Ode to a Nightingale

I am not a huge fan of Keats and yet his poem of a man in a stupor is completely fascinating. God grants humans brief flashes of Reality in order to teach men to reach for Him. We are so bound by the common and the everyday, of the earth and earthly, that we begin to think there is a disconnect between our spritual nature and our earth-bound nature. When man disconnects from God the flashes of Reality seem less and less realistic and he falls into a stupor. His understanding is drenched in agonies because there can be no hope in this denial. Keats describes man as he goes from stage to stage in life looking for satisfaction. He first dabbles in the pleasure in being blantantly self-destructive. After which he gets comfortable in the lull of common pleasures. The nightingale's beautiful song is the first thing to call him outside of himself. The choice of the nightingale is rather funny because the nightingale is an image of damaged beauty from the myth of Philomel: it is an emblem of innocence and beauty ravished then unjustly silenced. Yet the beauty is turned into a nightingale and is granted the gift of song as a replacement of speech. The speaker in Keats's Ode falls in love but he is unused to loving. It's funny that all people desire love and yet we are all so very bad at it initially. There is an incredibly despairing line from the movie The Greatest Show on Earth (incidentally one of the worst movies ever made): "Every man kills the thing he loves." This is true and yet it is unfinished. Love is death, but as Christ proved, in death you discover Love. So this man, this incomplete man, more used to chaos than peace wants the joy he finds in the nightingale. Howevr, he cannot figure out how to love. He reacts with the desire to consume rather than cherish. And so he says to the bird "Away! away for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the wings of Poesy." He realizes that the courage in pursuit is the only way to find the nightingale. Yet when he shakes himself from his reverie -- startled by the everyday I would imagine -- he dismisses his former conclusions and promises. "Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades"and he thus abandons his nightingale. The poem ends with a slap in the face: "Do I wake or sleep?" and the man is left in confusion. There is no satisfaction in his refusal to pursue his dream and the nightingale is left in her silenced state. I tend to think that the bird is still in a state of happiness, but one that is not completely fulfilled. I think that had he followed the bird, both would have achieved a fuller happiness and perhaps the bird would have learned to speak again. Keats left this poem open-ended as a challenge, I think. All of us are born in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. It's fine to dream but the wish falls flat. To pursue the dream could echo in eternity.