Birds are well represented in Romantic poetry. Their gifts of flight and song have been used as metaphorical examinations of the poets’ dreams and desires. They have been imagined as creatures close to spiritual perfection as any found on earth. One can imagine that birds indeed might strike a fantastic and otherworldly presence to Romantic poets.
Three poems by three different poets revolve around the poetic ideal that birds represented in Romanticism: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To the Skylark, and John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. While there are some overarching themes about birds expressed by each poet, particularly in his view of the poetic ideal and how birds represent it, there are differences that each poet brings to his vision.
In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross, whose appearance covers only five stanzas, represents order in the onslaught of chaos. Its appearance comes at a point when the mariner and his crewmates are stranded in the icy waters. Universally acknowledged among mariners as a good omen, the bird offers hope to the sailors, especially after a “good south wind” blows through and sends the ship’s sails on its due course. The sailors’ fortune end when the ancient Mariner shoots the albatross with his cross-bow. Coleridge presents the bird’s role as a figure of order by creating an environment that is stark and barren in its chaotic representation:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound! (59-62)
The total barrenness of the environment, its blotting out of both men and beasts, reveals the hopelessness of the situation. When the albatross appears through the fog, the ice splits “with a thunder-fit” (69), suggesting its control over the uncontrollable and dangerous aspects of nature. Clearly, the albatross is a powerful bird whose good omen is a deliverance for the men. While the good fortune continues briefly after the bird’s killing, the crewmates’ fortune sours. The breezes die down, the sails drop, and, in the middle of the sea, under the blistering sun and with no food left, the crewmates slowly starve to death. The albatross’s death brings chaos back to the ship.
The deliverance from chaos to order, or from sin to the redemption which the albatross represents, is impeded by the narrator’s act. The ancient Mariner, in shooting the albatross, is described in exact contrast to the bird. While the crewman hail it as a “Christian soul” (65), the Mariner is immediately defined as being “plagued” by “fiends” (80). Here, Coleridge foreshadows the poem’s spiritual concerns. The Mariner is a soul wracked with demons or “fiends” and therefore, his killing the albatross, becomes an act of wish-fulfillment. The price for his sinful act is death. The crewman drop dead in their spots, leaving only the Mariner to live, carrying the dead albatross around his neck as a scarlet letter of his sins.
Shelley’s To a Sky-Lark is a poem about spiritual and Romantic perfections. Like Coleridge’s albatross, the sky-lark represents spiritual attainment. Yet it also offers aspiring ideals to the poet. The sky-lark, which sings only in flight, is the perfect metaphor for a poet who wishes to attain the greatest heights of his craft. Shelley describes the sky-lark as “…a Poet hidden/In the light of thought,” (36-37). Its song which embodies “shrill delight” and “sweetest songs” are poetic inspirations of “unpremediated art” (5). What Shelley sees in the sky-lark are the unsubconscious skills to create its art through happiness and joy. Its gift of flight enables it to soar nearest to Heaven, which for many Romantic poets is the genesis of all spiritually inspired art.
Like Coleridge, Shelley sees the sky-lark as an embodiment of order, or in this case, purest joy. Shelley points this out when he compares the songs poets create to the sky-lark’s and finds it wanting, “[a] thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want” (70). What prevent poets from attaining the purest joy that the sky-lark’s song creates is their knowledge of “love’s sad satiety” (80). Shelley notes that poets will never attain the sky-lark’s “unpremeditated art” as long as it is aware of hate, scorn, pride, and fear.
The chaotic disorder that these qualities bring to the world create an art where the “sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thoughts” (90). Like Blake and Wordsworth before them, Shelley also believed that thinking inhibited one’s ability to, like the sky-lark, soar to the heavens on its purest songs.
Unlike Coleridge, who views the albatross as a metaphorical vehicle for spiritual attainment, Shelley’s sky-lark is a poet which inspires both envy and awe in Shelley. Realizing he can never attain the same poetic perfection of the sky-lark, he entreats it to teach him its secrets. Shelley’s interests seem to lie not so much in a desire to be spiritually pure, as Coleridge suggests in Ancient Mariner, but to be the superior poet for it – “[f]rom my lips would flow/The world should listen then-as I am listening now” (104-105). One cannot help but view this entreaty as self-serving. His desire is toward fame, not necessarily spiritual purity.
