The Immortality of the Natural: Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" Author(s): Andrew J. Kappel Source: ELH, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), pp. 270-284 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872516 . Accessed: 19/12/2014 08:18
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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE IMMORTALITY OF THE NATURAL: KEATS' "ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE"
BY ANDREW J. KAPPEL
The seventhstanza of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale,"famous for an unexpectedallusion to theBook of Ruth and fora peculiarresis- tanceto criticism,begins with a bald assertionof the immortality of thenightingale. Thou wast notborn for death, immortal Bird! No hungrygenerations tread thee down. These linesinitiate the vexed issue ofthe bird's immortality which is still,despite much discussion, a stumblingblock to satisfactory interpretationof the stanza.Several critics speculate that the im- mortalityis onlyrelative, that Keats' assertion refers not to an indi- vidualbird but to a species,whose longevity makes negligible the lifetimeof any single member.' The chiefobjection to this interpre- tationis thatby the same token,the relativelongevity of the species,man as well as thenightingale is immortal.This ofcourse cannotbe thecase because thepoem explores and insistsupon the genericdifference between mortal and immortal.In determining the basis of Keats' claim forthe bird'simmortality what we want is an explanationthat grounds the immortalityin an aspectof the bird'snature that is not sharedby man and hence thatdoes not qualifyhim, too, for immortality. Somecritics who, for the reason just cited, reject the generic basis of the bird's immortality,prefer a symbolicinterpretation of the nightingale,locating the basis of the claimto immortalityin that symbolicsignificance.2 According to David Perkins,who most fully arguesthis position, the bird or, moreaccurately, its song is the compositelyric voice of poetryas it has soundedthroughout the ages and whose lifeextends beyond the deaths of successive indi- vidualbards.3 This explanationis subjectto the same objectionas the former.It humanizesthe bird and in the processerases the poem'sraison d'ttre. If the nightingale'ssong is a symbolof lyric poetry,the words "immortal Bird" must refer to thePoet. In which case, Keats,identifying singer and song(and perhapsanticipating
270 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"
ELH 45 (1978) 270-284 0013-8304/7810452-0270$01.00 ? 1978 by The JohnsHopkins University Press
This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Yeats,who couldn't distinguish dancer from dance), ends up assert- inga typeof human immortality. These twointerpretations ofKeats' nightingale, in thefirst case as a representativeof a species and in the secondas a symbolof lyricpoetry (or morebroadly, of all art),have providedvaluable criticalinsights into the poem. The latter,for instance, leads to Perkins'seminal notion of symbolic debate. But when we lookto themto explainthe natureof the bird'simmortality, they prove inadequate.Critics have naturally turned toward them for this pur- pose,however, because ofthe seventhstanza of the poem. Thou wast not born fordeath, immortalBird! No hungrygenerations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick forhome, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same thatoft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faerylands forlorn. Criticsperceive a note "of strain"4in the openingassertion and thenguess that in the lines that follow Keats is tryingto explain and defendthe statement he hasjust made by suggesting a basis for the claim of immortality.Since Keats refersto past instancesof the nightingale'ssong, to pastgenerations of nightingales that sang to pastgenerations of men, the generic basis seemsintimated. At the sametime, the voice referred to is thatof literary nightingales; this suggeststhe symbolic interpretation. Certainly, these are important dimensionsof the nightingale's identity; but neither explains why itis immortaland man is not.We need notsuspect Keats of wobbly thinking,however, because thereis, I will argue,another dimen- sionof the bird's significance, one thatprovides a basis forimmor- talitythat excludes human claims, and one, moreover,that is evi- dentthroughout the poem.This eliminatesthe supposedneed to justifythe assertionafter it is made and allowsus to see thelines thatfollow it as somethingother than unconvincing evidence for a self-consciouslyextreme claim.
