What is NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and -- when the thing is done -- the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2006, we had over 79,000 participants. Nearly 13,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
So, to recap:
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.
Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: Sign-ups begin October 1, 2007. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
Still confused? Just visit the How NaNoWriMo Works page!
Showing posts with label Criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Criticism. Show all posts
Monday, 9 April 2007
Some Poetic Devices
Alliteration - The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds.
Imagery - Words or phrases that appeal to any sense or any combination of senses.
Metaphor - A comparison between two objects with the intent of giving clearer meaning to one of them. Often forms of the "to be" verb are used, such as "is" or "was", to make the comparison.
Meter - The recurrence of a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Onomatopoeia - The use of words which imitate sound.
Personification - A figure of speech which endows animals, ideas, or inanimate objects with human traits or abilities.
Point-of-view - The author's point-of-view concentrates on the vantage point of the speaker, or "teller", of the story or poem.
1st person: the speaker is a character in the story or poem and tells it from his/her perspective (uses "I")
3rd person limited: the speaker is not part of the story, but tells about the other characters but limits information about what one character sees and feels.
3rd person omniscient: the speaker is not part of the story, but is able to "know" and describe what all characters are thinking.
Repetition - the repeating of words, phrases, lines, or stanzas.
Rhyme - The similarity of ending sounds existing between two words.
Rhyme scheme - The sequence in which the rhyme occurs. The first end sound is represented as the letter "a", the second is "b", etc.
Simile - A comparison between two objects using a specific word or comparison such as "like", "as", or "than".
Stanza - a grouping of two or more lines of a poem in terms of length, metrical form, or rhyme scheme.
Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds.
Imagery - Words or phrases that appeal to any sense or any combination of senses.
Metaphor - A comparison between two objects with the intent of giving clearer meaning to one of them. Often forms of the "to be" verb are used, such as "is" or "was", to make the comparison.
Meter - The recurrence of a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Onomatopoeia - The use of words which imitate sound.
Personification - A figure of speech which endows animals, ideas, or inanimate objects with human traits or abilities.
Point-of-view - The author's point-of-view concentrates on the vantage point of the speaker, or "teller", of the story or poem.
1st person: the speaker is a character in the story or poem and tells it from his/her perspective (uses "I")
3rd person limited: the speaker is not part of the story, but tells about the other characters but limits information about what one character sees and feels.
3rd person omniscient: the speaker is not part of the story, but is able to "know" and describe what all characters are thinking.
Repetition - the repeating of words, phrases, lines, or stanzas.
Rhyme - The similarity of ending sounds existing between two words.
Rhyme scheme - The sequence in which the rhyme occurs. The first end sound is represented as the letter "a", the second is "b", etc.
Simile - A comparison between two objects using a specific word or comparison such as "like", "as", or "than".
Stanza - a grouping of two or more lines of a poem in terms of length, metrical form, or rhyme scheme.
Saturday, 31 March 2007
What makes Good Poetry ? ~ John.R.Haws
What Makes Good Poetry ?by John R. Haws
Poetry of the present age is appalling. For the most part, I don’t like it. It stinks much like the garbage that’s in it. I rarely ever find anything that I consider good. It’s like everything else in modern life - watered down and bland to meet the standards of the mediocre.
So I’ve asked myself, "Self, what makes good poetry? What distinguishes the very best from all the rest?" Is it the subject matter? No. Poetry can talk about almost anything. Is it the rhyming of lines? No. That’s out of fashion in today’s world. Is it the meter? Not really. Good poetry doesn’t have to meet a beater or beat a meter – although it’s nice when it does. Well, what is it then? It’s, it’s …oh, how can I it put? It’s hard work. It’s the struggle between two words. One is OK, but the other is better. So much better, you wonder why you didn’t think of it before.
Poetry, good poetry that is, bites and stings. It arouses your senses. It burns a hole in your brain. It stimulates your imagination. You think, "I never thought it like that before." Yet, It (whatever it is) was always there for everyone to see. A fork in the road1 - some snow in the woods at night2 - some gold rushers slugging it out in a Yukon saloon3… the difference is the view that the writer brings to the reader. And that has made all the difference ages and ages hence4.
