何梓涵 12010007
To Professor Hou Yiling
English Literature

The Transient Sublime and Mortality in “Ode to a Nightingale”

Composed during the most creative period in Keats’s brief poetic career, “Ode to a Nightingale” has long been regarded as one of the most refined works of his poetry. Previous criticism has comprehensively explored its themes of nature, beauty and mortality, as well as its demonstration of Keats’s notion of Negative Capability. But based on my research, few critical reviews have touched upon the point which I find clearly suggest itself in this poem: that the poet’s experience here depicted is not merely an escape into the realm of ideal beauty, but also an intoxication with the Romantic sublime. Between the sublime and his anticipated death, Keats builds an analogical connection from which he gains insights into both. Hence it is my endeavour in this paper to illustrate that in “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats describes the entire process of his journey into and back from the sublime, after which he has to face again the transience of the sublime and the mortality of human life.
Traditionally, most critics agree on the poem’s theme being the conflict between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature, among many other contrasts that are present throughout the poem. The most representative interpretation comes from Richard Fogle, who defines the principal stress of the poem as a struggle between ideal and actual, containing more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and reason, of permanence and change, of nature and man (32). However, the majority fails to detect the innate relevance between that ideal to the sublime. It is thus necessary to fill in the gap in that relevance before any further analysis.
According to Wordsworth’s definition, which is placed by most scholars as the standard of the Romantic sublime, it is