Keats’ nightingale represents for him a release. Happiness, which is the purest release of emotional attainment to the poet, is the ideal state. The nightingale’s song allows the poet to go down an excursion, leaving the physical realities of the world, including his own body/Self, and emerge into the poetic imagination. The nightingale, whose happy song is the conduit for this excursion, is freed from the trappings of identity and thought. As Shelley notes in Sky-lark, the nightingale’s poetic sensibilities are implicit in its ability to sing unpremediatedly. Keats, on the other hand, can never “fade away into the forest dim” (20) as simply for he has known “[t]he weariness, the fever, and the fret” (23) which, as Shelley also notes, only brings the poet “sorrow” (27). Thinking, as with all the Romantics, is considered an enemy to the imagination.
Throughout the poem, Keats seeks ways in which to reach the plateau of happiness he imagines the nightingale has attained. Wine offers a half-hearted attempt. It is only on the “viewless wings of Poesy” (33) that the poet can attain a level of contentedness equal to the nightingale’s song. As the poet drifts down into his imagination, he is one with the nightingale in its joy – “[A]lready with thee!” (35). The imagination, as Blake believed, offers Keats a release from the material world. For Keats, this release also means death. The nightingale’s “ecstasy” promises a “rich” death (55-58). Unlike Keats, the bird is immortal, yet it is this very rumination of immortality that breaks the veil of his imaginative revelry and brings him back “to [my] sole self!” (72). The word forlorn, with its brooding and melancholy qualities, is the heavy intrusion of the material world into Keats’ imagination.
Through Death, Keats could lose himself, his identity, and become one with the nightingale in its happiness, but thoughts of the bird’s immortality only serve to remind him of differences. Keats is mortal, and therefore is not like the nightingale. This difference brings the Self back to his self. The imagination, which offered Blake the means to see the Infinite in all things, is a “deceiving elf” to Keats, one which only tricks him into believing a reconciliation with the nightingale is possible. Still, happiness as represented by the nightingale is the ideal, one that, as Keats notes, is still “[I]n the next valley-glades” (79) offering the possibility of a release from the Self.
Of the three poems, Keats’ strikes a more personal and desperate note. While death and immortality is a preoccupation of all three poets examined here, Keats seems the only one in which this preoccupation is more than a poetic conceit. While, like Shelley, Keats’ desires to be a superior poet informed much of his creative output, Ode to a Nightingale, unlike many of his poems which were about poetry, speaks directly to the poet’s heart. Coleridge’s poem concerns itself with the moral and ethical values toward nature. Morality creates order and sin strikes a path toward chaos.
Though heavily informed by Christian beliefs of sin, redemption, and superstition, the poem also cuts a complex figure in how those values are expressed in the actions of its protagonist. The ambiguity which ends the poem, where again, the word “forlorn” makes an appearance, connoting a melancholic note in the Mariner’s experience, suggests that the Mariner, though wiser from his experience, is nonetheless traumatized by it.
As Coleridge and Shelley would suggest, the Mariner is never able to fully achieve happiness for he has already witnessed the “sorrow” of the world. Shelley, as noted before, sees not necessarily a spirituality which promises a “forgetfulness” of mortal concerns, as Keats’ poems pursue, or redemption, which is Coleridge’s concern in the Ancient Mariner, but a means in which he the poet can achieve the perfection of the sky-lark’s song. The sky-lark, the albatross, and the nightingale, all different species of bird, represent something infinitesimal to the Romantic poets. Like spiritual gurus, they offer the Romantics a chance to glimpse at happiness that provide angst for Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in their awareness of its existence and the near impossibility of its fulfillment.
Reference:
- Stillinger, Jack and Deirdre Shauna Lynch. Northon Anthology of English Literature: Volume D: The Romantic Period. W.W. Norton & Company: New York. 2006