So, is good poetry written by a profound writer? Nnnn... sometimes, but not always. Well, then, how do you decide whether a writer (any writer) writes good poetry? Well, you can look for little nuances; visual slight’s of hand on paper. You can look for hidden meanings, alternative meanings, or broader meanings to the words. A great, but little-known poet, once said, "I’m just an ordinary, ordinary, ordinary man."5 How ordinary is he if he has to say it three times? I’m not talking about scattering a bunch of words on a page and calling it a poem. Although, I have done exactly that. I don’t consider it poetry. It was an experiment that failed. No matter how hard I try, I cannot make indented, peculiarly placed words on a page poetry. I have written tons of stuff that has failed to make it as poetry by my own standards. I don’t know how it would fare in the real world. My guess is, someone would greatly admire "... the Emperor’s new clothes"6. No so me.
First, good poetry has to say something. It gives meaning, value, or worth to a person, place, or thing. It speaks-about or focuses-on something that everyone can relate to. If it does this, it’s got a good start. But it can’t just be wishy-washy, pie in the sky, by and by, dribble. It’s got to hit home. It’s got to get you where you live. You’ve got to feel it in your heart, experience it in your mind, reflect on it in your thoughts. Humm… Yeah, I can relate to something like that.
Second, good poetry has great word choices - the very best. This I struggle with everything time I sit down to write. It just can’t be "Jack and Jill went up the hill". Why not "Jack and Jackie went down to Dallas"? The words should impart sensory impressions that take your breath away – like when you step outside on a winter day and the wind sucks away your breath while it pelts your face with snowflakes and you feel the wind-chill factor of –20oF down into your bones. Like that.
Third, a good poem should visually arouse the reader. "What do you mean by that?" For me, it's not enough to simple write black words on white paper. I want more communication than just that. So I search for ways to visually confirm what the words are saying. I use the tools at my disposal, like different style fonts , fonts with different colors, bold print for emphasis, and small fonts for diminished restraint and quietness. I search for words within words, like cLOUDs for the thunder and lightening in clouds. None of this is necessary for the ordinary, run-of-the-mill poet. It most assuredly is essential for the poet that is not content to be just ordinary. One word of caution though. Don't overdo this! It's easy to get carried away by all of these choices and do too much - like too much salt in a chicken soup or too much garlic in the spaghetti sauce. When this happens, the visually superfluous can rob the reader of the true taste and flavor of the words.
Fourth, a poem can be fun. Even a short limerick7 or nursery rhyme8 can make you laugh. Occasionally, it should be fun to write poetry. It should leave you with a feeling of, "Ah… that felt good – like a nice warm bath." Yes, it can be psychotherapy. No, it is not an infectious disease, despise what Cervantes says9. Yes, it can be a mental relief. But it doesn’t have to be. Now and then it can just be fun.
Finally, a poem must be honest. It must be true to itself and its maker. So much of the stuff that passes for poetry today is just the airy, aimless, meandering thoughts of a young mind uncertain of everything. Even in uncertainty there is a certain amount of certainty. Isn’t there? I think so. Sometimes honesty hurts. Sometimes honesty laughs at itself. But as John’s Little Known Proverb # 1 says, "Life is too serious to be taken seriously." Lighten up. Give the reader something to think about, but don't cause them to contemplate suicide just because you’re having a bad hair day.
Furthermore, you cannot expect everyone who reads good poetry to get it, to really understand what you're working so hard to say. The best you can hope for is that most people do. There is too much depth in some poems, not enough in others. One bite of food does not tell you much about the cook. If it’s oatmeal, he or she may be fixing breakfast. If it’s meat, she or he might be cooking dinner. But you really cannot tell much from just one bite. The same is true of a poet. One poem does not tell you much about a poet, but a dozen will give you the essential essence of that poet's perspective.
There are two more personal "don’ts" that I have to include here. I don’t particularly like poetry that preaches at me or asks me to accept some Universal, Cosmic Ideal. Such writings do not impress me. Neither do they move me. I also despise the use of poetic language as a means to push a political view, foreign or domestic. My stomach turns sour whenever I hear such stuff. It may be poetic but it ain't poetry. Everything else though, is fair game. And believe me, that game (like the greased pig at the county fair) can be very slippery.
Now let me see if I can summarize all this verbiage. Write about something people can relate to. Grab hold of and hang on to their attention. Use the very best word choices. Make the verses concrete, down to earth. Spice the print with the tools at your disposal. Throw in some fun now and then. And don't get your hopes or expectations up to high with regards to your readers. Many of them won't get the point. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, "You can convince some the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot convince all of the people all of the time."
