John Keats

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

 • John Keats is one of the most celebrated poets in the English
language, and this one of his most celebrated poems. "Ode to a
Nightingale" was written in an astonishing burst of creativity during
the spring of 1819, during which Keats also wrote his other odes
(except for "To Autumn," which was written slightly later, in
September of the same year).
• These other odes include the equally famous "Ode on a Grecian
Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy." According to Keats's friend Charles
Brown, Keats composed this poem while visiting Brown and
John Keats spotting a nightingale nearby. Brown said Keats wrote the poem in
just a few hours on a couple scraps of paper!

• Keats is generally considered a key member of the Romantic poets,

in particular of the second generation which included writers like
Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Romanticism doesn't mean
the same thing as "romantic"—instead, it is characterized, loosely
speaking, by a deep-rooted belief in the power of the imagination,
the transformative role of poetry in society, the importance of
nature, and political engagement.
 • Keats is also far from the first writer to use the
nightingale as a subject. The bird appears in works from
the classical era, including Homer's The Odyssey and
Sophocles's Tereus.
• Keats deliberately seems to distance his nightingale from
the most familiar of the mythical nightingale
associations, which is the story of Philomela (this
appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses).
John Keats • Philomela is a princess who is raped and mutilated; she
enacts her revenge and is then turned into a nightingale.
The nightingale's song thereby becomes a kind of
lament, as sorrowful as it is beautiful.
• While Keats's nightingale does possess these last two
characteristics, the poem makes no reference to this
particular myth, which would certainly have been
familiar to Keats.
 • Keats wrote this poem not long after the American
Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789,
which facilitated Napoleon's rise to power. The early 19th
century can be considered a period during which people
rethought the way that individuals relate to society.
• Romanticism, the literary movement of which Keats was a
part, was also a response to the rapid industrialization of
society and influx of people into cities. As urban centers
John Keats grew ever more crowded and dirty, artists often began to
idealize the countryside and the natural world.

• Keats certainly had more than his fair share of bad luck
during his lifetime, partly informing his focus on suffering
and—in particular—the impermanence of life and beauty.
 • He had already lost both parents and an infant brother, and
would himself be dead from tuberculosis within a couple of
years of writing this poem.
• He also struggled financially throughout his life, and was
frequently the subject of scorn from the literary
establishment.
• Indeed, the odes were written during a period when Keats
John Keats thought he would soon be ceasing his writing life.
• Having borrowed money from his brother, George, and now
unable to return the favor, Keats intended to get more
financially stable work and give up poetry—but not before
writing a few more poems, which, years after his death,
became considered some of the best written in the English
language.
 • The speaker in "Ode to a Nightingale" is never specified,
though most critics take it to be Keats himself.
• The composition of the poem is well-documented: Keats wrote
it in the garden of his friend's house, in which a nightingale
had nested.
• Furthermore, the speaker is a poet (see line 33) and also
Ode to a tragically experienced in the world of human suffering and
disease (Keats had recently lost his brother to tuberculosis).
Nightingale- That said, the poem itself doesn't tell readers the speaker's
gender or age.
Speaker
• The poem is told in the first-person, with the speaker speaking
to the nightingale through apostrophe.
• The nightingale, of course, is not a speaker in the poem, but a
singer that remains oblivious and uninterested in the speaker's
doubts and searching questions about the world.
 • The speaker moves through different emotions and
states of mind throughout the poem.
• At times, this person revels in the beauty of the
Ode to a nightingale song.
Nightingale- • At other points, the speaker longs for intoxication or
death to alleviate the pains of being human.
Speaker • Ultimately, the speaker is someone looking for
answers—but, as if to underscore the impossibility
of finding these answers, the poem ends with two
rhetorical questions.
 • "Ode to a Nightingale" is set in a lush forest some time during the spring, in
all likelihood, given the references to blooming flowers, the "seasonable
month," and "mid-May's eldest child."
• The forest is both "verdurous"—or very green and full of life—and gloomy,
Ode to a suggesting that the tree canopy is so thick that not much light actually gets
through.

