indeed one life of perpetual joy in nature, of full-throated song. This real state of the bird is ever beyond the pale of human experience even as the individual bird is hidden from the poet’s view in the melodious plot of beachen green, amidst mysterious “shadows numberless.” Indeed, the bird was not born for death just as man, by implication, is not born for life. If man is mortal in this sense, the bird then is immortal. Thus we see that there is no logical break in the shift of reference from the individual bird to the class of birds called nightingale, as many critics averred ; provided, of course, we catch the spirit of the poem.

Let us return to stanzas I and IV to pick up a few more significances strewn by the poet therein. The bird flies amidst beauties which are there, tangible, in nature. And it does so on wings real and tangible. But the poet, “embalmed ,. in “darkness” cannot “see” them. He has to “guess” and fancy (not perceive) what is. In such a state how can “the viewless wings of Poesy” serve his purpose of escaping from his dull, perplexing brain, full of the impressions of misery? The bird needed no such “viewless wings”; and no such invisible wings can help man. The poem seeks to explain this predicament of man that flashes in the poet’s realization after a momentary ecstacy.

We have now only to witness how the poet strives to recapture the rapture of the bird’s song. In the second stanza, every association that he seeks in the provencal wine almost corresponds with the “melodious plot of beachen green” from which the bird sings. For the poet feels that the immediate cause of the bird’s rapture is the perception of beauty of nature in summer–the beachen green, shadows numberless, the queen moon and the stary fays in which there is no place for the ills of human life.

“………flora and the country-green,

Dance, and provencal song, and sunburnt mirth.”

The immediate effect of the bird’s song on him is his ecstatic perception of the beauty of existence (through the eyes and song of the bird) during which moment, all the miseries of life, the products of the dull-brain of man (“dull” because it fails to perceive the beauty of nature which is at hand) are rendered oblivious ( “unseen”) to him. The only corresponding experience the poet could think of is a draught of wine. For in the first stanza itself he has said that during the rapturous moment of sharing the joy of the bird’s song he felt “as through of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.”

This correspondence makes him think of wine as an escape from the human condition. The human condition is such, as we said earlier, on account of his thinking about what is not (as Shelley puts it) which “perplexes” and “retards” our seeing the beauty that is about us: “Where to think is to be full of sorrow.”

But why does Keats reject wine almost in the next breath? This has not been explained adequately by most readers of the poem.

In the opening lines of the third stanza Keats starts glimpsing the utter dissimilarity of the effects of wine to the rapture of the bird. We only forget the human condition, under the impact of wine but the bird has never “known” it – “What thou among the leaves hast never known.”

The post does not mean that the bird is ignorant, deficient of an aspect of knowledge. It has not “known” in the sense that never knows darkness, in the sense that a child has not known taste of lust. It never knows the state of being retarded or perplexed by thought: its perception of the perpetual beauty of existence knows no dimming. The poet can at best forget what he knows to be his inevitable condition with the help of wine; but it does it equal the bird’s perception of the beauty of what is? It has no misery to forget, no thoughts to drown. Wine helps to shut out what is our bounden, our subjective experience; the bird but freely experiences what is. The one is an escape from an illusion of misery projected by thought but which is our only possible experience of life. The other is a state free from such illusion; it is an affirmation; a knowledge (in the true sense) of what is. To put it in Buddhist terminology, man’s condition is Samsara and the bird’s experience is Nirvana. And even the poet’s initial temptation to seek escape from the Samsara is but a play in the realm of Samsara – a further plunge into the depths of a worse oblivion and not an emancipation into the realm of Nirvana or Bodhi. Does the draught of wine give a keener awareness of the beauty of existence such as the bird experiences, or is it just a benumbing of, a mere suppression of, our already clouded perception into non-perception? Bliss is not the forgetting of a misery which is there. It is the realization direct, that it does not exist, that it is the mere fiction of the dull-mind. Can wine help?