Footnotes
1 The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 2 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost 3 How McPherson Held the Floor by Robert W. Service 4 A paraphrase of the last stanza in The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 5 Poem No. 12, JUST AN ORDINARY MAN in POETRY - Book 1 by John R. Haws6 The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen7 A LIMERICK by John R. Haws8 FATHER GOOSE by John R. Haws9 Don Quixote's niece in Chapter 6 says, "... and, even worse, writing poetry, which everyone knows is an infectious disease for which there is absolutely no cure." Translation by Burton Raffel
January 2002
Return to essays
A view on Bad Poets ~ Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell(1914-1965)
"In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick."
"Bad Poets"by Randall Jarrell
Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.
In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick.
After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.
If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem.
A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.
1953
Back to The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner Page
"In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick."
"Bad Poets"by Randall Jarrell
Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.
In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick.
After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.
If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem.
A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.
1953
Back to The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner Page
Saturday, 24 March 2007
Ode to a Nightingale ~ John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821)Ode to a Nightingale
1My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
2 My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
3Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
4 One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
5'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
6 But being too happy in thine happiness,--
7 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
8 In some melodious plot
9 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
10 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
11O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
12 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
13Tasting of Flora and the country green,
14 Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
15O for a beaker full of the warm South,
16 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
17 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
18 And purple-stained mouth;
19 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
20 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
21Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
22 What thou among the leaves hast never known,
23The weariness, the fever, and the fret
24 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
25Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
26 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
27 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
28 And leaden-eyed despairs,
29 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
30 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
31Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
32 Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
33But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
34 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
35Already with thee! tender is the night,
36 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
37 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
38 But here there is no light,
39 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
40 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
41I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
42 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
43But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
44 Wherewith the seasonable month endows
45The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
46 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
47 Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
48 And mid-May's eldest child,
49 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
50 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
51Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
52 I have been half in love with easeful Death,
53Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
54 To take into the air my quiet breath;
55 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
56 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
57 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
58 In such an ecstasy!
59 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
60 To thy high requiem become a sod.
61Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
62 No hungry generations tread thee down;
63The voice I hear this passing night was heard
64 In ancient days by emperor and clown:
65Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
66 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
67 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
68 The same that oft-times hath
69 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
70 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
71Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
72 To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
73Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
74 As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
75Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
76 Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
77 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
78 In the next valley-glades:
79 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
80 Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?
Notes
2] hemlock: a poisonous plant which produces death by paralysis.
4] Lethe: a river of the lower world from which the shades drank, and thus obtained forgetfulness of the past.
7] Dryad: a wood nymph.
9] beechen: of the beech tree.
11] draught: what can be swallowed in a single drink.
13] Flora: the goddess of flowers, here used for flowers themselves. Cf. Keats' letter to Fanny Keats ca. May 1, 1819: "O there is nothing like fine weather ... and, please heaven, a little claret-wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep -- with a few or a good many ratafia cakes -- a rocky basin to bathe in, a strawberry bed to say your prayers to Flora in" (Letters, II, 56).
14] Provençal song. In the early Middle Ages the poets of southern France, the troubadours of Provence, were particularly famous for their love lyrics.
15] warm South: a southern wine.
16] Hippocrene: a fountain on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, sacred to the Muses.
26] Tom Keats died of consumption on Dec. 1, 1818.
32] Bacchus and his pards: the Roman god of wine, whho traditionally is shown in a conveyance drawn by leopards.
33] viewless: invisible. This phrase appears in half a dozen poems from 1765 to Mary Robinson's "The Progress of Liberty" in 1806 (II, 426).
37] Fays: fairies.
43] embalmed: full of balms, or perfumes. Lines 43-49 appear to echo Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.249-52 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997):
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine ...
46] pastoral eglantine. Eglantine is properly the sweet-briar, though popularly applied to various varieties of the wild rose. "Pastoral" presumably because often referred to in pastoral poetry.
51] Darkling: in the dark; cf Milton, Paradise Lost, III, 38-40: "As the wakeful Bird/Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid/Tunes her nocturnal Note."
60] high requiem: a liturgical song for the repose of the dead.
67] alien corn: alien because Ruth was not an Israelite but a Moabitess, gleaning in the barley fields of Judah (Ruth 2:1-2).
