's wish for a draught of wine, to help him towards spiritual
commune with the nightingale. Some exquisite phrases in this passage
have endeared it to all readers of Keats; yet I cannot but regard it as
very foreign to the main subject-matter. Surely nobody wants wine as a
preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music, whether in a literal or
in a fanciful relation. Taken in detail, to call wine "the true, the
blushful Hippocrene"--the veritable fount of poetic inspiration--seems
both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase "with beaded bubbles winking
at the brim" is (though picturesque) trivial, in the same way as much of
Keats's earlier work. Far worse is the succeeding image, "Not charioted
by Bacchus and his pards"--_i.e._, not under the inspiration of wine:
the poet will fly to the nightingale, but not in a leopard-drawn
chariot. Further on, as if we had not already had enough of wine and its
associations, the coming musk-rose is described as "full of dewy
wine"--an expression of very dubious appositeness: and the like may be
said of "become a sod," in the sense of "become a corpse--earth to
earth." The renowned address--

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down,"

seems almost outside the region of criticism. Still, it is a palpable
fact that this address, according to its place in the context, is a
logical solecism. While "Youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies,"
while the poet would "become a sod" to the requiem sung by the
nightingale, the nightingale itself is pronounced immortal. But this
antithesis cannot stand the test of a moment's reflection. Man, as a
race, is as deathless, as superior to the tramp of hungry generations,
as is the nightingale as a race: while the nightingale as an individual
bird has a life not less fleeting, still more fleeting, than a man as an
individual. We have now arrived at the last stanza of the ode. Here the
term "deceiving elf," applied to "the fancy," sounds rather petty, and
in the nature of a make-rhyme: but this may possibly be a prejudice.

Having thus--in the interest of my reader as a critical appraiser of
poetry--burned my fingers a little at the clear and perennial flame of
the "Ode to a Nightingale," I shall quit that superb composition, and
the whole quintett of odes, and shall proceed to other phases of my
subject. The "Ode to Indolence," and the fragment of an "Ode to Maia,"
need not detain us; the former, ho