The Double Refuge 🍷 Ch.1: Bubbles Winking at the Brim
Half in Love With Easeful Death
Refuge - Destiny’s Child - Romantic Reason
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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-stainéd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim […]
— “Ode to a Nightingale,” 1819
Keats’ famous ode does two opposite yet complementary things: it expresses the need to escape pain and constriction, and it expresses the need to connect to beauty and expansiveness.
Initially, Keats laments the grim state of humanity, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; / Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.” Yet he soon finds an escape from this sorrow when he hears a nightingale singing “of summer in full-throated ease.” He refers to the nightingale as a dryad (a nymph from Greek myth) and dreams about a beaker of Southern wine, with bubbles winking at the brim.
The wine winks, as if alive, as if reanimating his body, that at the beginning of the poem ached, “as though of hemlock [he] had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.” The wine makes Keats think of Hippocrene, which is the spring on Mount Helicon that’s home to the Muses of art, literature, and science. His imagination becomes a refuge, and soon he hardly thinks at all about his original grim state.
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Refuge
This refuge is less a rejection of his present life than an attraction to a type of earthly heaven, a place where music and beauty and wine prevail. He’s gone from wanting oblivion to wanting a better version of life on earth. He’s only “half in love,” 50% “in love with easeful death.” Not 100% — not Keats, who had a job as a surgeon yet gave it up to write poetry, and who wrote in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Instead of leaving this world, Keats wants to hear its sweetest music. He wants to follow the notes of the nightingale into the deep forest, “To cease upon the midnight with no pain, / While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!”
The wine he’s looking for isn’t some ordinary wine, but rather a wine that helps him pour his own soul abroad in ecstasy. It’s full of gusto and beauty, not despair, although it may lead elsewhere to all sorts of drunken madness and may taste bitter at the dregs. Yet still it ranks high in his personal Trinity:
This short poem is obviously light-hearted and hedonistic, yet it also fits more deeply into a pattern in which Keats despairs of this world and dreams of a better world — one of intoxication, beauty, song, art, poetry, freedom, and love. In other words, a sort of secular heaven. In this sense, his snuff isn’t just tobacco; it’s the stuff of art. It’s similar to the state of intoxication he gets from reading Homer:
The final six lines from “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” 1816.
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Destiny’s Child
Keats’ vision is similar in several ways to that of Waterhouse’s depiction of the goddess Destiny, who has a cup of wine at her lips, and seems to have just read something from the open book beneath her:
Destiny, 1900, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum. Source. (From Wikimedia Commons.)
A globe sits on the other side of the mirror, which reflects the real world beyond. Destiny seems to look past the immediate scene, even past the ships in full sail, to some other world beyond the sea, beyond the confinement of her present space. The redness of her dress suggests the redness of the wine, which is hinted at in the richness of her ruby lips.
Seen through the prism of an aesthetic which blends the physical into the spiritual, Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” turns the wine of the tavern into the wine of the altar. The poem becomes an almost eucharistic salute to both the angst and the ecstasy of existence. Why else would he refer to the “soul” of a bird in ecstasy?
I’ll return often to this poem because I’ve only scratched the surface here. For instance Keats ends by saying that his escape is a fancy that “cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.” However high Keats flies, he always comes down to earth. He lifts his reader on the wings of metaphor to a great height, yet later reminds us that it’s a metaphorical height, and that the transformation of metaphor into fact is impossible in this world. Destiny or Ultimate Truth is as elusive — and perhaps as illusive — as ever. Yet still there’s a space between Blind Chance and Destiny: there’s room to move deeper into the real world or to move deeper into the metaphorical world. There’s still the winking of the wine. The bubbles may be impermanent, there one moment and gone the next, but we still see them wink.
Wine can be both a profane drink that takes us to a happier state, and a mystical drink with profound links to aesthetics, Classical myth, and the Eucharist. Many see the rite of the Eucharist in strict religious and doctrinal terms, yet Christ’s blood made manifest in wine is also a metaphor for a love and redemption that’s everywhere, even deep in our stomachs and in our veins. It’s the antidote to the hemlock of existence: its’ something so rich, deep, cherry-red, ruby, or dark crimson, that it can make us dance and sing half the time, and make us “half in love with easeful death” the other half.
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Romantic Reason
Keats wrote at a very particular time and place: the start of the 19th Century in England. This historical context magnifies the ambiguous meaning of wine because the clash between science and religion was coming to a head. Keats’ lived in the Romantic Age, when reason and science had already taken apart the literal doctrines of the Church. In its place Keats presents us with two prospects: 1. the logic of empirical reality, and 2. a richness and a metaphoric intensity that makes us wonder if the metaphor might also be part of a greater mystical reality.
We can see this double prospect in Waterhouse’s Sorceress (1913), where the wine has been spilled onto the table and is dripping down its side. We see the wild animals of Darwin’s Nature almost bite the table on which we see a book of geometry and a giant beaker — presumably of wine. Amid all of this, the sorceress, like Destiny, stares over and beyond the scene.
The Sorceress, 1913, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917). Source. (From Wikimedia)
As a surgeon, Keats didn’t deny the science blossoming all around him. And yet he didn’t cling to science as if it were the new religion. In this, he anticipated the agnosticism of Thomas Henry Huxley, who was nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog, and who was a firm believer that one should always keep an open mind.
Decades before Darwin’s evolution and Huxley’s agnosticism, Keats coined the phrase negative capability to get at the idea of using reason, yet not allowing reason to hound us or predetermine our conclusions when we’re confronted with mysteries and uncertainties. Like Huxley, Keats was open in his rational thinking, and he was also open to any mental or emotional state that didn’t conform to rational patterns of thought.
Keats used reason as a refuge from superstition and religious dogma, yet he also used his poetic, mystical sensibility as a refuge from the existential conclusions of reason. In this way he was what I would call a double refugee.
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Next: 🍷 Refuges Here & There