Between Mortal Pain and Immortal Song: Romantic Imagination and Deconstructive Ambivalence in Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Name of Author : Dr.P.Parthiban

Abstract: Keats Ode to a Nightingale presents a speaker who moves from heavy bodily pain toward an intense imaginative identification with a bird, and then back to doubt and solitude. The poem stages the desire to escape the weariness, the fever, and the fret of human life through immersion in the nightingales song, while at the same time revealing the limits of such escape. One strong line of interpretation situates the ode within Romantic expressive theory and Keats notion of Negative Capability, in which the poet accepts uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without rushing toward systematic explanation. Another line of approach, shaped by deconstructive thinking, attends to the poems internal conflicts, unstable temporal markers, and self questioning language, especially around the claims of immortality and the bell like force of the word forlorn. The following article brings these two approaches into conversation by reading the ode through Romantic theory, as described by M. H. Abrams, and through deconstructive reflections on language and temporality associated with Paul de Man. Critical insights from Richard Harter Fogle and Helen Vendler help anchor the readings in established Keats scholarship. The argument proposes that Keats’ ode keeps Romantic aspiration and deconstructive uncertainty together in a single lyric movement, without allowing either to cancel the other.

Keywords : Romanticism; Negative Capability; deconstruction; Romantic ideology; poetic voice

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