II Accordingto Charles Brown's famous account of the poem's com- position,there was a nightingalesinging while Keats wrote. In fact,
AndrewJ. Kappel 271
This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions according to Brown, Keats had heard the song of the nightingale many times before the morning of composition; on that particular day, says Brown, Keats moved his chair "from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree."5 To begin with, then, Keats' nightingale is an actual bird in an actual tree, a comfortable inhabit- ant of the natural world whose song, heard through the poet's sen- sual ear, has drawn him fromthe human ceremony of breakfast to infiltratethe natural occasion involving grass-plot, plum-tree and singing bird. Thou, light-wingedDryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green,and shadows numberless, Singestof summerin full-throatedease. As Earl Wasserman has pointed out in The Finer Tone, by calling the bird a "Dryad," a creature whose being "is that of the tree it inhabits" (p. 186), Keats stresses the naturalness of the bird. The wine, Cool'd fora long age in the deep-delved earth, Tastingof Flora and the countrygreen, derives from and embodies the natural world and therefore the forgetfulnessit promises might well constitute the desired natural- izing of the human which the poet undertook when he moved his chair fromthe breakfast table into the plum-tree's shade. The tra- jectory of the bird's withdrawal at the end of the poem is an indica- tion that its ontological status as a natural being is maintained to the end. As it withdraws, it moves fromone natural setting to another, never ventures outside nature and seems, indeed, to retreat ever more deeply into the natural world. Thy plaintiveanthem fades Past the near meadows,over the still stream, Up the hill-side;and now 'tis buried deep In the nextvalley-glades. The movement from the breakfast table to the grass-plot is the advance that balances (and perhaps forces) this retreat. The ontological differencebetween the nightingale and the poet is the differencebetween a purely natural being and a human being. This ontological difference gives rise to the essential experiential distinctionbetween the two beings, around which the poem is built: the bird is oblivious to death, man painfully aware of it. This dis-
272 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"
This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions tinctionbetween natural and humanexperience is directlystated elsewhere in Keats' poetry.For instance,in "Drear-Nighted December"obliviousness to deathor awareness of it is revealedas thesole determinantof the quality-whether happy or woeful-of an existence.Like thetree in the firststanza of the poem and the brookin the second,and unlikethe "gentlegirl and boy" of the third,the nightingalehas no awarenessof the terminationsof its variousjoys and is therefore"happy." To continuewith the termi- nologyof the earlier poem, the nightingale's song expresses what is humanlyunknowable (though humanly imaginable), "the feel of notto feelit," that is, the absenceof the "writhing" over "passed joy" thatan awarenessof local and ultimateterminations produces. Whatthe poet seeks in thedraught of vintage is "numbedsense to steelit," that is an obliviousnessto passedjoy orultimately death. To desireunion with the nightingale, then, is toseek an ontologi- cal change.The openinglines of stanzathree characterize that changeas in parta forgetting,specifically of whatthe bird has neverknown. Fade faraway, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness,the fever,and the fret Here, where men sit, beside sick-bedsor at breakfasttables. (Note that the nightingale is addressedas "thouamong the leaves," which stresses its native naturalness, at the point at which its obliviousness to transcience is asserted.) To accompany the forgettingand furtherthe approxi- mation of the nightingale's ontology,the poet seeks intensification of the senses. A draught of vintage promises to turn this double trick,allowing the poet " AndrewJ. Kappel 273 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions a metaphor for poetry throughout Keats' work6) and patent in the reference to Hippocrene (the fountainof the Muses on Mt. Helicon). He still seeks the same two-foldexperience, a forgettingand quick- ening at once: the sorrows of stanza three fade as the sensual plea- sures of stanza five accumulate. The only "sense" that is to be numbed by either wine or poesy is that referredto in "Drear-Nighted December": "numbed sense to steel it," the sense, that is, that perceives the passage of joys. Man can approach the natural only through the senses whose heightened activation as the mind fades can establish for the hu- man consciousness they now direct a local temporal focus, an infi- nitely narrow, instantaneous temporal perspective that an active mind, remembering and anticipating incessantly,can never achieve. Instances of this effect run throughout Keats' poetry. Two famous ones that come to mind are both pieces of advice, Endymion's "fold / A rose leaf round thy finger's taperness, / And soothe thy lips" (1.781-83) and that