The Odes by John Keats

This escapist theme is then developed further. Drunkenness leads not just to energy and creativity but also to forgetfulness and, finally, oblivion – an impression given by the word “dissolve.” An explanation is now given for Keats’ aching numbness at the beginning of the poem: the world is a vale of tears, a place of seemingly endless human suffering (Keats’ brother Tom had died of tuberculosis the previous winter). In this depressed mood, beauty seems meaningless and even love transient. The lines, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/And leaden-eyed despairs,” return the reader to the heavy discomfort of the opening lines of the poem. However, there is a deep ambiguity about this longing to escape. The effect of “hemlock” or the “dull opiate” is to send the poet “Lethe-wards,” a coinage suggestive of amnesia at best, and death at worst (as Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, flows through the underworld). This “sinking” is something to be resisted, or at the least to be regarded as unpleasant. But the way of alcohol, although initially able to create the euphoria of the nightingale, leads to a more insidious temptation to oblivion – to “Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget.” The alternative to being physically and mentally enervate turns out to be no alternative at all.

The poem continues, therefore, with a rejection of inebriation (imagined as being carried off, powerless, in Bacchus’ chariot) and the more convincing alternative of imaginative creation. The poetic imagination is immediate – “Already with thee!” – though poetic expression involves the “pain” mentioned in Ode to Psyche – here, “the dull brain perplexes and retards.” The reference to his “dull brain” may simply be a reminder of his rather somnolent state of mind, or perhaps Keats is using “brain” as a way of referring to reason: for him, a secondary power of the mind, a tool of the creative imagination, but all the same necessary for the composition of something as potentially complex as a poem.
There follows an object lesson in imaginative power, as Keats, in darkness, recreates the world around him, allowing us to “see” what cannot be seen, smell what cannot be smelt. Here, the poetry itself demonstrates the essence Keats’ thought. However, something strange occurs in the imaginary time-frame of the poem. Losing himself in the world of imagination; flying on “the viewless wings of Poesy”; sharing the “ecstasy” of the nightingale “pouring forth [its] soul” leads him to actively desire death, which suddenly seems to him, as to Hamlet, “a consummation/ Devoutly to be wish’d” ( Hamlet III.i). This is a strange idea in itself, and it seems even stranger in a poem which began by evoking the unpleasantness of a pain-free death by hemlock or opium. Death as consummation, though is not an unfamiliar literary notion.