Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale is considered one of the finest odes in English Literature. It reveals the
highest imaginative powers of the poet. The poem was inspired by the song of a nightingale, which the
poet heard in the gardens of his friend Charles Brown. The sweet music of the nightingale sent the poet
in rapture and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table, put it on the grass-plot under the
plum tree and composed the poem.

After he had finished the poem he came back with scraps of paper in his hand. Brown rescued the
papers and found them to be the poem on the nightingale.

Thus the poem is an expression of Keats's feelings rising in his heart at the hearing of the melodious
song of the bird. The song of the nightingale moves from the poet to the depth of his heart and creates
in him a heartache and numbness as is created by the drinking of hemlock. He thinks that the bird lives
in a place of beauty. When he hears the nightingale's song, he is entrenched by its sweetness and his joy
becomes so excessive that it changes into a kind of pleasant pain. He is filled with a desire to escape
from the world of caring to the world of beautiful place of the bird.

The poem presents the picture of the tragedy of human life. It brings out an expression of Keats's
pessimism and dejection. He composed this poem at the time when his heart was full of sorrow. His
youngest brother Tom had died, the second one had gone abroad and the poet himself was under the
suspense and agony by the passionate love for Fanny Brawne. All these happenings had induced in the
poet a mood of sorrow. He could not suppress it. Thus the poet enjoys the pleasure in sadness/ pain and
feasts upon the very sadness/ pain into joy. This complex emotion gives the poem a unique charm.

In the beginning, Keats seems to be an immature youth with a melancholic heart urging to find a means
of oblivion and escape. On catching the sight of a nightingale and hearing its music, which he assumes to
be an immortal voice of happiness, Keats feels that his body is getting benumbed. But, he also feels an
acute pain because he is conscious of his mortality and suffering. He fantasizes of having drunk hemlock
or 'some dull opiate': "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, / my sense, as though of hemlock
I had drunk." The initial situation of awareness and conflict is slowly to change and develop throughout
the ode with a corresponding shift in tone. The tragic awareness of suffering inflicts on him a peculiar
kind of ache because the opposing effect of dullness, which is the effect of desire, is increasing. The
awareness is a burden that makes him 'sunk' gradually towards the world of oblivion.

After describing his plight, Keats acknowledges, rather than envy the bird's 'happy lot' and participates
in its permanent happiness. He identifies the bird with dryad, the Greek Goddess of the tree. He
contrasts the mortality and suffering of human being with the immortality and perfect happiness of the
nightingale. Of course, Keats immortalizes the bird by thinking of the race of it as the symbol of universal
and undying musical voice, which is the voice of nature, and also of ideal romantic poetry, of the world
of art and spirit. This universal and eternal voice has comforted human beings embittered by life and
tragedies by opening the casement of the remote, magical, spiritual, eternal, and the ideal. The poet is
longing for the imaginative experience of an imaginatively perfect world. At this stage in the poem, the
poet is trying to escape from the reality, and experience the ideal rather than complement one with the
other. This dualism is to resolve later. Keats begins by urging for poison and wine, and then desires for
poetic and imaginative experience.

But, as the poem develops, one feels that the numbness and intoxication the poet deliberately and
imaginatively imposes upon his senses of pain are meant to awaken a higher sense of experience. The
vintage, dance and song, the waters of poetic inspiration are the warmth of the south together make a
compound and sensuous appeal.

Keats develops a dialectic by partaking both the states-the fretful here of man and the happy there of
the Nightingale-and serves as the mediator between the two. After activating the world of insight and
inner experience by obliterating that of the sense, Keats is revived into a special awareness of the
conflict. With this awareness, he moves into a higher thematic ground moving from the ache of the
beginning through yearning for permanence and eventually exploring the tension so as to balance the
transient with the permanent.

In fact, no one can escape into the ideal world forever. Imaginative minds can have a momentary flight
into the fanciful world. But, ultimately one has to return to the real world and must accept the reality.
John Keats is no exception to this. He makes imaginative flights into the ideal world, but accepts the
realities of life despite its 'fever, fret and fury'.

The process of experience, he has undergone has undoubtedly left him with a heightened awareness of
both the modes of experience. When the imaginative life wakes, the pressures of ordinary experience is
benumbed: and when ordinary experience becomes acute, the intensity of imaginative reality is
reduced. And this makes life and experience more complete.

The song of the bird symbolizes the song of the poet. Keats is contrasting the immorality of poetry with
the immorality of the poet. This is the climax of the poem and the point where the different themes
harmonized—the beauty of the nightingale's song, the loveliness of the Spring night, the miseries of the
world, the desire to escape from those miseries by death, by wine, or by poetry.

