The nightingale, let us repeat, is the most unsad thing in the world: even more unsad than the peacock full of gleam. He has nothing to be sad about. He feels perfect with life. It isn’t conceit. He just feels life-perfect, and he trills it out, shouts, jugs, gurgles, trills, gives tong, mock-plaintive calls, makes declarations, assertions, and triumphs, but he never reflects. It is pure music, in so far as you could never put words to it. But there are words for the feelings aroused in us by the song. No! even that is not true. There are no words to tell what one really feels, hearing the nightingale. It is something so much purer than words, which are all tainted. Yet we can say, it is some sort of feeling of triumph in one’s own life-perfection.
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness—
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—
Poor Keats, he has to be “too happy” in the nightingale’s happiness, not being very happy in himself at all. So he wants to drink the blushful Hippocrene and fade away with the nightingale into the forest dim.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret—
It is such sad, beautiful poetry of the human male. Yet the next line strikes me as a bit ridiculous.
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs—etc.
This is Keats, not at all the nightingale—But the sad human male still tries to break away, and get over into the nightingale world. Wine will not take him across. Yet he will go.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy—
He doesn’t succeed, however. The viewless wings of Poesy carry him only into the bushes, not into the nightingale world. He is still outside.
Darkling I listen: and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death—
The nightingale never made any man in love with easeful death—except by contrast. The contrast between the bright flame of positive pure self-aliveness, in the bird, and the uneasy flickering of yearning selflessness, forever yearning for something outside himself, which is Keats:
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
