The Poetic Beauty of "Intensity"

2124 Words9 Pages
n a letter to George and Thomas Keats, John Keats wrote: "The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth."(Walter Klaidjian, 170). In his view, the intensified quality of every art has a great power to embody its beauty. Most of the languages Keats used in his poems had the quality of intensified beauty to convey his ideas. At the beginning of the poem "Ode to A Nightingale", the poet wrote: "my heart aches", forming a kind of basic tone or general atmosphere of the whole poem. In order to illustrate the extent of that "ache", the poet used two similes, "as though of hemlock I had drunk/or emptied some dull opiate to the drains." The word "empty" showed the mood of despair in the heart, for it aches so much just like eating the entire opiate. These two similes served a good way to emphasize the feeling of ache, and just reading the two lines can bring any reader into a gloomy world. This was Keats’ way to express the intensified feeling of ache. However, with the continuing of the poem, it was showed that the reason of the aches of heart was not because of sadness or grief, but the happiness of the nightingale. In the poet’s eyes, the nightingale was like the "light-winged Dryad of the trees", and "singest of summer in full-throated ease." A "Dryad" was "a wood nymph or nymph of the trees. It was connected to a specific tree and died when the tree died." So here the nightingale was empowered by the poet to be a powerful and beautiful image, singing happily in the summer. "Full-throated ease" showed how happy the bird was. In this way the poet fully pictured the nightingale’s pure happiness through his language. It was the intensity of happiness. Thus the intensity of "ache" and the intensity of "happiness" connected together to form a higher level of
Open Document