Again Returns the Blushful May and Gives

In the woods in May 1819, a nightingale sings of summer and her notes fall on the ears of the poet John Keats. He uses the metaphor of the audible but invisible bird, singing to the open skies, as a metaphor for the final bloodshed of all. The poem opens with the poet feeling numb, every bit though drugged.

Joseph Severn's depiction of Keats
listening to the nightingale (c. 1845)

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate

and closes with the nightingale flight abroad and the poet questioning what he may or may not accept heard.

Adieu! good day! thy plaintive canticle fades
Past the near meadows, over the all the same stream,
Up the hill-side; and at present 'tis buried deep
In the side by side valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or slumber?

According to a friend, Keats wrote the poem in a single twenty-four hours, in about ii to 3 hours, on Hampstead Heath, either behind the Spaniards Inn or at his firm shut by. In the poem, Keats rejects the pursuit of pleasure he had advocated in earlier poems and explores idea of nature, transience, and, ultimately mortality. The verse form is long, fourscore lines in 8 stanzas, but remains ane of the about popular poems of Keats' small output. (The total poem is at the bottom of this article).

Hamilton Harty

Keats died of tuberculosis at age 25, having published merely over 50 poems, but the Ode to the Nightingale and its preoccupation with his own death and the nightingale's immortality through its song poses an essential Romantic quandary.

Over the space of a century, iv different composers took up the verse form, each finding something unique in its lines.

In 1901, composer Hamilton Harty moved to London and made his manner as an accompanist. One of the singers he met was Agnes Nicholls, considered one of the leading young sopranos of her solar day. They married in 1904 and in 1907, wrote Ode to the Nightingale. Agnes was its dedicatee and the soloist at its premiere at the Cardiff Festival in 1907. The singer's soaring vocal phrases are matched by the rich orchestral writing.

Hamilton Harty: Ode to a Nightingale (Heather Harper, soprano; Ulster Orchestra; Bryden Thomson, cond.)

Valentin Silvestrov

Lithuanian composer Valentin Silvestrov fix the poem in 1985 in Russian (translation by Yevgenij Vitkovskij). It is seen as 'a musical reflection of Keats's evocation of that water that we are unable to hold in our hands for more than a few seconds—our life.' Supporting the song are a unique ensemble of pianoforte, harp, vibraphone and wind instruments that evoke the unique song of the bird.

Valentin Silvestrov: Ode to a Nightingale (Inna Galatenko, soprano; Oleg Bezborodko, piano; Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra; Christopher Lyndon-Gee, cond.)

Geoffrey Gordon

In 2015, American composer Geoffrey Gordon took up the call of Keats in a work for chorus and cello. He says, 'the work vocalises a rapt, suspended country between the reality of death and Arcadian bliss…'. His opening uses dissonances to convey Keats' languid land at the showtime of the poem. The cello offers an interesting weigh to the fluidity of the voices, sometimes echoing them in its entrances and then spinning away.

Geoffrey Gordon: Ode to a Nightingale: My heart aches… – (Toke Møldrup, cello; Mogens Dahl Bedchamber Choir; Mogens Dahl, cond.)

By the end, the emotions are higher every bit he brings himself back from the world of the nightingale to his ain questions about his land: awake or sleep.

Geoffrey Gordon: Ode to a Nightingale: Forlorn… (Toke Møldrup, cello; Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir; Mogens Dahl, cond.)

Will Todd

The English composer Will Todd uses Keats' romantic imagery and emotion to delve into the death, fantasy, dear, hope and despair of the verse form. He opens with a recording of the nightingale itself, singing its sweet song in the summer.

By verse 8, Todd has built to an incredible tiptop of emotion, underscored by the timpani beats. Information technology closes with the question "Do I wake or sleep?" in an almost dreamlike way and the nightingale returns.

Will Todd: Choral Symphony No. iv, "Ode to a Nightingale": Start (Hertfordshire Chorus; BBC Concert Orchestra; David Temple, cond.)

Will Todd: Choral Symphony No. 4, "Ode to a Nightingale": Poetry 8 (Hertfordshire Chorus; BBC Concert Orchestra; David Temple, cond.)

These highly imaginative settings of ane of the most important of the Romantic poems past one of the most important, if brusque-lived Romantic poets leaves us room to remember farther most these questions of life, decease and immortality.

Ode to a Nightingale
By John Keats

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, every bit though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some tiresome opiate to the drains
One infinitesimal by, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But existence too happy in thine happiness,—
That chiliad, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summertime in total-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved world,
Tasting of Flora and the country light-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker total of the warm Due south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbling winking at the brim,
And majestic-stained rima oris;
That I might drink, and get out the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What k among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Hither, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, final grayness hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where simply to think is to exist full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot go on her lustrous optics,
Or new Beloved pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Abroad! away! for I will fly to thee,
Non charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the tiresome brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the nighttime,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
Only here there is no light,
Save what from sky is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot run across what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
Simply, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable calendar month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd upward in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest kid,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy vino,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summertime eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been one-half in beloved with easeful Decease,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than always seems information technology rich to die,
To end upon the midnight with no hurting,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy loftier requiem become a sod.

One thousand wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee downwardly;
The phonation I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days past emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sorry middle of Ruth, when, sick for dwelling house,
She stood in tears among the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very discussion is like a bell
To price me back from thee to my sole self!
Bye! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to exercise, deceiving elf.
Adieu! farewell! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the nonetheless stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the side by side valley-glades:
Was information technology a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

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Source: https://interlude.hk/the-music-of-poetry-john-keats-ode-to-a-nightingale/

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