Thus it is that Keats turns from the tangible wine to “viewless wings of Poesy”. He hopes that while wine can at best help us to leave the world “unseen “ (though it is there) poetic fancy can render us “viewless”; it can, at least momentarily, throw down the erroneous view of the reality. Poesy is given here by Keats a new definition altogether from what is accepted common parlance. It is a turning of the heart to the beauty which is, away from the phantoms projected by the mind. And Keats demonstrates his new interpretation in the next few lines of stanza IV. He turns his attention deliberately to the “queen-moon” and “the stary fays” which are in the sky, ready to be perceived, turning away from the thought-conjured sorrows that haunted the third stanza. But when he does so, he soon perceives that he is sitting in a shadowed place–perhaps under a tree in the Hampstead garden. The dark shade at once strikes him as a symbol of the very condition of man, a constitutional incapacity to perceive what is and that it is as much a part of reality for him as the ever-present beauty and its perception are to the bird. The all too human Keats realizes that he cannot see the beauty of flowers at his feet or above his head (“The Kingdom of Heaven’ which is at hand, or “the Light hidden in darkness which the darkness perceives not”, as the Bible puts it); he can at best guess what the bird can perceive. Even in the matter of guessing the flowers he cannot depend on his sense of smell. He has to reckon the season and the month and compute the name of the flowers from his knowledge, from his “thought.” The poet finds that he is already drunk with thought and rendered oblivious to what is around him and what can wine do to such a one? Through Poesy he hoped to turn his attention to the reality around him, out of the misty apparitions of thought. But the very attempt makes him realize that, instead, he is made to turn to the very same intellection to guess the flowers that are at hand; for he is in darkness. “Poesy” is his name for the ability to recognize the beauty of existence hidden beyond the veil of maya of thought, the ability of great poets to glimpse Truth which is Beauty and Beauty which is Truth, Truth and Beauty unclouded by the dull-mind. He hopes that Poesy is potential in him and seeks to make it active. But his realization extends only thus far and no further, that he, as a man, is embalmed in darkness. It is not as though there is darkness around him, around the things in nature. There is a more impenetrable darkness in which man is enwrapped, a darkness of incomprehension which is the essence of his nature. The poet is embalmed in it but the bird singing from shadows numberless does not have to guess the sweet flowers of the season. The very spirit of joy that informs the queen-moon, stary fays, the seasonable flowers and the numerous bees also informs the bird and its ecstatic song. The darkness does not cloud its perception. Hence there is a full-throated ease in the bird’s song unlike the constrained effort of the poets to sing. It has not known anything but the beauty and joy of existence in nature and man had never known anything but the weariness, the fever and the fret of his human life, except for occasional glimpses of ecstacy afforded him by waftings of the breezes of chance, of chance encounters like the one with the bird’s song. Keats’ survey of the annals of human experience from ancient emperor, clown and Ruth to his own immediate experience bears out the meaning. Thus what he hopefully sought to be Poesy is at best a fancy which cannot cheat so well. Whatever there is of it is but a cheating and not a true perception. Poesy is something divine, its wings invisible like those of an angel and it too is capable of infinite joy. But Keats, the man he is, can only reach out to fancy which is a cheat and to put too much of trust in it is itself a cheating of oneself. Man’s deliberate invocation of Poesy is doomed to end in the tricks played by the elf of fancy.

