keats as an escapist,

The word escapist is often entitled to the name of Keats because of his escaping tendency (from the real world to an imaginative world). Having been experienced from the bitter realities of his life, wherever he sees some beautiful pictures depicted on an ‘Urn’ or hears the song of a nightingale, he tries to dip into or to fly to an ideal world of happiness, beauty, music and imagination (through his ‘viewless wings of Poesy’), forgetting his reality in the world. But this little moment of pure happiness does not last long; he is to come back to this world again. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an excellent example of Keats’ escapism in his poetry.

Escape means to run, to avoid and to flee. As a literary term escape means writing about

things which are imaginary, having nothing do with the realities of life, which are

pleasant, having very little of the bitterness of real life.

Escapism is a special characteristic of romantic poetry. Now term romantic is not easy to

define, yet we can say that poetry which is the result of imagination is called romantic

poetry. This kind of poetry generally does not deal what is happening with human beings

as they living their life on this earth surrounded by different problems. Rather it seeks to

present human beings in a sort of make belief work-a world which do not exist.

As I said that escapism is a very dominant trait of romantic poetry, we have to see why

it confined to the romantic poetry and why it does not appear in classical poetry. In order

to understand this we will have to socioeconomic changes which were taking place in

English society at the time when romantic poetry was being written.

Escapism, which we find in romantic poetry, and industrialization and urbanization have

vital relation. Both industrialization and urbanization affected the sensibility of the poets

because of their special demands and those who could not fulfill the demands of the time

found it convenient to avoid those demands and live in a world without those demands.

Of course this world was not present. They had no option but to dream of that world.

Keats was one of the romantics and he felt what all romantics felt. Yet Keats was

different from other romantics because of his unique experiences of life.

His failure in love, his failure to write poetry good enough to satisfy the critics of his

time, his experience of death of his brother and his fear of death lend some special

escapist traits to his poetry. Nowhere in his poetry has he discussed the social, moral

and political issues of his time. Again and again he seems to escape or attempting to

escape in a world which is not the real day to day world of his time. Rather and ideal

world he creates with his powerful imagination.

Keats’ escape is from his real life to an imaginative and ideal world. But why is this escape from the inevitable place? – Because, according to Keats, reality of human life is full of suffering, pain etc; this world is not a desirable place. He has summed up his individual as well as common sufferings of life in the following lines of stanza 11 of the poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ –

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs

Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,

Or, new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Here he remembers the bitterness of his own life and reminds us that of our life. He considers that life is full of misery, sorrow and disease, of tiring struggle, of restlessness and pain; that life is nothing but a series of groans and complaints; that old men’s life is helpless and pitiful, having lost the control over their limbs and their hair being grey; that even the young are dying of terrible disease- that is, the poet here thinks of his young brother Tom, dying just before his eyes; that for thoughtful or sensitive but thoughtless persons, there is no happiness in reality; that beauty is short-lived; that one’s love for another does not last long – that is, he remembers his beloved Fanny Browne’s rejection of his young love and turning to others. This is the view of reality by Keats.     

When does Keats think of escaping from the reality of his life? Is there any particular time? – Yes. Keats life-long creed is ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ (Endymion). So wherever he sees any beautiful picture or scenery or hears any attractive melody or song, he feels joy, and forgets his harsh reality, and becomes one with that, and thus he escapes. For examples, having seen a beautiful Urn inBritish Museum, he forgets his position, even he talks with the pictures depicted on the Urn, e.g. –

Ah, happy, happy boughs that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.

Again, having heard the song of a nightingale, his sense begins to loose in excessive joy as if he has drunk hemlock. As a result, he says,

            “One minute past, and lathe-wards had sunk.

Here lithe is a river of Greek mythology; he who drinks from it forgets all. So, the poet has forgotten all, having heard the song.

How does Keats escape from reality? What is his medium or transport? – Keats’ own word gives answer to these questions –

            “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards

But on the viewless wings of poesy.”

That is, his is not any transport of physical existence like Bacchus, the God of wine. Rather he has poetic imagination for this sake. It is more suitable to him than anything else.

Hearing the song of the nightingale which is singing, probably, away from him, Keats forgets his reality. Now, through his poetic imagination, he depicts in his mind the nightingale’s happy abode, its healing surroundings which have made him forget all pains of life. Now we can look at that imaginative world.

Keats imagines the happy nightingale and its happy surroundings in the following lines through excellent images and word selection –

“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.”

That is the nightingale, compared as a nymph, is singing, without hesitation, in such a plot which is full of melody, greenery and dreamy shadows and where summer is remaining.

Moreover, Keats longs for a draught of long-aged vintage, for a beaker of warm southern wine, compared with the foundation of the Muses, so the poet says,

‘That I might drink, and leave the world

            And with thee fade away into the unseen forest dim

 But he rejects this way of escaping.

Then, through ‘the viewless wings of Poesy’, ‘though the dull brain perplexes and retards’ his mind, he has already come, as if physically, to the imaginative world of the nightingale. He says –

            “Already with thee! Tender is the night,

            And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne

            Clustered around by all her story Fays.”

In this way, in stanza 5,6 & 7 of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats leads us to such a place where he feels the existence of various flowers in the dank night from their smells; where he feels death better than life, but again thinks that if he dies he will not be able to listen to the beautiful and permanent song.

In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats, seeing the pictures on the Urn, dissolves in them through imagination, as if he is with them who seem to be alive.

But Keats’ world of imagination remains only a short while. When he thinks that the Urn and   the song of the nightingale will remain for ages but he will not, rather he is ‘forlorn’, he comes back to reality. He says in the last stanza of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ –

“Forlorn! The very would is like a bell

 To toll me back from thee to my sole self”.

That is the word ‘forlorn’ reminds his position in ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’, like the ‘alarm clocks’ of our mobile phones turn us from our dreamy sleep to the world of bitter reality. He calls ‘fancy’, ‘deceiving elf’. Moreover, “the music which almost succeeded in making him ‘fade far away’ now itself fades and in a moment is ‘buried deep in the next valley-glades’(lines:77-78)” (Clearth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren)

Therefore, we see that Keats is so disgusted with the real life that he always tries to escape from it. C.D. Thorpe says –

“The moment of insight with him was a moment of complete emotion,           absorption in which the poet lost even his own senses of being in intense pursuit of his imaginative query. The extreme of this activity was a flight, far away from the fret and fever of life into a realm of imaginative delight into a region of abstractions of the poets own creations.”(The Mind of John Keats)

Even he has no revolutionary concerns of the age in his poems, while other Romantic poets, e.g. Wordsworth, Shelley have eagerly greeted the revolutions and Byron deals with social problems. Though Keats’ escapism is individual, it sometimes becomes common, when we seek a suitable place to relieve from the bitterness of our life.