Comparison: Ode to a Nightingale & Dover Beach

John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” were written at different times by very different men; yet their conclusions about the human condition are strikingly similar. A second generation Romantic, Keats’s language is lush and expressive, strongly focused on the poet as an individual; while Arnold, a Victorian in era and attitude, writes using simple language, and is focused on the world in a broader context. While Keats is a young man, struggling with the knowledge he is soon to die; Arnold is a man newly married, to all accounts healthy, and with a long life ahead. Yet despite their differences in era and age, both Keats and Arnold write with similarly dark emotional imagery, jarring emotional contrast, and a consistent exploration of the effects that the natural sounds around them have on their minds and emotions in order to demonstrate that suffering is as incomprehensible a part of the human experience as it is inevitable.

Both “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Dover Beach” include at least one emotionally dark image in every stanza; in “Ode to a Nightingale” there is frequently more than one. From beginning to end the reader faces physical darkness and decay, images of dark places and cherished bastions of imagination corrupted, with “shadows numberless” (Keats 9) and “forest[s] dim” (20); “[f]ast-fading violets” (47) and “faery lands forlorn” (70). Additionally, emotional suffering pervades the atmosphere of the poem from Keats’s allusion to Socrates’ death by hemlock in line 2, to his summary of the human experience in stanza three, an experience of “[t]he weariness, the fever, and the fret/Here, where men sit and hear each other groan” (23-24). Keats also makes it clear that the realm of the mind ...

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...ack, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls and Claire Waters. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007. 785. Print.

Arnold, Matthew. “The Study of Poetry.” Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. A. Dwight Culler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. 306. Print.

"forlorn, adj. and n.". The Oxford English Dictionary Online. November 2013. Oxford University Press. 17 November 2013. < http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/73413?redirectedFrom=forlorn#eid >.

Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume B. Ed. Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls and Claire Waters. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007. 441-42. Print.