Memories of a Cachique

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?

Through such melodious verses as these, Keats brings to light (and dramatizes) questions about the blur between what is "real" (what one senses as events that happen in the awake state) and what is part of the dream-world that we all know. In the verses above, he questions the observations he has just made about the curious "light-winged Dryad," the happy, singing nightingale that he is so fond of. It is mainly because of the beauty of its song, as well as the pastoral, mythical beauty it makes him think of, that makes him wonder about the experience so much. In addition, his hallucinatory state of mind, which he reflects upon, also makes him question the validity of his experience.

The questions and experience that Keats presents "Ode to a Nightingale" are questions that have been asked and situations that have been experienced for centuries. Is our world always what it seems: awake and alive with experience? Or is what we perceive as reality--our waking consciousness--really just part of our dreams--part of that altered state of consciousness known as sleep?

Interestingly enough, Keats compares the stage of transition of falling asleep to being on a substance, even to being poisoned: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains/One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk...(l.1-4). In the third line, one can see that he is comparing his foggy, forgetful state of mind (and consciousness) to being on opiates, drugs that are known to induce sleep and even produce hallucinations.

However, the second line gives a darker comparison: he feels as if he has drunk hemlock, a poisonous plant substance that is known to have killed Socrates in the ancient world. The awake-sleep transition, to Keats, felt like dying--crossing the line between life and death.

In connection to this idea, one must note that Keats mentions "Lethe" right after this particular comparison. "Lethe" refers to the river of forgetfulness (among the five rivers of Hades--the underworld) and as a river around the Cave of Sleep that induces drowsiness in Roman mythology. Clearly, there is not only one correct way to define "Lethe" as used in this poem. However, if the first definition is brought under consideration, the closeness between death and the state of altered consciousness (especially in terms of memory) is being highlighted to a great extent with these verses. The use of such mythological reference, in addition to the reference to hemlock (and even the opiates, since another thing that they induce is death, if taken in large enough quantities) shows that Keats indeed relates falling asleep and dying from the beginning, using this to frame his entire poem and to introduce such ideas about consciousness. The second also fits into the theme of drug-induced states of consciousness, but not necessarily the relationship between death and such states (although it may: during ancient times, as with the present day, sleep and death were closely related).

So why is this connection being made in the context of this poem? Keats hints at an answer: he mentions in the third stanza how the persona experiences sadness through experiencing sickness and watching others die and age throughout his present and past life. The only final escape there is is through death, which he mentions as being "half in love" with (because he would not be able to experience the nightingale's song again). However, through the song of the nightingale, the man finds relief. It is a song that takes him into a mythical dreamworld that seems to exist in his own mind: a temporary "death" that brings him away from the plights of the temporal world into a place of eternal beauty.