fromthe "Ode on Melancholy," "if thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her softhand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes." In both cases the exhortation is to engage the senses directly, intimately,and exclu- sively with their object and in that act to create a closed impenetra- ble node of attentiveness and intensity. Lips and finger (taste and touch) locked to rose leaf and lovers' locked hands and eyes define two self-contained configurations, two universes, each of which knows nothing but itself. One sense, however, is relinquished as the imagination comes alive: eyes close and in the poem day turns to night. Poetic conven- tion may explain this anomaly: as attentive a student of Milton as Keats would naturally associate the loss of sight with the invigora- tion and exercise of the imagination. But there may be a more rele- vant explanation. Sight is the one sense greatly given to panoramic perception, at least in Keats' poetry where the eye characteristical- ly positions itself so as to enjoy the widest possible focus, prefera- bly encompassing infinity.This occurs in the early sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer": Felt I like some watcherof the skies When a new planet swims intohis ken; Or like stoutCortez when witheagle eyes He star'dat the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each otherwith a wild surmise- Silent,upon a peak in Darien. 274 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"" This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The oceans, a practical near-infinityin 1817, are a favoriteobject of visual contemplation in the early poetry,the seashore a favorite poetic haunt.7 Because of this proclivity toward the panoramic, sight might well be unwelcome at this point in the poem. I cannotsee whatflowers are at myfeet, Nor whatsoft incense hangsupon the boughs, But,in embalmeddarkness, guess each sweet Wherewiththe seasonable monthendows The grass,the thicket,and the fruit-treewild; Whitehawthorn, and the pastoraleglantine; Fast fadingviolets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May'seldest child, The comingmusk-rose, full of dewywine, The murmuroushaunt of flieson summereves. Sight aside, the imagination seeks through the senses of taste (" AndrewJ. Kappel 275 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pointin the poem deathcomes to the poet's mindas thepossible preserverof Fancy's garden, as a wayof making the transformation irreversible.It is, recallingearlier terminology, an ultimateand irrevocableforgetfulness, far greater than inebriation or night,and itseems "rich to die" because thismore secure forgetfulness prom- ises a freerfield for Fancy and a richergarden of delights.These thoughtspass quicklythough because, only speculations, they are easilydispelled by the hardfact that death, whatever else it might be, is, as Keats said in a letterto CharlesBrown (September 30, 1820),"the greatdivorcer for ever"; morecertain than translation to a deathlessontology is unredeemable,unending torpidity. Un- like wine,death is a denial ofthe senses,too crude,too thorough a forgetter.As Bate says(p. 508),death is "thereverse of union with thebird"; the nightingale is a livingcreature whose songis heard onlyby livingears. (I shouldnote at thispoint that although this stanzaends witha convictionof death's inadequacy as an agentof ontologicalchange, Keats has takenthe other position elsewhere in his poetry,in "WhyDid I Laugh Tonight?"and "BrightStar" for example,and in hiswork as a wholethe question is leftunresolved. Death is eithera doorto anotherrealm or it is not.) The stanzacourting death is directlyfollowed by theapostrophe assertingthe nightingale'simmortality ("Thou wast not bornfor death,immortal Bird!"). This apostropheechoes the exclamatory openingof stanza four ("Away! away! for I will flyto thee")which also followsverses that dwell on deathand dying.These are paral- lel turningpoints in thepoem where oppressive thoughts of death and the dyingworld of men naturallybring to the poet'smind, as morepoignantly desirable than ever, the deathless ontological state ofthe nightingale. It is deathwhich haunts the poet throughout the poem, death which his mind,yearning for forgetfulness, cannot forget.The nightingale,as the being "not bornfor death," who does notknow death, is the objectof emulation. Its immortalityis simplyand exactlyits ignoranceof death; it is not an ultimate longevity,has, in fact,nothing to do withduration but instead with qualityof existence. Lived in Fancy'sgarden, each momentof the bird's life is an eternity:it containsall time'seventualities. No generationstread the birddown because thereare no suchthings in thatrealm. Its unregulatedself-enactment or fulllivingness (it "singestof summer in full-throatedease" and "poursforth [its] soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy")is not,surely, an accelerationof its lifein fearof death's imminence because forthe bird there is, in a 276 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions strictersense than usual, no tomorrow,only a series of todays, and the easy esctasy of its singing can seem wasteful only to an ontology