Analyze the theme of mortality in John Keats’s "Ode to a Nightingale" and Jayanta Mahapatra’s "Grass." How do these poets approach the subject differently?

Analysis of Mortality in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale and Jayanta Mahapatra’s Grass

Both John Keats and Jayanta Mahapatra explore the theme of mortality in their poems, but their approaches differ significantly due to cultural, historical, and philosophical perspectives. While Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale reflects a Romantic fascination with beauty, transience, and escapism, Mahapatra’s Grass takes a more grounded, existential approach rooted in Indian cultural and historical consciousness.

1. Mortality in Ode to a Nightingale

In Keats’s poem, mortality is central to the speaker's reflections on life and the desire to transcend its inevitable sorrows.

• Romantic Ideals: Keats sees mortality as a painful aspect of human existence, contrasting it with the eternal song of the nightingale. The bird symbolizes a timeless, otherworldly beauty that offers an escape from the decay and suffering of life.
• Escapism vs. Reality: The speaker dreams of merging with the nightingale’s eternal world through death, imagining it as a release:

  "Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
  To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
  However, he ultimately recognizes that such an escape is illusory, and the nightingale’s immortality is only a poetic construct.

• Personal Context: Keats, who faced illness and the loss of loved ones, imbues the poem with a personal longing for relief from the pain of life, making his meditation on mortality deeply emotional and subjective.

2. Mortality in Grass

Jayanta Mahapatra’s Grass takes a more stoic and philosophical approach to mortality, rooted in Indian cultural and historical sensibilities.

• Symbolism of Grass: Grass in Mahapatra’s poem symbolizes both fragility and resilience. It grows over graves and historical ruins, embodying the cycle of life, death, and renewal. Mortality is not seen as an end but as a part of nature’s eternal process.
• Collective Mortality: Mahapatra reflects on historical suffering and collective human mortality, evoking the memory of violence, colonialism, and death. This contrasts with Keats’s more personal and introspective focus.
• Acceptance of Death: Unlike Keats’s yearning to transcend mortality, Mahapatra accepts it as a natural and inevitable truth. Grass becomes a silent witness to human transience, signifying the continuity of life beyond individual deaths.

3. Comparative Analysis

4. Conclusion

Keats and Mahapatra approach mortality from different vantage points. Keats, as a Romantic poet, views it as a painful limitation that art and imagination temporarily transcend, while Mahapatra’s existential lens sees death as an integral part of the natural and historical cycle. Both poets, however, underscore the inevitability of mortality, enriching their works with profound reflections on life and death.