A Passage from Adam’s Dream to the Cessation of Desire: A Buddhist Reading of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Abstract

John Keats (1795-1821) reveals a sustained interest in dreams and quest motifs throughout his career, which bespeaks his concerns with the nature of human agency in a narrative of atonement and self-redemption. The \"Ode to a Nightingale\" (1819) remains a great but cryptic poem, concerned with a Keatsian preoccupation with human existence, as well as with the issues of \"being-in-the-world\" and \"being-not-at-home\" in the form of poetic trance and visionary flight.1 This poem also calls into question such renowned Keatsian concepts as \"Adam`s dream,\" \"Pleasure Thermometer,\" and \"Negative Capability.\"2 On 30 September 1820 Keats wrote to Charles Brown: \"Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering\" (Letters 2: 346).3 Uttered at the end of Keats`s life, this echoes the questions Keats`s speaker asks earlier in the \"Ode to a Nightingale\": \"Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?\" (79-80).4 Keats here emphasizes a pervasive sense of impermanence, suffering, and illusion as well as shifts from conventional Christian `sin` to Buddhist `suffering` as the epistemic framework for living. In no sense was Keats a doctrinaire Buddhist, but I would like to suggest that certain Buddhist concepts may shed light on some concepts in Keats`s writing.5 Keats`s \"Ode to a Nightingale\" embodies such Buddhist principles as the dharma and the Four Noble Truths, articulated through Buddhism`s focus on suffering and its possible antidote.