John Keats' "Hymn to the Nightingale" and "The Darkling Thrush", although written almost a century apart, share many poetic elements that allow readers to actually draw a superficial parallel between the two poems. Although both of these poems have analogous stylistic elements, a solitary speaker similar in nature, and an overall desperate tone, it is the image of the nightingale in each poem that ultimately comes to symbolize very different ideals for each poet. While Keats's nightingale is representative of the Romantic ideals of creative and imaginative power with which the speaker can connect/identify to bring his solitary position to life, Hardy's thrush serves to accentuate the speaker's stark, lifeless world, and further alerts both the speaker and the readers. of the failure of any connection with it which defines Keats's "Ode". Through the symbol of the nightingale representing such different ideals in each poem, the poems serve to reflect the vast differences between the eras in which they were written. Where Keats's "Ode" is largely representative of Romantic ideas of power and connection with nature, Hardy's clearly marks the end of the Victorian period and the beginning of a new era in which nature and humanity they are stripped of their previously lush and divinized effects. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Although “Hymn to the Nightingale” and “The Dark Thrush” end with very different messages, the poems share many superficial similarities. Indeed, "Keats's Nightingale may have awakened Hardy's conscience when he wrote The Darkling Thrush" (May 62), cites critic Charlie Mays' essay, "Hardy's 'Darkling Thrush': The 'Nightingale' Grown Old." These similarities, according to some critics, are intentional, as Hardy intended to use familiar Romantic poetic elements that readers can recognize to further set up the divergent message in his own poetry. One of these similarities between poems lies in the form and rhyme scheme that each poet develops. For example, in Hardy's "Thrush" as well as Keats' "Ode", every stanza, with the exception of one line in Keats' poem, is written in iambic pentameter. Although Hardy uses eight-line stanzas versus Keats's ten, each poet's use of iambic pentameter creates a poem that flows quite easily and allows readers to focus on the speaker and the driving action of the poem. Although typically used in odes, Hardy's choice to write "The Darkling Thrush" in iambic pentameter serves to again remind readers of these similar Romantic traits in order to further emphasize the disparate message he will later establish in his own poetry, which helps to create the romantic atmosphere. sense of irony often present in Hardy's poetry. Furthermore, both poems operate on a similar rhyme scheme, with Hardy's eight-line stanzas following an ABABCDCD pattern, and Keats's ten-line stanzas using an ABABDCEDCE form. Again, this simple rhyme scheme is commonly used in Romantic odes, but Hardy's attempt at it adds irony to the message found within it. Since Hardy's poetry was written in 1900, well after the composition of Keats's Ode, he was aware of readers' familiarity not only with Keats's Ode, but with Romantic odes in general. Therefore, because these poems share familiar and stylistic traits, readers cannot help but "keep in mind" Keats's poetry when reading Hardy's at the time his was written. Besides beingStructurally similar, both “Nightingale” and “Thrush” also focus on the image of a speaker solitary observing nature and convey a desperate initial tone and mood. According to critics, Keats actually composed “The Ode to the Nightingale” based on a similar experience in which he sat alone under a tree, apparently under the bird's trance. Philip Greenblatt and others refer to this event in the annotation of the poem, stating: “Charles Brown, with whom Keats was then living… wrote 'In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats took a quiet, continuous joy in his singing; and one morning he... sat under a plum tree for two or three hours. When he entered the house he had some sheets of paper in his hand. . . Wondering, I found those fragments... they contained his poetic feeling in the song of our nightingale.' (Greenblatt et al 903) With this experience in mind, readers can witness the similar position taken by Keats's speaker in “Nightingale” as well. For example, in the first stanza of “Nightingale,” readers are immediately introduced to the subjective speaker and depressed mood of the poem through the opening lines, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness aches / My senses, as if they were of hemlock I had drunk /” (lines 1-2). By using the first person "I" and "my" to convey the opening tone of the poem, Keats establishes the subjectivity in a poet's work that often characterized Romantic writings, as the overall tone and feeling of a poem are expressed through the senses of a solitary individual. “Nightingale” is clearly no exception, as the experience and feelings associated with the driving action of the poem are conveyed through the subjectivity of the speaker involved. The first-person description also allows readers to get a sense of the depressed state of mind present at the time of reading. beginning of “Nightingale” via first-person speaker. Through lines that refer to "[his] heartache" and descriptive lines that compare the speaker's mood as if he had consumed poison or a "tedious opium," the initial tone of the poem is established, the mood before the speaker describes the nightingale. Keats's speaker refers to the world using depressive imagery that describes: “The weariness, the fever, and the agitation / Here, where men sit and hear one another groan; Where paralysis shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and grows thin, and dies; / Where if not to think is to be full of pain / And leaden-eyed despair” (lines 23-28). Through descriptions like this, the speaker offers readers a solemn and dejected picture of his initial state of mind and environment that exists without the presence of the nightingale in the poem. Hardy, similarly to Keats, also uses the stylistic element of a first-person speaker to establish the depressed mood in “The Darkling Thrush.” Like "Ode," Hardy's poem also opens by focusing on the speaker in the first person as he states, "I leaned against a copse gate / When the frost was wraith gray" (lines 1-2). Once again, adopting a typically Romantic trait in conveying the mood through the speaker, Hardy also focuses on the speaker's loneliness in nature through the lines: "And all mankind that haunted the night / Had sought the fires domestic" (verses 8-9). Through Hardy's establishment of the poem's sole speaker in nature, he is again using a scheme that allows readers to recognize the Romantic elements present in his own poetry and then prepares readers for his ultimate reversal of these Romantic ideals by the end of his poem. AsKeats's speaker, even Hardy's speaker in “Thrush” conveys a sense of dejection by making subjective statements about his internal state. For example, the lines: "And every spirit on earth / seemed as fervent as I" (16-17) are indicative of this depressed state. Once again, Hardy's similarity to Keats's Ode is the speaker's subjective offering of the poem's tone. Readers pick up the overall tone not simply from the images used, but directly through the first person. To develop this mood of anguish and loneliness that is established at the beginning of each of these poems, another important similarity between these two poems is the thematic concern of death. Although both poems, as readers will later learn, have very different interpretations of death, each shares a common theme in its menacing existence and sense of inevitability throughout the world.every. In Keats's Ode, for example, the speaker acknowledges that death is a regular part of the cycle of existence by stating: “Here… / Where youth grows pale, ghost-thin, and dies; /” (line 26). Later in the poem, he speaks of death again, but this time in relation to his own existence and reflects: "For many times / I have been half in love with sweet Death, /... Now more than ever it seems rich to die, / To cease to midnight without pain,/” (lines 51-57). For Keats's speaker, it is clear that he sees death as a looming presence, as he contemplates his own end both recognizing its inevitability and remaining confident that his will be painless, as if he could occur while the speaker is in a brief experience of ecstasy offered through the nightingale. Similarly, the theme of death also seems to pervade Hardy's entire poem, Hardy's original title for “The Darkling Thrush.” it was instead “By the Century's Deathbed,” which seems appropriate, since death metaphors and imagery pervade nearly every line of the poem. Not only does Hardy use images like “crypt” and “corpse” in his descriptive lines, but the poem itself was actually composed on New Year's Eve 1900. Thus, combined with the speaker's position before the "failing eye of the day," the poem literally expresses the death of the speaker's day, year, and century. speaks. This overwhelming sense of the looming presence of death in Hardy's poetry is once again a reminder of its inevitability which is simply so pervasive that every speaker has no choice but to recognize and contemplate it further. The poems of Keats and Hardy continue to parallel each other with the sudden appearance of the image of the nightingale, an image familiar to poets "which often had a symbolic meaning for its strange habit of singing only in the darkness » (May 63). Subsequently, it is the entrance of the nightingale that serves as a turning point in these two poems, as it marks the point at which Keats's speaker is able to connect with the bird and has a euphoric "transformation" despite the bleak world, while Hardy's speaker is unable to identify with the bird, reflecting the emerging view of his era: nature no longer offered the deep spiritual connection and experience it once offered in the Romantic period. "[T]he bird is a symbol of the visionary imagination, and the hope of identifying with it provides the impetus in both poems," (62) states Charles May's article "Hardy's 'Darkling Thrush': The 'Nightingale 'Grown Old'. Furthermore, its appearance in each poem as a chant in complete darkness around the image of the solitary speaker in nature are parallel characteristics; however, what each poet does with the image of the bird, however, is the area in which thesepoems diverge, ultimately marking the divergence between Romantic and post-Victorian ideologies as well. In Keats's Ode to the Nightingale, for example, the identification and experience with the bird is a defining characteristic of Romantic writings. For Keats, the nightingale represents a connection with nature in which the speaker, through poetic identification, is granted a temporary respite from the inevitability of death in the world he had contemplated earlier in the poem. With the entrance of the nightingale into each poem, readers may also begin to see a distinction in how each poem characterizes nature. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” nature is represented as glorified and sensual, and the speaker, through the nightingale, is able to connect to this deified state resulting in their own internal experience of ecstasy despite the negative feelings about it. initially surrounded him. For example, Keats's speaker uses particularly sensual terms to describe nature, referring to the nightingale as he sings about "a melodious texture / Of green beech" (lines 8-9). Nature is again characterized in lush terms later in the poem when the speaker describes “the grass, the grove, and the wild fruit tree; / White, hawthorn and pastoral dog rose; / Violets that fade quickly…” (lines 45-47). Later, Keats's speaker appears again to deify the nature around him, describing celestial qualities that reflect the earth around him through the lines “But there is no light here, / Save what from heaven blows with the breezes / Through green darkness and winding mossy ways” (lines 38-40). These sensuous and glorified images of nature are particular characteristics of Romantic poetry, as Philip Greenblatt observes in his “Introduction to the Romantic Period,” “Romantic poetry…has almost become synonymous with “nature poetry.” …many poems of the period are almost unmatched in their ability to capture the sensuous nuances of the natural scene…” (Greenblatt et al 11). Keats's "Nightingale" shares this romantic characteristic, as the speaker, through the bird, is granted a profound identification to share the fullness of nature. Even more significantly, Keats's speaker possesses the ability to experience a connection to this glorified natural state through the nightingale. According to May, the main difference between the writings of Keats and Hardy is the use of the nightingale to connect to nature. “The focus in 'Ode to a Nightingale' is on the fullness of nature and the speaker's limitations in participating in it. In “The Darkling Thrush,” the focus is on the emptiness of nature and the courage of the speaker. . . refuse such a connection" (May 63). As a result, readers can see examples of the speaker's “unity” with the nightingale throughout Keats's poetry. For example, the lines “Go! Distant! For I will fly to you / Not on the chariot of Bacchus and his pards, / But on the invisible wings of Poetry /" (lines 31-33) express the speaker's desire and ability to metaphorically "take flight" with the nightingale , leaving the world as he knows it momentarily. This feeling is again described in the lines “ 19-20). Once again, the speaker's ability to fully connect to the natural world described is a distinctively Romantic theme, as Greenblatt credits Keats as a "Romantic craftsman" in his ability to achieve this connection in his work Greenblatt explains this romantic quality of Keats's writing by stating: “[his] description in which all the senses… combine to give the total apprehension of an experience;himself, the poet seems to lose his own identity in a total identification with the object he contemplates…” (Greenblatt et al 879). Identification with nature, then, is a Romantic theme that readers should not lose sight of, for later poetry, as highlighted by Hardy, is markedly devoid of this theme. Although Keats's speaker expresses an initially depressing attitude regarding his current state and the state of humanity in general, it is undoubtedly clear that his identification with the nightingale offers him a respite from this state. Referring to his connection with the bird, Keats's speaker states: “Though the dull brain confuses and delays: / Already with thee! Tender is the night, / And perhaps the Moon-Queen is on her throne” (34-26). Keats subsequently describes the ecstatic experience with the bird that he actually manages to draw from this identification with it, even expressing a lack of fear of the inevitability of death, as long as the speaker remains in the ecstasy of the bird. He states, “Now more than ever it seems rich to die, / to cease at midnight without pain, / while you are pouring out your soul abroad / In such ecstasy!” (lines 55-58). To Keats's speakers, the nightingale offers an escape from mortality, an escape that the Romantics believed could simultaneously be achieved through a deep connection with nature. "You were not born for death, immortal bird!" exclaims Keats. Mays' article agrees with this feeling of escape: “The song of the nightingale celebrates nature's abundance; and Keats is able, if only for a moment, to participate in this fullness on the "invisible wings of Poetry". Of course, Keats is called back to himself and the world of change and change when the bird's song fades, but he is still left with a valid experience of unity...” (May 65). Ultimately, as Mays notes, Keats's speaker is brought back to his reality as he bids farewell to the bird and his song