CC - IX: John Keats's "ode to Nightingle" Explanation ( "Away! away! for I will fly to thee, /not Charioted by Bacchus and his pards, /But on the viewless wings of poesy,...")

 

"Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

not Charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of poesy,..."

These lines are extracted from the fourth stanza of John Keats' poem "ode to a nightingale". Here, the poet seeks to escape from the world of reality into the world of imagination through the medium of poetic imagination.

The terrifying reality of human suffering  (as described in third stanza) gives the poet is special urgency to the need for escape, and he desired escape from both actuality and fretting consciousness. But now he dispenses with external stimulants like wine and relies on the potency of the mind's inner resources, on his own imaginative powers ('on the viewless wings of poesy'). In other words, the poet bids goodbye to the escape-route of wine as expressed in second line of the quoted stanza. According to classical mythology, Bacchus is the God of wine and revelry and he is presented as riding a chariot drawn by leopards ('pards'). What the poet implies is that the intoxication of wine is not at all needed by him to transport himself to the world of beauty of the nightingale. He rather proposes to take the help of his poetic imagination for this purpose. Obviously, the poet thinks that complete identification with the imaginative world alone can make him forget about the predicament of mortality.

      These lines evidently expresses 'poesy' as the sole means of the poet's transportation. But his poetic imagination is so powerful that he finds himself transported into the world of the bird.('already with thee'!). It also shows Keats' love for Greek mythology-his Hellenism as expressed in the reference to Bacchus and his 'pards'.