This is the poignant significance of “Darkling I listen”: he listens to the song of the bird, keenly and helplessly aware of his own plight of dark incomprehension. What then is life worth? If there is any worth in it, it is the momentary glimpse of the real beauty in existence even if it be invoked by the song of the bird (the eternal consoler of man). For that is the only moment of true perception, untrammelled by thought, available to man; and direct perception of the beauty which is Truth, of beauty which is “a joy forever”, is the only moment of true living. Rest is a groaping in darkness, a life in death, a living hell. Is it worth, after such a moment of real life in bliss, to sink into the delirium of common life “Life’s fitful fever?” A sinking back, a prolongation of life into a succeeding spell of darkness after such a glimpse would only aggravate man’s sense of misery, as we see it happen in the poet’s song. Is it not better to cease to exist in such a moment of bliss, of life, of beauty and such a death might probably mean an everlasting union with or absorption into the joy and beauty of existence. But would such a death constitute the real transcendence over the web of misery by thought woven, which he hoped in vain earlier to achieve through wine, and through fancy which he mistook for Poesy? As the song of the bird had given him the highest and the only possible realization of Truth that is possible to man, it seemed to him more than ever rich to die in that moment. The joy of that moment transcended all other moments of earthly joy during which the poet wooed death earlier.

The poet realizes that to cease to exist can in no way constitute union with the joy of existence rendered by the song. In fact, it might even rob him of the blissful glimpse of reality as the song of the bird can afford him. In the stark realization of his own plight as man, Keats ecstatically sings the praise of the “immortal bird.”

How the bird is immortal is what we have indeed noted so far. To the poet the bird is its voice, a song in full-throated ease, a vocalization of the ecstatic experience of the beauty that life in nature is. And the voice was heard all through history by man in different circumstances. Generations of misery-ridden men had hungrily trampled on poets of old who had the momentary glimpses of the bliss of existence. But generations of nightingales only perpetuate the song as though they were all one continuous, rapturous, song. The poet, the man he is, can only bid good-bye to the bird which flies off, and with it, to the blissful moment of realization. From the moment of awakening to reality under the impact of the bird’s song, the poet sinks into the slumber of human life tormented by “bad dreams” of mentation, of thought, but which to him as man, constitutes the only subjective reality he can have. Hence it is impossible for him to describe the change; “do I wake or sleep?” He is unable to say whether it is a “vision” of reality that has fled, or it is a waking dream that has temporarily rescued him from the dark subjective reality. Hence it is that the song of the bird which, in its full-throated ease, seemed to him as expressive of its happiness in the opening stanza becomes “the plaintive anthem” in the concluding one. As his heart returns to the sad realization of his helplessness, his sadness colours the nature of the bird’s song and he seems to feel that it expresses, too, the bird’s pity for the built-in limitation of the poet’s being.

There is a bitter, pervasive irony implied in the whole texture of his poem. Except in the opening lines, the poet’s heart, instead of basking in the ecstacy rained by the song of the bird, has indeed wandered through reflection on his own inadequacy! And before he realizes his error, the bird flies, and with it, the song, and the moment of realization. In the light of this suggestion, the statement, “But here there is no light” and “Darkling I listen” acquire the deep emotional significance which inspired Eliot’s lines “Here there are no eyes” and “the eyes are not here” in The Hollowmen. So too, the seemingly unimportant words “unseen” (in stanza II) “viewless” (wings of Poesy in stanza IV), “I cannot see” (in stanza V) acquire an all too great significance in underlining the symbolism of the phrase “embalmed darkness.” These are vital, as we have seen, to understand how the bird is immortal. The working out of man’s innate groping-in-darkness in the body of the poem is the crowning irony that demonstrates the poet’s chief meaning. The very struggle of the poet for a means to recapture the rapture of the bird’s song has denied him the little first-hand sharing of it while it sang and that is the human predicament. Is not the bird immortal?

Critics have recognised the poet’s fondness for the circular structure of his poems in his return to the reference to sleep and dream in the last lines of the poem which corresponds to the slumberous intoxication mentioned in the opening lines. There is something more in this return to the initial mood. Initially he sensed the ecstacy of the bird through self-forgetfulness; at the end, he has returned to it, but now with a greater realization of the pricelessness of the experience through his insight into man’s predicament. At the end he has come to realize that the initial moment of ecstacy is something which man can by no means recapture. In retrospect he realized how inestimable the gift of the bird’s song had been to mankind, through ages. The bird of song had been the only bringer of the heavenly insight into Beauty which is Truth to man.

Back