"Tintern Abbey" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"
Michelle Smith
November 5, 2001
Critics such as Thora Balslev and Beth Lau have established that Keats read "Tintern Abbey" as well as other works by Wordsworth and that Keats was influenced by these readings. Keats' letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, dated 3 May 1818, provides further evidence regarding the point at which Keats read "Tintern Abbey;" this letter also gives us some insight into his thoughts on the poem. Thematically, "Tintern Abbey" and "Ode to a Nightingale" share several characteristics: both works are concerned with nature and the ethereal, with the poet's self and thoughts processes, and with the possibilities for sustained happiness in life. These similarities are, quite possibly, unintentional on Keats' part. As Lau suggests, the parallels to be found between "Tintern Abbey" and "Ode to a Nightingale" "reflect not his recent reading of Wordsworth, but Keats' entire past reading digested and incorporated into his own thoughts and feelings" (28). At the same time, Keats' poem takes a relatively antithetical position to the concerns Wordsworth addresses in "Tintern Abbey." Wordsworth finds a sustaining joy in nature that revitalizes him; he goes on to articulate this feeling through intellectual reflection on his experience, while Keats finds himself forlorn and alienated from the happiness of the nightingale, leading him to question the nature of both experience and consciousness.
Wordsworth conveys a sense of tranquil joy tempered with reason in "Tintern
Abbey." In describing the Wye Valley and expressing the joy it inspires, he
simultaneously formulates a hypothesis about his relationship to nature and
reflects upon the purpose that nature has in one's life. This mental process
begins with Wordsworth's comparison of his 
"coarser pleasures of [his] boyish days / And their glad animal movements"
(74-75). This passage speaks to Wordsworth's childhood as well as his first
visit to the Wye Valley in 1973. In comparison to these memories, Wordsworth
identifies an
"abundant recompense" (89) of a more thoughtful approach to nature that, as
he reflects on the present moment, he acknowledges that age and experience
have brought him. The need for this approach is partly inspired by Wordsworth's
"sad perplexity" (61) at both
"the fever of the world" (54) and the manner in which his memory of the Wye
Valley has faded over time. As he feels his sadness alleviated by his interaction
with nature and her beautiful forms, he feels a joy that leads to
"elevated thoughts" (96), and further senses a spirit that
"impels / All thinking things, all objects of thought" (101-2). The spirit
with which Wordsworth connects is named as the
"anchor of his purest thoughts" (110), the essence of his morality. The presence
he senses is, then, closely associated the effects of thought and contemplative
insight; nature's purpose is identified in "Tintern Abbey" as the ability
to ease sorrow and inspire moral feeling. In this way, Wordsworth distills
a sensory and emotional experience into and intellectual idea about the universe
and his relationship with it.
In the 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds mentioned earlier, Keats records
his thoughts on "Tintern Abbey." He calls Wordsworth "a genius and superior
to us, insofar as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed light on
them" (Wu 1022). In this instance, Keats shares his appreciation of Wordsworth's
ability to derive a meaning from sensory experience, yet Duncan Wu points
out that Keats "was suspicious of Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime' -- the
tendency of Wordsworth to focus his attention on his own imaginative processes"
(1011). In reflecting on the effect that the Wye Valley has on his state of
mind, Wordsworth privileges his own consciousness and his ability to think.
Keats was not a proponent of this approach to creativity. In contrast, "Ode
to a Nightingale" denies the
"Abundant recompense" (89) of aging mentioned in Wordsworth's poem.
Rather, Keats contemplates "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies, / Where but to think is to be full of sorrow" (26-27). Aging and the
contemplation it might entail is treated as a source of suffering.
Further to this, Keats' treatment of his own consciousness is markedly different from the "egotistical sublime." Throughout "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats treats his consciousness as an obstacle; if he could abandon it, he would do so because only in such abandonment would he be free to merge with the beauty and happiness at which the nightingale's song hints. The poem opens with the lines "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk" (1-4). In this complex passage on the sense, Keats can be read as invoking a forgetting of the self. The word "sense," which can be interpreted as reason or perception or both, is made numb. This opens up the space for Keats' imaginative response to the nightingale's song, part of which is the desire to:
fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards (30-35).
Not only does this passage express the interference of the brain with the reception of beauty and the otherworldly connection one could make through beauty, it also suggests a freedom from the self that would make it possible to become one with the nightingale's happiness. Keats also refers to the "weariness, the fever, and the fret" (23) that the bird has never known. As the bird lacks the self-conscious ability to contemplate its situation, Keats is further setting up the idea that one's self-awareness and the awareness of others' problems makes it difficult to feel the happiness that the nightingale knows. At the end of the Ode, Keats returns to his own self. This return is alienating and saddening. In his words, he is "Forlorn! The very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" (70-71). The final lines of the poem continue a sense of dissolution: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music -- do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). Rather than arriving at a conclusion about his experience, Keats is not sure if he has even had an experience or, given the connection that he makes in some of his other writings between sleep, dreams, and imagination, if he has imagined the song. The uncertainty of the closing lines illustrates Keats' theory of negative capability, set out in a letter to his brothers, George and Tom, in 1817. Negative capability is defined as "a man [being] capable of uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (Wu 1019). In "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats chooses to treat his experience, if it was one, as ultimately mysterious and separate from his consciousness, making the scope of the poem divergent from Wordsworth's reflections on nature.
