Blooming Madness- My take on the essence of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale

‘Balance’ is a phenomenal word ever added to dictionary. Connotation of which can also lead to dangerous discoveries about life. If ever one is privileged to explore the spheres of ‘absurdity’,’existentialism’, ‘nihilism’, all of which are separated by a very blur line, she/he is bounded by a constant dilemma eroding the very depths of fundamentals. The mischievous dance between hope and hopelessness, sane and insane, faith and doubt, meaning and futility…consumes even the brightest of minds. It brutally fetches the purpose of living. Yet however tragic and bleak it may be, it cannot avoid the sole meaning anchored with it…that it’s all funny! A joke, dropped so unceremoniously, that has the inevitable strength to liberate anybody from the shackles of reasons, belongingness, despair and from the tortured loop of patterns.

 

 

Many great philosophers, thinkers, poets, artists have questioned and embraced this dance. Among whom ‘John Keats’ was a remarkable genius…believing in “ the life of sensations rather than of thoughts”. His own life resonates with riveting paradoxes of ‘time’ and ‘change’. Yet his early death couldn’t stop him from being the most unique romantic poet that the world has ever got. Free from impulses of the movements around him, no matter how significant they may have been, he devoted himself to the service of ‘beauty’ evoked from the realms of ‘imagination’.
Even the greatest scientist ever lived, after discovering more than any ‘man’ has ever done, couldn’t resist to come up with a phrase that “ Imagination encircles the world”.

"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways."

Reaching beyond the fundamentals of ‘knowledge’ and ‘intellect’, Keats imagination gave a complex escape to enjoy the ideal beauty in anything that can exist if we want it to! Where he could listen to a nightingale and be filled with overpowering sensation of happiness. And eventually intend to escape and fly into his own imagination to explore the tender nights, to surround queen moon with starry fairies, to smell the fragrance of beautiful flowers or to adore fulfillment in autumn befriending the sun or to draw personification of ‘Autumn’ into a woman, a farmer, a gleaner or an orchard man. In other words, to make the best out of life, to savor it even after knowing the ugly realities of this world. Most of which he faced personally. We all do…sooner or later! Losing his younger brother and surviving his own minimal days was his personal tragedy that he coped with.

His odes reflects his appreciation and also his agony to be split within two worlds entirely different from each other. Such is the entrapment felt from the webs of an absurd life. As if everything is narrowed down and split into two simple choices. Either to “wait” or to seek “Godot”! Either to enjoy the time we are given, anyway and accept the changes that occur, always. Or to remain miserable, choked by existentialism. Both of which ends might mean nothing. Even Keats returned to reality in his ‘ode to nightingale’. After all we are a part of a funny creation devoid of its creator, left hanging into abyss on a pale blue dot. But if we do have a choice … then pioneers like Keats all ever do is to love it, find beauty in it and be the torch bearer of ‘Hope’.