送交者: DJ 于 北京时间 07/06/2008 (305 reads) [累积242270分 给DJ发悄悄话]
回答: 是的，我选择体力劳动的工作，原因之一就是为了能健康安度晚年！ DJ 于 07/06/2008
主题：肺结核濒死者的绝唱：《夜莺颂》英语原诗介绍
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John Keats: 'Ode To A Nightingale'
No one knows for certain the order in which Keats composed his odes in the spring of 1819. One conjecture, however, is that he wrote the "Ode to a Nightingale" right after the "Ode to Psyche" and before any of the others. The poet's friend Charles Brown has left this account of the writing of the poem: "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale."
If the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is Keats' most admired and discussed poem, the "Ode to a Nightingale" is surely his most beloved. The poem is so free in its movement, so apparently untrammeled with philosophy, so lush in its imagery, so impassioned in its song that there is no lyric in the English language to which it need take a second place or to which the heart can more freely respond. At the same time, it is full of the speculation about life and death and art, full of the "light and shade" that characterizes all of the poet's best work and that invites a thoughtful as well as an emotional reaction.
Analysis:
The nightingale, for instance, which Brown tells us gave Keats such continual joy, is represented in this poem not only in its own person but also as a symbol of poetic inspiration and fulfillment. Birds have always made ideal symbols of poets and poetry, first, because like poets they sing, and second, because like poets they fly; that is, they soar above earthbound men and seem to exist in a kind of Platonic realm of perfect and unchanging beauty. It is in response to this beauty, Keats tells us in the first stanza of the ode, that he feels numbed to the everyday, sensual world of experience and change, and one with the serene and ageless loveliness of the bird's song:
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:
The images are nearly all of anesthesia: "drowsy numbness," "dull opiate," "hemlock," a poisonous herb whose effect is a gradual loss of feeling, "Lethe-wards," a reference to the mythical river of forgetfulness. But there are also references to an aching heart and to pained senses which suggest the sorrow of the human condition, sorrow which is sweetly augmented in such moments when the nightingale sings its song, when poetry takes a man out of himself and conducts him into the realm of pure, unchanging spirit. In the ode, Keats longs to follow the nightingale into that realm, and thinking first of alcohol as the agent of change, invokes the spirit of wine in one of his most ardent and sensual passages:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Man has many sorrows to escape from in the world, and these Keats recounts feelingly in the third stanza of his poem, a number of the references apparently being drawn from firsthand experience. The mention of the youth who "grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," for example, might well be an allusion to Tom Keats, the younger brother whom the poet nursed through his long, last struggle with consumption. But the bitterest of all man's sorrows, as it emerges from the catalogue of woes in the third stanza, is the terrible disease of time, the fact that:
. . .Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
It is the disease of time which the song of the nightingale particularly transcends, and the poet, yearning for the immortality of art, seeks another way to become one with the bird:
Away! away! for I will fly with thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his leopards . . .
that is, not carried away by wine (Bacchus, the god of wine, was frequently
depicted in a chariot or cart drawn by leopards),
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Here the metaphoric significance of the bird seems most clear. Like the nightingale, poesy, too, has wings, though because poesy is more insubstantial than the bird, more purely a thing of the spirit, its wings are viewless (cf. the "unheard melodies" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"). Yet the poet maintains the tension, the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, by immediately referring to the dull brain that "perplexes and retards," that pulls man back from the heights his fancy and intuition would help him to scale. This conflict lies at the heart of the poem. In the very next lines, for instance, a moment of pure spiritual transfiguration:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays [fairies] . . .
is inevitably followed by the reminder that
. . . here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
In other words, while the spirit is roaming in regions of pure light, the body remains below in darkness, and the body has its legitimate claims. The sensual pull of the world is nothing to be despised; the world offers man summer as well as winter, health as well as sickness, and in the fifth stanza Keats makes the beauty of the physical world, the lush darkness of a summer evening, moving and seductive indeed:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorne, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Perhaps by the mention of the musk-rose's dewy wine the poet is reminded of his efforts to achieve a union with the nightingale's song, and having found both wine and poesy inadequate to help him achieve his goal, he listens in darkness to the bird and thinks how:
. . . for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou are pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Perhaps death is the answer; perhaps death will transport him to the realm of the nightingale. After all, death, like wine and poetry, takes a man out of himself and conducts him into the region of pure, unchanging spirit. But what sort of death does the poet mean? It is plain, from his choice of words, that he is thinking of death as a purely spiritual phenomenon. He talks of "easeful death," of ceasing "upon the midnight with no pain," and this is a far cry from the wretchedness of death described in stanza three. Nor does the body allow the spirit to forget this fact. Death is physical as well as spiritual, and it is terribly final; thus the death of the poet will not bring him any closer to the nightingale. The bird will sing on, says Keats, but:
. . . I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.
One thing is clear: poetry will never die. Though the singer and the listener may pass away, the song is immortal. The very song heard today was heard thousands of years ago; thus, though there may be no personal survival for the poet, or for man in general, there is something that survives somewhere. This is the crucial fact at the center of the eighth and final stanza of the ode. That stanza begins with the poet bidding farewell to the nightingale. He cannot follow it as he had hoped; he had only momentarily been separated from himself by its song. Even as he listens, the melody fades into the distance like an illusion:
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
But the question raised by the previous stanza still lingers on. The poet seems to have returned to reality after his flight of fancy, but has he in fact done so? How should we define reality? What is more real, the "real" life of a "real" human being, which is nevertheless over and forgotten in a few years, or the fanciful song of the nightingale, which for all that it goes on "viewless wings," has indisputably and solidly survived for centuries? To put the question this way is to understand why the ode ends on its ambiguous and typically Keatsian note:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: - do I wake or sleep?
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毋令浮名浮利污吾目
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