The Ode is not the expression of a single mood, but of a succession of moods. From being too happy in
the happiness of the bird's song, Keats becomes aware of the contrast between the bird's apparent joy
and the misery of the human condition, from the thought of which he can only momentarily escape by
wine, by poetry, by the beauty of nature, or by the thought of death. In the seventh stanza the contrast
is sharpened: the immortal bird, representing natural beauty as well as poetry, is set against the 'hungry
generations' of mankind. Keats expresses with a maximum of intensity the desire to escape from reality,
and yet he recognizes that no escape is possible.

One kind of mastery displayed by Keats in this ode is worth noting—the continuous shifting of view-
point. We are transported from the poet in the garden to the bird in the trees; in the second stanza we
have glimpses of Flora and Provence, followed by one of the poets drinking the wine; in the fourth
stanza we are taken up into the starlit skies, and in the next we are back again in the flower-scented
darkness. In the seventh stanza we rang furthest in time and place. The nightingale's song is unrestricted
by either time or space. The voice of the nightingale is made immune first to history, and then to
geography. It can establish a rapport with dead generations or with faery lands. In the last stanza we
start again from the Hampstead garden, and then follow the nightingale as it disappears in the distance.

The poem expresses the poet's love of romance, deep delight in nature and his interest in the Greek
mythology. In the poem the reference to Flora, Dryad, and Bacchus is made which are all related to
Greek mythology. It shows that Greek mythology had a deep hold on the mind of the poet. The poem
contains concrete imagery, richness of coloring and the elements of charm and deep human interest.
The mastery of poetic language is perfectly seen in the poem. The style of the poem is Shakespearean.
The expressions are unsurpassed.

To sum up, Keats soars high with his 'wings of poesy' into the world of ideas and perfect happiness. But
the next moment, consciousness makes him land on the grounds of reality and he bids farewell to the
ideal bird. At this moment, Keats must also have been conscious that the very bird, which he had
idealized and immortalized, existed in the real world, mortal and vulnerable to change and suffering like
himself.

A magical voice of the bird, imparting significant influence on the mind and soul

We have all dreamt of escaping this world when we are having a bad day, or just escaping the situation
we are in at the moment. In John Keats' poem "Ode to a Nightingale" we hear the story of an individual
who wants to escape all his problems and go to a fantasy world with a nightingale and never come back.
This saddening composition puts us in the shoes of somebody who suffers with a great deal of pain and
depression and we are taken on his journey as he experiences a life changing occasion from a slightly
insignificant source. Keats celebrates the nightingale, a bird with a particularly magical voice. The
nightingale is a loaded symbol for Keats.

In the “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats contrasts the birds’ immortality with the mortality of human beings.
The spiritual nature of Keats poetry concerns itself with exploring human emotions and understanding
nature. This poem is a lyric meditation narrated by a poet who is tempted to sake the real world of
human suffering for the ideal world of art. As he listens to a bird’s song, the speaker becomes more and
more enraptured by it, and increasingly disgruntled with the mortal world of pain and death.

The nightingale and the discussion about it are not simply about a bird or a song but about human
experience in general. Nightingale is not an eternal entity. There are many images of death within the
poem. The images are particular and sensuous, but not highly visual. Nightingale experiences a sort of
death but actually it is not a real death nightingale is mysterious and even disappears at the end of the
poem but nightingale itself is symbol of continuity or immortality and is universal and undying in
contrast with the morality of human beings. The poet also shows nostalgia in this poem. Human cannot
be immortal as nightingale is immortal in his poem. It seems a pain for humans to know that they shall
die. Keats is expressing his love towards nature. The beauty of nature he is talking about. The
nightingale is the poet s addressee but the poet s main issue is to express his love and attitude towards
nature. The contrasts portrayed in the poem, the illusion vs. reality is shown through juxtaposition of
factors in the real and ideal world. These are the mixture of pain and joy, life and death, morality and
immortality these are vital in the poem because they depict the difference between the perfect world
created with the nightingale where the poet is able to escape all the negativity and problems in the real
world and thus emphasize the poets feelings about human existence and the problems in real life. We
all have days when it would be nice just to crawl in a hole and leave our troubles behind. Modern life
can be stressful, and there is always some new issue or problem to worry about. Moments when you
can just be seem pretty rare. So people try to create a little escape from life in different ways: some
practice yoga, some go to movies or find a good book, some go hiking and so on. In "Ode to a
Nightingale," however, the speaker actually has an out-of-body experience where he leaves his world
and enters the realm of…the nightingale! It's quite a strange poem, actually. The song of the nightingale
affects the speaker like He just kind of quietly drifts out of normal reality. Like Alice in Wonderland, he's
down the rabbit-hole. "Ode to a Nightingale" flips our view of what is real and what isn't on its head, so
that by the end of the poem the speaker doesn't know whether he's awake or dreaming. Once the
nightingale's song lulls him into a stupor, he fades into the atmosphere of a night in the forest, where he
can hardly see a thing but can only smell the intoxicating plants around him. The poem gets even
stranger when he imagines that he has died and the nightingale is singing at his funeral! This poem
explores the way certain experiences a song, a poem, a scene in nature can make you feel like you have
left your day-to-day concerns behind. Unfortunately for the speaker, he doesn’t manage to flee the
world forever, and the poem expresses this disappointment, too. "Ode to a Nightingale" doesn't shy
away from the hard truth: no matter what method of escape you use, everyone has to return to "real
life" eventually, so you are better off finding the life that suits you best.