Commentary by Ian Lancashire(2002/9/9)
Between the first three words of "Ode to a Nightingale," "My heart aches," and its last, "sleep," John Keats describes a brief personal escape from an existence whose suffering he can no longer endure. The "I" who speaks eight times in this perfect eight-stanza lyric is Keats himself, not a surrogate persona. Ambiguity, irony, and even implication have no place here, but biography does. Keats' letters show that he certainly believed the poet possessed "negative capability," the self-nullifying power to enter other things and speak as and for them. "Ode to a Nightingale" depicts one such experience. True enough, Keats leaves his "sole self" (72) to join with the nightingale in verse that briefly realizes, in human language, the ageless beauty of its unintelligible song. Yet it is Keats who does so, in May 1819, not the living reader, not some character in a dramatic monologue manipulated by a poet who stays outside his created world. During his training as a medical practitioner, Keats saw drugs like opium (3) and wine (11) deaden the pain of feverishly ill men, the aged shaking from palsy, and the consumptive young (23-26). His own brother Tom, dying of consumption at this time, lingers on in "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" (26).
Keats' friend Charles Brown recollected, 17 years later, how Keats wrote this ode.
In the spring of 1818 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his 'Ode to a Nightingale', a poem which has been the delight of every one.
The only surviving draft of the ode, in Keats' handwriting, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It appears on two half-sheets and has "an uncancelled rejected beginning ... and the first thirty lines written continuously without stanza divisions" (Stillinger 651). Perhaps this manuscript, which Keats gave to his friend J. H. Reynolds, represents a later stage of the poem than what Brown saw on four or five "scraps." Whatever the textual history may be (and we are unlikely to know much more), Brown recalls the earliest stage of composition. Keats took "his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree" near Brown's house and sat under it "for two or three hours," taking pleasure in the song of a nightingale that "had built her nest" there. Afterwards, Keats returned to the house with some "scraps" on which he had been writing the ode.
Keats did not record these few hours in "Ode to a Nightingale." In the poem, the bird sings "in some melodious plot / Of beechen green" (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is "night" or "midnight" (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33) and only returning to himself when his "fancy" fails, its spell broken by a word, "forlorn" (71-74). The morning in his chair under the plum-tree stimulated the experience described by the poem, in what we now call lucid (or wide-awake) dreaming. At poem's end, Keats recognizes this when he asks, "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / ... Do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). He has had a disorienting, transcendental experience. One moment, sightless in a pitch-black midnight, high among the leaves of a forest of trees, he was listening to the nightingale's "ecstasy"; and then suddenly he was back alone, if Brown remembers truly, under a plum-tree one morning near his house.
In retrospect, after the event, Keats describes his experience as a somatoform (bodily) dissociation, an out-of-body experience, or what parapsychologists term an OBE. Others might call it a "near-death" experience. During a critical illness, such as a heart attack, the self may appear to rise out of the dying body and to rush down a tunnel towards a light, only returning to the body when its trauma ceases. Both out-of-body and near-death experiences, available to a very large percentage of the population, are widely documented by those who had them and by other observers. A typical OBE begins when sensory input is disrupted, sometimes by drugs. The mind then feels itself float upwards out of the body to a height that has been termed "bird's-eye" or tree-high. Often the ascent may seem like travelling through a tunnel towards a bright light. Experiencing itself being divided into two, or having a dissociated double, the self may feel itself near death. Afterwards, when the mind returns to the body, the person recalls his experience, not as a dream during REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, but as vivid or wide-awake dreaming.
"Ode to a Nightingale" opens when Keats acknowledges feeling "a drowsy numbness" that he associates with having taken drugs like hemlock or opium, or with drinking from the classical river, Lethe, which makes humanity forget what it was like to have lived. Keats then wishes to drink deeply of red wine so that he could "fade away" (20-21), leaving the suffering world for the nightingale's joyful song. What transports him, however, is the imagination. Despite the physical brain, which "perplexes and retards" (34), his mind enables him to "fly" up to the nightingale in the trees. He imagines the moon's bright light blown through "winding mossy ways" (40) but arrives in utter darkness, lacking sight and smell. He imagines himself desiring death, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die" (55), and experiencing it, becoming "a sod" (60). Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word "forlorn," Keats comes "back" to his "sole self," that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced as, perhaps, "a waking dream" (79). Many facets of an OBE are here: drug-associated sensory deprivation, a flight upwards of a double mind through dark "ways" illuminated by a great light, the moon, a bird's-eye perspective among the tree-tops, a near-death experience, the descent of a double to its abandoned self, and a sense of having had a vivid dream.