for which there is a tomorrow and which, hoping to live in it, invents conservation. III With the basis forthe immortalityclarified, we may now turn to the promised discussion of the lines following the misjudged asser- tion of stanza seven. The basis of the bird's immortality,its natural- ness, is, as we have seen, manifest in many details throughoutthe firstsix stanzas of the poem. The assertion, therefore,is well pre- pared forand needs no justification afterit has been made. By this point in the poem, the bird's immortalityis a given. And the frantic rhetorical gesture with which the assertion is made betrays no "strain" of belief on the poet's part in what he says but rather a strainof acceptance, a resistance to a painful knowledge, specifical- ly, that the bird enjoys a peculiar but real immortalityfrom which the mortal poet is excluded. The opening lines of the stanza are as much a recognition of the poet's mortalityas an assertion of the bird's immortality."Thou wast not born fordeath, immortalBird," as I was. "No hungrygenerations tread thee down" as they do me. With his own predicament acutely in mind, then, Keats gathers into the rest of the stanza three situations analogous to his own. In the second of the three, he imagines the simple sensual pleasure of the bird's song cheering Ruth amid sorrow. Similarly,the birdsong the poet himself hears carries him fromthe woes of stanza three to the sensual delights of stanza five. Or, Keats may have a more elab- orate parallel in mind. According to the Biblical account, one voice Ruth hears amid the alien corn is that of the man Boaz. She finds herself in his cornfield because she has, like the poet, chosen to forsake her native land for a foreign realm. Boaz' words, like the nightingale's song, promote and sanction that movement to a new world. In the last of the analogues, the bird is heard charming an open casement; it is poised near and presides over a beckoning threshold. Like Keats' hidden bird, heard at the interface of the natural and the human, this bird, heard but not seen, also pours forthits soul "abroad," that is, beyond its native land, seeking alien ears. Because the three analogous situations Keats presents read, one- hundred-and-fiftyyears later, with a certain inevitability,we may AndrewJ. Kappel 277 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions lose sight of the peculiarity of the second and third.Certainly, we would not expect the figureof Ruth to appear in any compilation of singing nightingales done in ignorance of Keats' poem. There is no bird in the Book of Ruth to persuade us otherwise. For the same reason, the third instance is also anomalous in such a context. In all the commonly cited sources-Claude Lorrain's Enchanted Castle; sea imagery in Diodorus, Book III, Chapter 3; any of the several casements and tumultuous seascapes in Radcliffe'sMyster- ies of Udolpho; Coleridge's "Fears in Solitude," 1. 87; or Cary's translationof the Inferno, i.22-23-no nightingale appears. This is hardlythe way to go about establishing the universalityand change- lessness of the nightingaleas the supposed basis of its immortality. To cite precedents which are such only because the poet has added the qualifyingelement, the birdsong, is to beg the question hope- lessly. Clearly, Keats is not out to prove anythingbut seeks instead, as the speculative nature of his analogues suggests, to explore the nature of the experience those analogues image, his own experi- ence has recorded so far in the poem. Through them, he seeks to comprehend and validate that experience, to confirmhis suspicion thatthe imaginationcan so invigoratethe senses as to allow a mortal man to share the immortalityof the natural. Though at the end of the poem he can straddle the fence nicely, neither denying nor confirming,in stanza seven his analogues trace a stepwise approach to an awareness of the experience's possible fraudulence and his own delusion. David Perkins and Walter Evert, two criticswho see Keats' poetic career as a gradual rejection of the visionary imagination (and approve that rejection), acknowledge this tendency in stanza seven. The emperor and clown, to begin with, are "figures presumably out of the historical past.">8(Keats could have read of Theophilus and his golden birds, a possible source of the allusion, in Gibbon, Chapter 53.) The image of Ruth marks a shifttoward the fictive; the Biblical legend mediates be- tween the historically-based emperor and the fanciful "magic" casements of faerylandor what Evert calls the "never-never land of the imagination,'9 an illusion akin to Lamia's fabrications. This movement fromthe historicalto the legendary to the purely fictive is a critical speculation worth entertainingbecause it suggests the logic and inevitability of the final turn of the poem. The poet's experience, his uneasy union with the nightingale,finally snaps at the end of an analogical comprehension of that experience that al- lows it validity only on a level of reality,the supernaturalrealm of 278 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions magicand charms,that is farremoved from the one on whichit was achievedin the firstplace, the natural. I have said nothing,in myconsideration of sources,of the myth of Philomela, the nightingale story from which all others derive. Obviously, Keats sought no direct or detailed correspondence with the myth and all discussion is perforce speculative. There is, how- ever, in the case of the third analogue, a possible connection with Lempriere's account of the myth in his Classical Dictionary, to which Keats regularly referred. Lempriere describes Philomela's place of concealment as "a lonely castle." This is a departure from Golding's "pelting graunge that peakishly did stand / In woods forgrowen" (11.663-64) and fromSandys' "Lodge ... Obscur'd with woods" (11. 