John Keats as an Escapist:

In most of John Keat's Odes there is a tension between the ideal world which is created by the poet's imagination and the world of reality in which the poet actually lives. The real world is full of sorrow, suffering, frustration and pain. Moreover it is a world of change where everything is transitory and short lived-beauty, love and youth everything suffers from destruction and decay. But the poet can create with the help of his imagination a new ideal world where everything is beautiful and permanent. Being torn up with sorrow and suffering, Keats wants to have rest in the world of imagination, beauty and perfection. (For this — he is often termed as an escapist. An escapist is that kind of person who tries to avoid the hard realities of life and wants to live in an imaginary world) but his realization of the fact that life is as it is helps him to come back to the reality.

Ode to a Nightingale shows very clearly the conflict between the happiness and immortality of the bird and the misery and mortality of human life. The poem starts with a description of the effect of the song of the Nightingale on the body and soul of the poet. The song of the Nightingale seems to him to be a symbol of everlasting joy. The world of Nightingale is the ideal to him. But he is dissatisfied with the real world. The weariness, the fever and the fret of the world of reality make him feel unhappy. He wants to fade away and to dissolve from the world of reality:

"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."

With the help of imagination Keats wants to escape to the dream forest of the Nightingale. In his imaginative forest he finds all the sensual enjoyments of his life. In the darkness of the forest he is surrounded by all the pleasures that he would like to have in the ideal world. There are flowers and fragrance everywhere and the summer season of woodland takes him to the extremity of joy of living. But they also remind him of death:

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die. To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul a broad

The association ^of ideas leads the poet now to think of immortality. He contrasts his mortality with the permanence of the Nightingale. It seems that there is a fallacy in Keats's reasoning-a Nightingale is as mortal as a human being. But what Keats wants to mean is that though a single Nightingale dies, the speeches is undying. The voice of the Nightingale that the poet hears today was heard in the ancient time by Emperors and clowns. It was also heard in the fairyland where-

"Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

The word "forlorn" brings the poet back from the ideal world to the world of reality and he finds himself again in this real world. The world of imagination can shelter us for a short time, but it cannot give us the solution of the reality of life, so in this poem we find a dynamic tension between the ideal world represented by the bird and the actual world of mankind which is full of sorrow.

The above discussion shows that John Keats is not totally lost in the world of beauty and imagination. So Keats was not an escapist from life as he is sometimes supposed. The strain and stress of practical life makes him fly to the world of imagination for the time beings but he thinks of the short coming of the imaginary world and finally accepts life as it is.