Keats did not write "Ode to a Nightingale" as testimony about an "out-of-body experience"; it would not be recognized or named for more than a century. On the other hand, neither does Keats appear to invent this dissociative event or to copy it from other poets. Anyone can meditate, one fine, warm morning, about escaping from the harsh world of humanity into the countryside and its healing natural beauty. Samuel T. Coleridge did so in his lyric, "The Lime-tree Bower my Prison":
... Henceforth I shall know That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,No waste so vacant, but may well employEach faculty of sense, and keep the heartAwake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,That we may lift the soul, and contemplateWith lively joy the joys we cannot share.
Some readers believe that Keats drew from Coleridge here, but despite "lift[ing] the soul," opiate Coleridge remained fully possessed, in sunlight, of himself and his senses. Keats' last six lines owe much more to Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper." Wordsworth described the valley maiden singing, in a strange language as "No Nightingale did ever chaunt" (9), such "plaintive numbers" (18; cf. Keats' "plaintive anthem") that, once the speaker had climbed the hill, remained in his mind as "music ... / Long after it was heard no more" (31-32). As the reaper's song "could have no ending" (26), so the voice of Keats' nightingale was "immortal," heard in "ancient days" and Biblical history as in contemporary England. Both poets cluster "plaintive," unheard "music," "hill-side," and "valley" in the context of a nightingale's song, strong evidence for influence, but Wordsworth does not allude to any dissociative experience.
Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" springs from a poet's personal life-changing, mind-wrenching experience of a timeless paradise, a world "with no pain" (56). Only someone who has spent days tending the terminally ill can understand with what depth Keats longs for this respite. In the event's aftermath, he recreates the experience "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33), using all his craft's resources, but with little sensory recall. The "tender" night (35) and "embalmed darkness" (43) disable his sight and leave him guessing at fragrances. Simple words like "song," "voice," "anthem," and "music" only hint at the nightingale's soul-pouring "ecstasy" (58). He imitates it with astonishingly resonant lines like "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" (40), and "The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves" (50). For the rest, Keats must describe the bird-song "of summer" (10) by depicting what he knows, its hearers over the centuries. To recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering. Only by being in two worlds at once, the self below, its double above, can we know the song's essential beauty. Why else did the song that "found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth ... sick for home," leave her standing "in tears amid the alien corn" (65-67)? She was not, like Keats at the start, "too happy in thine happiness" (6). Quintessentially, we know the nightingale's song truly only when we are aware that we cannot keep it for long. It is, at heart, "plaintive" (75), that is, sorrowful.
For this reason, Keats echoes Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" in the last stanza. Although their ways to beauty are different, their experiences are one.
1My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
2 My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
3Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
4 One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
5'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
6 But being too happy in thine happiness,--
7 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
8 In some melodious plot
9 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
10 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
11O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
12 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
13Tasting of Flora and the country green,
14 Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
15O for a beaker full of the warm South,
16 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
17 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
18 And purple-stained mouth;
19 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
20 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
21Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
22 What thou among the leaves hast never known,
23The weariness, the fever, and the fret
24 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
25Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
26 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
27 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
28 And leaden-eyed despairs,
29 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
30 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
31Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
32 Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
33But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
34 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
35Already with thee! tender is the night,
36 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
37 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
38 But here there is no light,
39 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
40 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
41I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
42 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
43But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
44 Wherewith the seasonable month endows
45The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
46 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
47 Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
48 And mid-May's eldest child,
49 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
50 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
51Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
52 I have been half in love with easeful Death,
53Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
54 To take into the air my quiet breath;
55 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
56 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
57 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
58 In such an ecstasy!
59 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
60 To thy high requiem become a sod.
61Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
62 No hungry generations tread thee down;
63The voice I hear this passing night was heard
64 In ancient days by emperor and clown:
65Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
66 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
67 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
68 The same that oft-times hath
69 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
70 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
71Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
72 To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
73Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
74 As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
75Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
76 Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
77 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
78 In the next valley-glades:
79 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
80 Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?
Notes
2] hemlock: a poisonous plant which produces death by paralysis.
4] Lethe: a river of the lower world from which the shades drank, and thus obtained forgetfulness of the past.
7] Dryad: a wood nymph.
9] beechen: of the beech tree.
11] draught: what can be swallowed in a single drink.