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In the poem, “Ode to a Nightingale,” written by John Keats, the speaker attempts to use a nightingale as
a means of escaping the realities of human life. Throughout the poem Keats gradually discovers the
concepts of creative expression and the morality of human life. The speaker is in search of the freedom
that the nightingale so elegantly sings about. The nightingale’s song of freedom is an expression of pure
joy, which is oblivious to anguish and suffering. It appears in the poem that Keats is tempted into the
nightingale’s world of beauty and perfection. He is also longing to sooth his soul from his troubles and
open up to a world that promises eternal enjoyment. The answer to the poet’s problems may lie in living
a life similar to that of a nightingale’s life. As the poem progresses the speaker explores multiple ways to
join the nightingale. However, he eventually realizes that he must face the reality that fleeing from the
human world is not possible. Keats not only writes this poem gracefully, but it reads fluently while using
a discrete rhyme scheme. Allusions are the main idea of this poem. The poet uses allusions involving
alcohol and other drugs as a main idea throughout the poem. “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in eight
ten-line stanzas and is metrically variable. The eighth line of each stanza is written in iambic trimester,
while the first seven lines and last two are written in iambic pentameter. Iambic trimester occurs when
there are only three accents in a line of poetry. This poem displays a complex form of end rhyme
scheme unique to the poem. Each verse of “Ode to a Nightingale” has a rhyme scheme ABABCDECDE.
This rhyme scheme is used throughout the entire poem; however, there are a few instances where off-
rhymes appear in place of the perfect rhymes. A good example of off-rhyming appears in the second
stanza between lines in 16 and 1. Line 16 reads, “Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,” while line 1
reads, “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen.” I use these two lines as an example of off-
rhyming because these two lines show Keats’s notion of writing lines that have a centralized idea
involving alcohol. Off-rhyming also appears in the sixth verse, specifically in lines 55 and 58 where the
words die and ecstasy are used to end the lines. These two words do not appear to perfectly rhyme with
one another. Keats uses these kinds of rhymes to enhance the emotions of the poem.

The first few stanzas of this poem are filled with allusions involving alcohol, drinking, and also drugs. In
the first line, Keats says, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains.” At the start of an “Ode to a
Nightingale,” the speaker seems to be initially in a sort of daze and describes it as a heart ache along
with a drowsy numbness pain. The way Keats says this reminds me of the way you feel when you lose
someone that you are in love with. I would describe this pain as despair with a lack of self-regard or
regard for others. After that in the second line the poet writes, “My sense, as though of hemlock I had
drunk.” First of all, hemlock is a type of poison made from an herb. Keats compares his daze like feeling
to that of person is drugged up on hemlock. This line seems to be a reference to some type of regret
towards something. It appears to me that the speaker wishes to forget the bad and perhaps maybe the
good of his past in this line. In the second line, Keats uses his first reference to a sedative or drug. The
third line of the poem says, “Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.” The poet compares his current
state to that of consuming opium in this line. This alludes to the poet only being half awake, somewhat
vulnerable and less in control than normal. In the fourth line of an “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats writes,
“One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.” The Lethe is a river in Hades where souls about to be
reincarnated drank from to forget their pasts. This alludes to the way the poet tries to escape his life by
drinking wine in line 11 of the second stanza. Keats feels that the only way for him to live a carefree,
pleasant life, just like the “nightingale,” would be to use some sort of drug.

