Ode To A Nightingale

 

“Ode to a Nightingale,” which Keats wrote in 1819, gets at the strange, uncanny effect that art (especially music or poetry) can have on us, deranging our senses and disordering our consciousness. 

This is how it starts:

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:

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness, —

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

What’s going on here? The song of the bird induces in the listener a pleasurable, painful, narcotic reverie. The full-throated music of the poem might have a similar effect on the reader. The cascading rhymes and trippy images conjure a kind of aesthetic rapture that’s not so different from falling in love.

With the poem or the poet? Is it always so easy to tell? Diane Seuss’s crush on the actual John Keats is a matter of poetic record. In another of her poems, the similarly titled “Romantic Poetry,” she writes about visiting the house in Rome where Keats died and making out with his death mask, imagining how “auspicious, / rare, lush, / bizarre, kinky, transcendent” it would be “to cradle him / in my arms.”

Keats isn’t the only romantic poet in “Romantic Poet.” The title fits Seuss too.

"Romantic Poet" by Diane Seuss

You would not have loved him,

my friend the scholar

decried. He brushed his teeth,

if at all, with salt. He lied,

and rarely washed

his hair. Wiped his ass

with leaves or with his hand.

The top of his head would have barely

reached your tits. His pits

reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

One thing poets do — part of the romance of their craft — is to spin the wretchedness and tedium of ordinary life into the shimmering gold of art.

Ten of this poem’s 11 lines — the scholar’s part — amount to a catalog of ugliness. The language is correspondingly blunt and profane: unromantic, prosaic, crude.

Or at least it seems that way. The romantic poetry of this poem sneaks up on you. Its music is subtle, but unmistakable. Rhymes, rather than hanging at the end of lines like ornaments on a tree, are clumped together and scattered, as if they’d been spilled.

The rhymes and near rhymes make a jagged scheme that is all the more beguiling for its asymmetry. When you read the poem aloud, you hear its jumpy, syncopated rhythm.

It resolves into a tidy, clever pair of end-rhymed lines, a mic drop proclaiming the supremacy of poetry over grubby, fact-based scholarship. Maybe he smelled, but the dude could write. And so can Diane Seuss.

This is a perfectly witty, wittily imperfect poem.

It’s more than that, though. Note that in the last line, “the nightingale” is uncapitalized, and unadorned by quotation marks. This means that it’s not, strictly speaking, Keats’s “Ode” that Seuss is talking about.

She isn’t simply countering the scholar’s critique of Keats’s sloppy life by insisting on his immaculate art. This nightingale is a real bird, which is to say it’s the bird made real by Keats’s poem.

And therefore also Keats himself, made real in Seuss’s poem — a living, embodied presence she cannot help loving, in spite of whatever unpleasantness her scholar friend might reveal about him. That’s true romance.

- Author: A.O. Scott, The New York Times