13] Flora: the goddess of flowers, here used for flowers themselves. Cf. Keats' letter to Fanny Keats ca. May 1, 1819: "O there is nothing like fine weather ... and, please heaven, a little claret-wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep -- with a few or a good many ratafia cakes -- a rocky basin to bathe in, a strawberry bed to say your prayers to Flora in" (Letters, II, 56).
14] Provençal song. In the early Middle Ages the poets of southern France, the troubadours of Provence, were particularly famous for their love lyrics.
15] warm South: a southern wine.
16] Hippocrene: a fountain on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, sacred to the Muses.
26] Tom Keats died of consumption on Dec. 1, 1818.
32] Bacchus and his pards: the Roman god of wine, whho traditionally is shown in a conveyance drawn by leopards.
33] viewless: invisible. This phrase appears in half a dozen poems from 1765 to Mary Robinson's "The Progress of Liberty" in 1806 (II, 426).
37] Fays: fairies.
43] embalmed: full of balms, or perfumes. Lines 43-49 appear to echo Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.249-52 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997):
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine ...
46] pastoral eglantine. Eglantine is properly the sweet-briar, though popularly applied to various varieties of the wild rose. "Pastoral" presumably because often referred to in pastoral poetry.
51] Darkling: in the dark; cf Milton, Paradise Lost, III, 38-40: "As the wakeful Bird/Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid/Tunes her nocturnal Note."
60] high requiem: a liturgical song for the repose of the dead.
67] alien corn: alien because Ruth was not an Israelite but a Moabitess, gleaning in the barley fields of Judah (Ruth 2:1-2).
Commentary by Ian Lancashire(2002/9/9)
Between the first three words of "Ode to a Nightingale," "My heart aches," and its last, "sleep," John Keats describes a brief personal escape from an existence whose suffering he can no longer endure. The "I" who speaks eight times in this perfect eight-stanza lyric is Keats himself, not a surrogate persona. Ambiguity, irony, and even implication have no place here, but biography does. Keats' letters show that he certainly believed the poet possessed "negative capability," the self-nullifying power to enter other things and speak as and for them. "Ode to a Nightingale" depicts one such experience. True enough, Keats leaves his "sole self" (72) to join with the nightingale in verse that briefly realizes, in human language, the ageless beauty of its unintelligible song. Yet it is Keats who does so, in May 1819, not the living reader, not some character in a dramatic monologue manipulated by a poet who stays outside his created world. During his training as a medical practitioner, Keats saw drugs like opium (3) and wine (11) deaden the pain of feverishly ill men, the aged shaking from palsy, and the consumptive young (23-26). His own brother Tom, dying of consumption at this time, lingers on in "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" (26).
Keats' friend Charles Brown recollected, 17 years later, how Keats wrote this ode.
In the spring of 1818 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his 'Ode to a Nightingale', a poem which has been the delight of every one.
The only surviving draft of the ode, in Keats' handwriting, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It appears on two half-sheets and has "an uncancelled rejected beginning ... and the first thirty lines written continuously without stanza divisions" (Stillinger 651). Perhaps this manuscript, which Keats gave to his friend J. H. Reynolds, represents a later stage of the poem than what Brown saw on four or five "scraps." Whatever the textual history may be (and we are unlikely to know much more), Brown recalls the earliest stage of composition. Keats took "his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree" near Brown's house and sat under it "for two or three hours," taking pleasure in the song of a nightingale that "had built her nest" there. Afterwards, Keats returned to the house with some "scraps" on which he had been writing the ode.
Keats did not record these few hours in "Ode to a Nightingale." In the poem, the bird sings "in some melodious plot / Of beechen green" (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is "night" or "midnight" (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33) and only returning to himself when his "fancy" fails, its spell broken by a word, "forlorn" (71-74). The morning in his chair under the plum-tree stimulated the experience described by the poem, in what we now call lucid (or wide-awake) dreaming. At poem's end, Keats recognizes this when he asks, "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / ... Do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). He has had a disorienting, transcendental experience. One moment, sightless in a pitch-black midnight, high among the leaves of a forest of trees, he was listening to the nightingale's "ecstasy"; and then suddenly he was back alone, if Brown remembers truly, under a plum-tree one morning near his house.