520-21). Lempriere's phrase may have suggested to Keats the possibility of holding Ovid, Claude, and Radcliffe togeth- er in a single allusion. Another possible correspondence, one particularly pertinent to this essay, is with Golding's and Sandys' translations. In both, when Philomela firstappears, she is described in terms remarkably similar to those Keats uses in the firstdescription of his nightingale. In Golding's version she comes "in raiment very rich, / And yet in beautie farremore rich, even like the Fairies which / Reported are the pleasant woods and water springs to haunt" (11.578-80); in Sandys', "in rich array; / More rich in beauty. So they use to say / The stately Naiades, and Dryad's goe / In Sylvan shades" (11.451- 54). In comparison, Keats' firstdescriptive phrase is "light-winged Dryad of the trees." Additionally in this regard, both Golding and Sandys are careful to retain Ovid's distinction between the respec- tive haunts of Philomela and Procne after their transformations. According to Sandys, Philomela, now a nightingale, "sings / In woods" (11. 669-70) while Procne, a swallow "neare the house remaines" (1. 670); or, in Golding's words, "the one away /To wood- ward flies, the other still about the house doth stay" (11. 845-46). Keats' association of the nightingale with nature is not without precedent. That Keats noticed these details when he read Lempriere, Golding, and Sandys is certainly possible; that he remembered them on a certain May morning is perhaps less likely and, of course, hardly crucial. The best argument of the nightingale's naturalness lay elsewhere, not in Lempriere, Sandys, Golding, Gibbon or the Bible but close-by, within earshot, in the tree above the poet's head. AndrewJ. Kappel 279 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions IV The early naive yearning forimmortality, whatever it mighthave meant for Keats as he wrote Endymion for instance, had matured by 1819, had clarified itself into a desire fora certain inner experi- ence of time quite unrelated to the factor imminence of death. The old desire and this new insight into its meaning inspire and guide the action of "Ode to a Nightingale" where Keats explores ways of achieving the nightingale's sense of things. He discovers that the poetry-makingFancy is the creator of a world that embodies the desired temporal perspective-possibly. Thus, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" follows logically fromthe "'Ode to a Nightingale" as a direct exploration of the possibility suggested there. In the latter poem, Keats considers the congeniality of the urn-world's experience of time or the suitability,that is, of Fancy's creations in light of his newly-understood desire forimmortality. As opposed to the night- ingale's warm garden, the cold urn-world gives up so much in achieving its temporal perspective that Fancy's fraudulence, suspected in the earlier ode, is confirmedhere. (Lamia dispells any lingering doubts.) In September 1819, with the earlier odes several months old, Keats wrote "To Autumn," and in that act affirmedprocess, aban- doning, it would seem, the quest fora nightingale-like experience of time. The inexorable temporal march abhorred in the earlier odes is affectionatelytraced here. It is difficultto know how this became possible forKeats though I think we can see two separate pathways leading simultaneously to this position. According to GeoffreyHartman, the importantdevelopment from the earlier odes to "To Autumn" is a shiftin style and metaphysic fromassertion to surmise.'0 Specifically, the existence of an achiev- able alternate ontology with a more satisfyingexperience of time is no longer asserted but casually surmised. The poetic consciousness does not leap to and fro,boldly asserting a sense of presence, then sinking in regretas that sense dissipates; instead, it slides gentlyin non-commitment,quietly courtingpossibility. Hartman argues that this is a startlingdevelopment in the practice of the ode in Western literature,as it surely seems, but Keats achieves it naturally and logically. It is, to begin with, an application to his poetry of the de- sired negative capability pervading the letters. With regard to an existence of another ontology of greater justice than our own, he can remain, with desire undiminished, "in uncertainties, Myster- ies, doubts, without any irritablereaching afterfact and reason."" 