In "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth formulates the idea that
"A motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking thing, all objects of all
thought / And rolls through all things" (101-104). His connection to this
spirit is threefold: it is made through his sense-perceptions, through his
intellectual contemplation, and through his emotions. Each of these aspects
of Wordsworth's self work together to create a unity within his subjectivity.
In addition, perception, thought, and feeling all lead him to the same recognition
that nature, joy, and spirit form are
"The guide, the guardian of [his] heart, and soul / Of all [his] moral being"
(111-112). Wordsworth's internal unity works in conjunction with his sense
of unity with nature and the spirit with which he communes through contemplating
the landscape. In addition, Wordsworth has a close bond with Dorothy; he can
share this experience as it happens and he can share memory of it in the future
with her. Through his sister, Wordsworth is able to connect with a fellow
human being as well as the natural and the spiritual. On several levels, Wordsworth
feels that he is a part of something greater than he is, which creates a sense
of wholeness that Keats does not possess.
For Keats, joy and alienation from it coexist in the same instant. If a spiritual essence is conveyed through the nightingale's song, Keats cannot truly grasp it. Instead, he expresses the distance he feels from the nightingale's airy world with the words:
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways (37-40).
While this passage suggests a deep connection between man and nature, the metaphors of "light" in the "verduous glooms" and of "breezes blown" also suggests that one's full immersion in this connection is fleeting. In conjunction with the hint of Keats' impending separation from nature, a disunity within Keats' sense of self is also suggested. Emotionally, Keats moves from such disparate states as numbness to near-ecstasy to near-despair over the course of the poem. Also, there is tension between his attempt to experience the bird's song intensely and his feeling of being "half in love with easeful death," death being a state that would abrogate intense feeling. Finally, Keats finds himself utterly alone as the nightingale's song fades. Unlike Wordsworth, Keats does not share his musings with anyone else, adding to the feeling of isolation or dissolution present in the poem.
Another significant difference between "Tintern Abbey" and "Ode to a Nightingale"
is the fact that Wordsworth arrives at a sense of renewal through his visit
to the Wye valley; he hopes that in his
"present pleasure . . . there is life and food / for future years" (64-66),
as it has been his previous experience that his memory of the Wye Valley gave
him
"tranquil restoration" (31)
"in hours of weariness" (28). In his treatment of time, Wordsworth merges
his present joy with both his past and his hopes for the future, creating
a continuity that gives him peace of mind.
Keats, in contrast, expresses no such continuity. He is preoccupied with death throughout the Ode. He states that:
Now more than ever it seems rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy! (50-58)
Unlike Wordsworth, Keats suggests that it is better to cease living in the happiness of the present moment rather than maintain that moment in memory. In a similar vein, Keats says that the joy he hears in the song is eternal, yet he is fully aware of the fact that his experience of it is not. Keats' awareness of the disparity between the nature of happiness as eternal and the nature of man's experience as finite "throws into relief the poet's attempt at arresting the brief moment by intense participation in its life" (Balslev 45). Unlike Wordsworth, Keats does not attempt to conjoin past, present, and future.
The transient nature of life is conveyed through Keats' focus on sound rather than visual imagery in the poem. The primarily visual imagery of "Tintern Abbey" lends itself to a feeling of permanency or the idea that landscape, unlike memory, does not fade away. As sound only exists in the same instant that it begins to fade and vanish, Keats' concentration on sound is a reflection of his feeling that happiness is fleeting. As he puts it:
Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow (29-30).
As he is called back to himself at the end of the poem, Keats can no longer hear the nightingale's song. Either she has departed, or his sudden recognition that he cannot follow her in her happiness, ends his reverie. The effect is the same: happiness is transient and unattainable, making one's brief encounter with it inevitably sorrowful.
"Tintern Abbey" and "Ode to a Nightingale" are two works that are often treated as canonical representatives of the age of Romanticism. As such, they have many characteristics in common, yet the ideas that each work conveys several key differences between each poet's treatment of joy, consciousness, and participation in life.
Works Cited
Balslev, Thora. Keats and Wordsworth: A Comparative Study. Munksgaard: Scandinavian University Books, 1962.
Keats, John. "Letter to George and Tom Keats, 1817." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 1019-1020.
Keats, John. "Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 Feb. 1818." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 1020-1021.
Keats, John. "Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 1021-1022.
Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 1058-1060.
Lau, Beth. Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 265-269.
Wu, Duncan. "Introduction to John Keats." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 1008-1011.