In retrospect, after the event, Keats describes his experience as a somatoform (bodily) dissociation, an out-of-body experience, or what parapsychologists term an OBE. Others might call it a "near-death" experience. During a critical illness, such as a heart attack, the self may appear to rise out of the dying body and to rush down a tunnel towards a light, only returning to the body when its trauma ceases. Both out-of-body and near-death experiences, available to a very large percentage of the population, are widely documented by those who had them and by other observers. A typical OBE begins when sensory input is disrupted, sometimes by drugs. The mind then feels itself float upwards out of the body to a height that has been termed "bird's-eye" or tree-high. Often the ascent may seem like travelling through a tunnel towards a bright light. Experiencing itself being divided into two, or having a dissociated double, the self may feel itself near death. Afterwards, when the mind returns to the body, the person recalls his experience, not as a dream during REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, but as vivid or wide-awake dreaming.
"Ode to a Nightingale" opens when Keats acknowledges feeling "a drowsy numbness" that he associates with having taken drugs like hemlock or opium, or with drinking from the classical river, Lethe, which makes humanity forget what it was like to have lived. Keats then wishes to drink deeply of red wine so that he could "fade away" (20-21), leaving the suffering world for the nightingale's joyful song. What transports him, however, is the imagination. Despite the physical brain, which "perplexes and retards" (34), his mind enables him to "fly" up to the nightingale in the trees. He imagines the moon's bright light blown through "winding mossy ways" (40) but arrives in utter darkness, lacking sight and smell. He imagines himself desiring death, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die" (55), and experiencing it, becoming "a sod" (60). Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word "forlorn," Keats comes "back" to his "sole self," that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced as, perhaps, "a waking dream" (79). Many facets of an OBE are here: drug-associated sensory deprivation, a flight upwards of a double mind through dark "ways" illuminated by a great light, the moon, a bird's-eye perspective among the tree-tops, a near-death experience, the descent of a double to its abandoned self, and a sense of having had a vivid dream.
Keats did not write "Ode to a Nightingale" as testimony about an "out-of-body experience"; it would not be recognized or named for more than a century. On the other hand, neither does Keats appear to invent this dissociative event or to copy it from other poets. Anyone can meditate, one fine, warm morning, about escaping from the harsh world of humanity into the countryside and its healing natural beauty. Samuel T. Coleridge did so in his lyric, "The Lime-tree Bower my Prison":
... Henceforth I shall know That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,No waste so vacant, but may well employEach faculty of sense, and keep the heartAwake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,That we may lift the soul, and contemplateWith lively joy the joys we cannot share.
Some readers believe that Keats drew from Coleridge here, but despite "lift[ing] the soul," opiate Coleridge remained fully possessed, in sunlight, of himself and his senses. Keats' last six lines owe much more to Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper." Wordsworth described the valley maiden singing, in a strange language as "No Nightingale did ever chaunt" (9), such "plaintive numbers" (18; cf. Keats' "plaintive anthem") that, once the speaker had climbed the hill, remained in his mind as "music ... / Long after it was heard no more" (31-32). As the reaper's song "could have no ending" (26), so the voice of Keats' nightingale was "immortal," heard in "ancient days" and Biblical history as in contemporary England. Both poets cluster "plaintive," unheard "music," "hill-side," and "valley" in the context of a nightingale's song, strong evidence for influence, but Wordsworth does not allude to any dissociative experience.
Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" springs from a poet's personal life-changing, mind-wrenching experience of a timeless paradise, a world "with no pain" (56). Only someone who has spent days tending the terminally ill can understand with what depth Keats longs for this respite. In the event's aftermath, he recreates the experience "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33), using all his craft's resources, but with little sensory recall. The "tender" night (35) and "embalmed darkness" (43) disable his sight and leave him guessing at fragrances. Simple words like "song," "voice," "anthem," and "music" only hint at the nightingale's soul-pouring "ecstasy" (58). He imitates it with astonishingly resonant lines like "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" (40), and "The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves" (50). For the rest, Keats must describe the bird-song "of summer" (10) by depicting what he knows, its hearers over the centuries. To recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering. Only by being in two worlds at once, the self below, its double above, can we know the song's essential beauty. Why else did the song that "found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth ... sick for home," leave her standing "in tears amid the alien corn" (65-67)? She was not, like Keats at the start, "too happy in thine happiness" (6). Quintessentially, we know the nightingale's song truly only when we are aware that we cannot keep it for long. It is, at heart, "plaintive" (75), that is, sorrowful.
For this reason, Keats echoes Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" in the last stanza. Although their ways to beauty are different, their experiences are one.
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