Stanza 5
Keates shows a relationship through the poet speaking through the bird and expressing his love of Spring. Both the poet and the bird are dealing with the progression of time and change. Keats is expressing some change in his life and the poem is experiencing that through the changing of seasons. The bird and the poet are connected because the poet is seeing everything through the bird's eyes. The bird experiences everything so vividly and vibrantly and Keats envies the bird's passion for Spring and the colors and aromas it brings. The poet sees Spring in a different way through the bird. It makes him long to experience nature like a bird can and envious of the bird's connection to nature. He longs for the connection the bird experiences because of his own disconnection and health issues. Keats has not been able to experience nature in the way he hopes.
Big picture
We as human beings are one small part in the big picture of nature and the world. Keats understood how fragile nature and life are because of his own understanding of mortality. Nature provokes this realization because it shows how quickly things can perish and yet how resilient nature can be at the same time.
Keats is not sure if what he experienced is a dream or a glimpse at an alternate reality. Either way, he longs for it to continue. He is jealous of the nymph because she can, "singest of summer in full throated ease." She is accepted by nature itself while Keats is a constant visitor. He longs to belong to nature the way she does, but he is stuck in his human form and that holds him back from the true beauty of nature.
ReplyDeleteOne thing to pay attention to in this stanza: the first line says "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet" (41). He isn't seeing anything, and and we know why by looking back at the pervious stanza (Stanza 4): unlike the bird, who can fly above the world with the "Queen-Moon ...Cluster'd round by all her starry Fays", the poet is earth-bound: poetry cannot get him away from the "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" and thus he is stuck in a place where "there is no light" (36-38). We might connect this to the post on Stanza 3: unlike the bird, the poet is continually thinking and sorrowing, and his thoughts and sorrows are connected to the material world of death, disease, fever and fret. This world is what is described in Stanza 5, a world in which even spring has the signs of decay: "embalmed darkness" "fading violets cover'd up in leaves," the riose that is the "Haunt of flies" (43, 47, 50). This is not the world of the nightingale, but rather the poet's perspective on nature: where the bird sings joyously of renewal, he sees the coming of autumn decay.
ReplyDelete