eventually fades, but it was the brief experience of ecstasy that Keats's speaker had through the identification with the natural bird that makes poetry par excellence romantic. Although the natural world in both of these poems still holds the concept of the inevitability of death, an individual's ability to connect to the spiritual qualities of nature represents a brief respite and escape. For Hardy, however, the familiar entrance of the nightingale purposely reminds readers of its romantic significance to accentuate his opposite theme of the inability to draw comfort from nature. According to Mays, “Hardy purposely took Keats's Romantic view of nature and inverted it to write an ironic rejection of that view. The resulting reversal of Keats's poem constitutes a fitting commentary on the end of a century in which poets often saw nature as symbolically full of meaning and value worth identifying with” (Mays 63). Hardy presents nature not as glorified and spiritual, but just as he sees it: cold, dead, and unforgiving. For Hardy's speaker, "what you see is what you get," and what the speaker clearly sees is in opposition to the lush fullness that Keats's speaker witnessed earlier. For Hardy, nature is not an object to be glorified and the nightingale does not have transformative properties like those of Keats; it is simply a feature in Hardy's dark landscape; and the speaker doesn't understand why he is singing. In this view, the speaker's view of nature in "The Darkling Thrush" is clearly in direct opposition to that of the speaker in "Ode to a Nightingale." For example, while Keats's speaker describes nature as lush and in sensual terms, Hardy's description of the speaker deprives nature of any form of life. Through the use of images thatthey are reminiscent of death, nature in this poem ends up appearing naked and lifeless, hardly something to be glorified. Hardy's speaker states: “The earth's sharp features seemed to be / the Century's corpse pouring forth, / its crypt the cloud canopy, / the wind its death-lament. / The ancient throb of germ and birth / Shrink hard and dry /” (lines 9-14). Once again, words such as "corpse" and "death lament" clearly establish that nature is devoid of life or spirit, in direct opposition to Keats's. For Hardy, the thrush itself is also devoid of its childhood spiritual and uplifting qualities. speaker in Keats' Ode. For example, while Keats's nightingale sat on lush "melodious green ground," Hardy's thrush rests on "tangled stems" and "shabby twigs." Furthermore, Hardy's thrush is certainly not an "immortal bird" to be venerated as Keats's is, but rather it is "An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small" (21). Through these descriptions of nature as devoid of imaginative and spiritual qualities, Hardy's poetry marks a clear divergence from the Romantic ideals that Keats so aptly displays in his poetry. According to critic Katherine Maynard, “The image of tangled, overgrown stems illustrates humanity's inability to find in nature a suitable accompaniment to its human song. . . Neither God nor nature accompany humanity, comfort or console people, in this earthly existence. By dint of senseless vitality, nature, in the form of an aged thrush, sings when a person certainly would not sing. . .” (Maynard “The tragic lyric”). Nature's ability to no longer grant people the imagination and strength that so characterized Romantic writings is strikingly evident in Hardy's poems, showing a clear divergence from "nature poems" such as those of Keats. To continue this concept, Hardy's speaker, unlike Keats's, is also impossible to find a connection to the singing thrush and the imaginative qualities of nature he has come to represent. As in “Ode to a Nightingale,” Hardy's thrush also breaks into “a sincere evening song” and later states how the bird “had thus chosen to cast his soul / Into the growing darkness” (22-23 ). However, in Hardy's poem, the speaker is unable to make a connection with the bird so common in Romantic verse. According to Maynard's article, “By conventions of symbolism, [Hardy] is, of course, the thrush, but he has not become the thrush. Romantic lyric [by contrast] occupies a passage of time during which the poet and the apostrophized object approach, meet, or become each other, after which they retreat back into separation. (Maynard “The tragic lyric”). In Hardy's poetry it is clear that the speaker never reaches this point of "meeting." He hears the song of the nightingale and sees the image of the bird on the vine above him, however, he is unable to relate to the bird and “become one with the other” as Keats's speaker had done; Hardy's speaker does not understand the earthly reason for the bird's song. This feeling is made clear in the lines “So little cause for carols / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on earthly things / Far or near” (lines 25-28). Here, the speaker hears the song of the bird, but because he cannot establish that romantic connection with it, he finds no comfort in the bird's joy; he doesn't understand it at all. Hardy's inability to identify and then experience brief joy through the nightingale is further exemplified in the final lines of the poem where the speaker states, "Some blessed hope he knows / And I was not aware" (line 32- 33). The explicit statement.