Ode to a Nightingaleと詩人の死の想念

Abstract

She (Melancholy) dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die, wrote Keats in Ode on Melancholy. For him, Beauty is, like a vision, fragil and evanescent. Therefore, it is the main theme for him to complain the short life of Beauty in the world of imagination. When he recognizied the mutability of Beauty, Keats tried to eternalize it in the timeless world of death with the help of the analogy of death as a preserver. We can say death is, in a sense, another eternity. In Ode on a Grecian Urn the poet preserved all the pasion and beauty of the motal world in an urn which symbolizied "tomb" and "death." In Ode to a Nightingale, on the other hand, he tried to give an eternal life to the ecstasy evoked by the song of a nightingale by wishing "easeful death." But this attempt failed when he associated easeful death with death of nothingness. The fact is very important for us to understand the process of the fall of the world of imagination and the poet's returning to the actual.