With the start of the second stanza, the poet wants to be rid of his pain from life and instead live in a
world of imagination or fantasy. In line 11 Keats writes, “O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been.”
Keats calls for a glass of vintage in this line, which is more commonly known as wine. He calls for vintage
rather than beer because vintage is more romantic and he wishes to experience the qualities associated
with fine wines. It appears that he is not in fact asking for a glass, but instead asking for the warm feeling
of being content and relaxed. Keats feels that the liquid he drinks will provide inspiration as well as
comfort. Also in the second stanza, Keats says in line 1, “Tasting of Flora and the country green.” The
word Flora is used here to represent the taste of the vintage. Flora is the goddess of flowers and fertility.
From this I concur that the taste of this vintage would have been a very wonderful tasting drink. Line 14
says, “Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!” Provincial is a region in southern France
associated with song, pleasure, and luxury. France is known for their wine and that is why it is used in
this poem to display another allusion to drinking. The use of sun burnt mirth is an excellent example of
synesthesia. Dance is associated with song, and together they produce pleasure or mirth. The mirth
however is sun burnt because country dances are held outdoors. In line 16 Keats says, “Full of the true,
the blushful Hippocrates.” Hippocrates is the name of a spring sacred to the muses located on Mt.
Helicon where poets became inspired after drinking its waters. Each of the nine muses was associated
with different arts including epic poetry, sacred song, and dancing. The last two lines of this stanza say,
“That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” These
two lines (lines 1& 0) give off the impression that the poet experienced something that hurt him
traumatically and does not wish to feel it again. To me this appears to be perhaps about a love of his
who left or passed on. These emotions may cause a person to not want to endure the good of the future
in order to avoid the bad of their past. The second line of these two again show the poet’s desire to get
away from something and return to a peaceful state. Thus being in the forest would suit his emotional
state well causing him to be very peaceful.

The third stanza seems to be like a suicide note because Keats practically says that he desires to forget
the past and does not wish to go on living. At the end of the second stanza the word fade is used and it
is again used in the beginning of the third stanza. This appears to be a way of to tie the stanzas together,
so that it can move easily into the next thought. Line 1 and begin the third verse and read, “Fade far
away, dissolve, and quite forgot, What thou among the leaves hast never known.” At this point, the poet
is in deep despair and longs to fade away and forget his troubles. Keats wants to forget the strife of
human life and believes that drugs and alcohol are the only answer to this. The poet’s awareness of the
real world pulls him back from his fantasy world of drink-joy. Through the first three stanzas in this
poem the tone of the speaker is dark and melancholic. I believe that the poem starts like this because in
the first three stanzas Keats believes that alcohol and drugs are his only way out. Most alcoholics and
drug users seem to be dark, melancholic individuals when not sober.

With the start of the fourth stanza the tone somewhat lightens becoming almost cheerful. Keats begins
this stanza with a return to life and a goal on staying focused within his emotions. He has finally realized
that alcohol is not the way to reach the nightingale. The first three lines of the fourth stanza (lines 1 � )
read, “Away! Away! For I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless
wings of Poesy.” In line the poet rejects wine. There is also a reference to Bacchus, the Roman god of
wine who was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards in line . Instead of using
alcohol to escape, the speaker says he will escape on the invisible wings of Poesy (poetic fantasy) in line .
This is where the bulk of the allusions to alcohol and drugs end because Keats now says he does not
need either to escape his problems.

In “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats built the poem around a large amount of strategically placed allusions
involving alcohol and drug use. Keats used extreme differences throughout the entirety of the poem. His
emotions range from dark to light, but he never touches any melancholy ones. The use of drugs and
alcohol in the poem seem to make the poem become funny and ironic at the same time when mixed
with lines containing sobering experience. Keats may not have meant that he actually wanted wine or
something else, but just wanted the association of feeling high and carefree.
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The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a
drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and
says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather from
sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid
some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.

In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine, “a
draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and like peasant dances, and let him “leave the
world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his
desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: “the
weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal and
nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous
eyes.”

In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through alcohol
(“Not charioted by Bacchus and his parts”), but through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He
says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlight is
hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the branches. In the
fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess them “in
embalmed darkness”: white haw throne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, “the murmur us haunt of
flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that
he has often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes.
Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than ever,
and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically
forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain”
and be no longer able to hear.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not “born for
death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns,
by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the
foam / Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to
restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the
nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he
can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking dream.” Now that the
music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.
Form

Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most
of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven
and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is
written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from the
other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of
rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes).
Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.

Themes

With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of
creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of
old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death,
immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,”
but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it
is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the
nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the
bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a
“draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the
transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the
Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses
instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless
wings of Poesy.”

In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to embrace the
creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds a
form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this
is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at last. The “art” of the
nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a
perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich though it is,
serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon,
“But here there is no light”; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are
at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which is in many ways a
companion poem to “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created
art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he has achieved creative
expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression—the nightingale’s song—is spontaneous
and without physical manifestation.