“ar ace 2d seven on ou seye are fant Reng 0 sen snes jo wrung og! HERES Oe “[eareip, pu ono, a sap 2 20 29) seu srr jo taney 6 sod, co Ke 6 pad 00 Op SAY HN PURE HT condumsse SuBuvyo asouy, “Kors ySommp aBauqo For these reasons, Keats’s life and poetry have been fused in the aginations of readers perhaps more than with any other poet. This is a particularly telling instance of our claim that the assumptions we bring to a poem subtiy shape our reading of it. For reasons that will emerge only in the course of this book, we want to discourage you ftom reading poems for biographical meaning — which is why we ascribe the Voice in this poem to a ‘poetic speaker’ rather than to Keats. However interesting Keats was as a human being, we want to encourage you to concentrate on reading his poetry rather than trying to recreate his thoughts and feelings. As TS. Eliot puts it: “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed ‘not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”* “Ode to a Nightingale’ invites us to read it as an intense and sincere expression of ‘experience - as the opening words of the: poem (My heart aches’) attest. This is reinforced by the speaker’s claim that his ‘pain’ arises not through ‘envy’ of the ingale’s ‘happy lot’ but through a profound empathy which he feels with the nightingale, In fact, the whole poem is driven by the speaker’s attempt to merge his consciousness with the nightingale. In the second stanza (poems are divided into ‘stanzas’ not ‘verses’) he apparently wishes for wine, on the assumption that it will enable him to join the nightingale. We learn in the third stanza why the speaker wants to ‘dissolve’ and to merge his consciousness with the bird. The real world, he is @ place “where men sit and hear each other groan’ (24). In the fourth stanza, he abandons the idea of wine (represented figuratively by Bacchus, the god of wine) in favour of poetry as a means of escaping this world and flying to the nightingale ngs of Poesy’. For one brief moment, the speaker apparently feels jced transported him from the human world to the realm of the ready with thee! tender isthe night’ (35). The speaker feels that this nightinghal se Mo and he is left alone, bewildered and mn is a paraphrase of the poem's ‘pl in effective way of framework upon beginning to analyze any poem because ‘which we can build a more precise anal also achieved is confirmation of the fa ‘our expectation that poetry records intense personal experience - though we are > Fees meat example of sch x reading, se Brin Stone (1990) The Posy of Kase “Talon an te Indsicual Tale fa HD: (198) Selected Prose. 26