THE VISION OF RICH DEATH IN JOHN KEATS’S “ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE”: AN AUROBINDONEAN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

John Keats’s vision of rich death while listening to the melodious voice of Nightingale, the manifestation of the Immortal on the earth, takes one beyond the plane of corporeality of the terrestrial existence. One comes to the plane of death-birth continuum, and, consequently, discovers a supra-earthly, nay, spiritual truth, the plane which earlier comes into the vision of the ancient Rishis of India. The richness of death which comes into the vision of Keats is revealed when we explore death in the light of the yogic discovery of Sri Aurobindo, a literary luminary of the 19th-20th century of India of, what he calls, ‘Psychic Being’, a flame of the Divine Self in the being of man. Sri Aurobindo discovers that the psychic being is instrumental in the evolution of consciousness to its spiritual and supramental planes in the death-birth phenomenon as it gathers the spiritual experiences of man’s life and, accordingly, lays foundation of his higher spiritual life to come in his next birth. Being immortal, it carries the foundation in the next birth of man. He also discovers that the foundation is laid at the time of the physical death of man. Such death, therefore, comes to be rich.

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