the conflict between ideal and real in Keats of poem

 

Discuss Keats's creation of ideal world in his poems / Odes.

 

Or,

 

Discuss the conflict between ideal and real in Keats's poem?

 

Ans. Keats's poems are the direct outcome of the personal experiences of his life containing certain conflicts, struggles and tensions. The fundamental conflict was the choice between real life and ideal life, which he created to retreat into it from the complicated  reality. By means of his imagination Keats created a beauty intoxicated ideal world where he could find a sanctuary from the troubles of mundane life.

 

Keats believed man exits in an unrelieved world of pain, boredom and sensuality. The concept of life is most vividly portrayed in his greatest of odes "Ode to a Nightingale" where he exhibits the contrast between the ideal and the real. In the poem, the poet makes the nightingale a symbol of permanent beauty and manipulates it to contrast the ideal with the real. He is thinking of the discord, struggles and despair of the age in which he lived, and contrasts the chaos of men's actual life with the content and peace prevailing eternally in nature. His study of human affairs had convinced him that the real world is full of sorrow and pain, where everything undergoes a never-ceasing change. In the actual world youth grows pale too soon and finds his eternal abode in the grave. Here each and every moment is full of sorrow and grief. Beauty fades in no time and the passion of youthful lovers has only a short duration:

 

“Where youth grows pale and spectre thin and dies

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow."

 

But the world of Nightingale, the ideal world, is free from all sorrow, pain, sighs and despairs. In the world of Nightingale he finds peace that helps him forget all the sorrow and suffering of life. In the ideal world, the bird is forever a happy creature and in that world it will never face death, and never come to an end;

 

“Immortal bird thou was not born for death------"

 

In fact, the main impulse of the "Ode to a Nightingale" is essentially of the same order as exhibited more simply by "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The superiority of the ideal world is expressed in the well-known lines:

 

“Heard melodies are sweet,

Those unheard are sweeter”

 

In the actual world everything undergoes a change and cannot keep itself in the same position for long. Here Beauty and Joy are very short-lived and in no time they say 'good-bye":

 

"Beauty that must die

And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu."

But in the ideal world as depicted on the surface of the Greek urn the lovers are forever in a state of immortal youth. Their love is forever young and still to be enjoyed. Here there is no existence of suffering, death and decay - leaves of trees do not fall here and the spring is everlasting. The radiant beauty of the young maiden will never lose its grace.

 

Keats created an ideal world in his mind and he used this world as a shelter where he could retreat from the complicated reality of pain and sorrow. This ideal world remains beyond the sphere of sensuous knowledge, beyond the reach of "satiety, disenchantment, and death."