282 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions As Hartman shows, in "To Autumn" this metaphysic finds a com- plementary stylistic poise: slow, meditative rhythms;flat, matter- of-factdiction; a vocabulary of tentativeness. The new poetic stance derives as well, however, fromthe poetic of empathy also cherished in the letters. As Bate intimates (p. 580), the poem is an entering into the life of the Winchester countryside about which Keats wan- dered during the days surrounding the composition of the poem. The landscape embodies the serenity the poet adopts. The comple- mentary poetics of negative capability and empathy, then, co- author the "surmise"-metaphysic of the poem. That new stance permits the affirmationof process. It is a relaxa- tion of the distraction toward the other and tomorrow and grants every here-and-now integrity. It is a fittingof perceiver to per- ceived: if the poetic consciousness can hear the music of autumn has it is played, deaf to other seasonal songs, singer and listener will share the same timeless perspective, the serene lanscape will be serenely perceived. In the sonnet "On Fame" Keats directly contrasts the "seasonableness" or poise in the moment of the natu- ral ontology with the characteristic human distraction from itself and the present. How fever'd is the man, who cannot look Upon his mortal days with temperate blood, Who vexes all the leaves of his life's book, And robs his fair name of its maidenhood; It is as if the rose should pluck herself, Or the ripe plum fingerits misty bloom, As if the Naiad, like a meddling elf, Should darken her pure grotwith muddy gloom; But the rose leaves herself upon the briar, For winds to kiss and gratefulbees to feed, And the ripe plum still wears its dim attire; The undisturbed lake has crystal space; Why then should man, teasing the world forgrace, Spoil his salvation fora fierce miscreed? Here the natural ontology of rose, plum, Naiad and lake, poised within themselves, offera literal "salvation" or mode of immortality. They affirmprocess as they enact it and therein find an experiential escape fromdeath, which can be known only fromthe outside; from within there is only fulfillment. In "To Autumn" the poetic consciousness, activating its negative capability and empathic power, achieves the "surmise"-meta- physic and approximates the rose's poise upon the briar, "looks / AndrewJ. Kappel 283 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Upon his mortal days with temperate blood," accepts process ("cmortaldays") calmly ("with temperate blood") by enacting it, by hearing spring's song during spring and autumn's in autumn. The serene affirmationof process is not, then, an abandonment of the quest fora nightingale's sense of things. It is not, forinstance, the result of a panoramic perspective on time's eventualities achieved throughwithdrawal fromexperience (as is the case with the China- men in Yeats' poem "Lapis Lazuli"). Instead, it is sort of dramatic decorum or composure, to continue with Yeats' poem in mind, like thatof an actor playing Hamlet or Lear who, though he is not Ham- let or Lear and so has a consciousness thatperceives beyond them, does not fall out of character to articulate his wider perspective, does not break up his lines to weep. Rice University FOOTNOTE S 1 Richard Harter Fogle, "Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'," PMLA, 68, (1953), 211- 22; Earl Wasserman,The Finer Tone (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1953), p. 216; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 508. 2 In a note to lines 61 ff.Douglas Bush says "there is no doubt a logical confusion here,since the singingbird is no less mortalthan the humanpoet, but in Keats's mind the bird has become the disembodied and immortalvoice of poetry."John Keats; Selected Poems and Letters,edited and with an introductionand notes by Douglas Bush, (Boston: Houghton MifflinCo., 1959), p. 348. 3 Perkins,The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 244 ff.See also StuartSperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 262 and Douglas Bush, John Keats (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), pp. 132, 135. 4Bate, p. 508. 5 The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder E. Rollins,2 vols. (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1948), II, 65. 6 See "To Charles Cowden Clarke," 11.25-27; Endymion, I, 23-24; or Hyperion, III, 118-20. 7 See, forexample, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," 11.13-14; "On the Sea," 11.9-10; or "When I Have Fears," 11.12-13. 8 Perkins,p. 254. 9 WalterH. Evert,Aesthetic and Mythin the Poetryof Keats (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 267. 10 The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 124-46. 1 Letter of 21, 27(?) December to George and Thomas Keats. 284 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Immortalityof the Natural:Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"[pp. 270-284] Please note: Due to an errorin the printvolume, the contents of pages 280 and 281 belongto thefollowing article, "Self and Societyin Trollope." In orderto preservethe complete content of the following article, we have insertedpages 280 and 281 betweenpages 285 and 286. 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