Nightingale- • That said, it's not clear exactly what time of day it is, or how much time
passes over the course of the poem: the "shadows" in line 9 suggest some
kind of daylight, but the moon in line 36 suggests it may be night (or that
setting the day turns into night as the poem unfolds).
• And, as the name suggests, nightingales tend to sing at night (their name is
Old English for night singer; the song is sung by male birds to attract a
mate).
 • Generally, the poem does feel like it takes place in a
dark atmosphere. Indeed, the moon is imagined
rather than actually seen, and the fifth stanza is a
powerful evocation of the forest scene told using
the speaker's poetic creativity rather than actual
sensory information.
Ode to a • There is also an element of fantasy to the poem's
setting.
Nightingale- • This is constructed through allusion to mythology
(e.g., Lethe and Hippocrene) and the enchanting
setting effects of the nightingale's music (e.g., the mention
of "faery lands" in line 70).
• The poem is also keen to stress that its central
experience—listening to the nightingale's song—is
not tied to a specific point in time.
• The nightingale's song is something that could be
heard stretching all the way back to biblical times.
 • ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is one of the five great odes
John Keats composed in the summer and autumn of
1819.
• It was first published in July that year, in a journal
called Annals of the Fine Arts, and subsequently in
Keats’s third and final publication, Lamia, Isabella,
The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).
• ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is not a simple description of
Ode to a arcadian bliss, but an intense meditation on the
Nightingale contrast between the painful mortality that defines
human existence and the immortal beauty found in
the nightingale’s carefree song; and it considers
poetry’s ability to create a kind of rapt suspended
state between the two.
 • The weather in the summer of 1819 was exceptionally
fine. Keats was living in semi-rural Hampstead; he had
fallen in love with his neighbour, Fanny Brawne, and was
enjoying a period of fruitful and confident composition.
• Keats’s friend and housemate Charles Brown later
Ode to a recalled a particularly memorable day that month.

Nightingale • A nightingale had built a nest near their house and one
morning Keats, who been delighted by the nightingale’s
song, sat under a plum tree in the garden and remained
there for several hours, composing.
• He eventually returned with some scraps of paper which,
according to Brown, contained the ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’
Ode to a Nightingale
• The opening stanza of the poem establishes its entranced, almost hallucinatory mood.
We are in an obscure, rich world. The poet is drowsy and numb, as if he had taken
hemlock or opiates (both medicinal sedatives), or been immersed in the Lethe, the river
of forgetfulness in Greek myth.
• Pursuing this theme, in the second stanza Keats celebrates the way wine (‘vintage’)
evokes the sun-drenched landscape of classical pastoral: the ‘warm south’ of France,
Greece and Italy; Flora, the Italian goddess of flowering plants, and Hippocrene, the
fountain on Helicon, a mountain in Greece sacred to the Muses.
• Wine also promises temporary release from the dreadful realities described in the third
stanza, and Keats, who had recently lost his younger brother Tom to tuberculosis, and
who had trained as a surgeon, knew well the world in which ‘youth grows pale, and
spectre-thin, and dies’.
Ode to a Nightingale
• In stanzas 4–5 we move from the momentary pleasures of Bacchus to something apparently more
sustainable: a magical arbour conjured up by the poet’s imagination (‘the viewless wings of
Poesy’). It is a place of soft scents and haunting murmurs, where the ‘Queen-moon’ lives with her
fairy attendants (‘starry fays’), and the unseen flowers, fruits and trees are strangely distinct.
• Within this rich nook of the imagination, protected from dull reality, ‘easeful Death’ has, for the
poet, a powerful allure, and in stanza 6 he imagines a kind of consummation with the nightingale
in which he expires while listening to the bird’s ecstatic song:

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstacy!
Ode to a Nightingale
• With this realisation the poet loses his imagined intimacy with the
nightingale. Where he is weighed down by the heavy tread of history,
the bird moves easily through time and space, its unchanging song
heard by people of all types (‘emperor and clown’), by figures from
the remote past (the biblical Ruth) and in far-off lands:

The same that oft-times hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Ode to a Nightingale
• The word ‘forlorn’, in the sense of lost or deserted, brings the poet
abruptly back to his ‘sole self’, and the stark immediacy of human
existence. It is significant that the poem should turn on a word, rather
than a sound or a thought, as it has been about the ability of
language, and the imagination, to escape reality and create a world of
its own.

• As the nightingale’s song fades he accuses his imagination of

deceitfulness, for it can cheat him into believing certain things, but
not to such an extent that he is unaware of being cheated.
Ode to a Nightingale
• Yet Keats concludes the poem with unresolved questions. He has been beguiled
both by the music of the nightingale and by his own poetic skill, which is
everywhere evident in his brilliant evocations of tangible existence, from the
quick, mercurial movements (‘light-winged’) and effortless existence (‘full-
throated ease’) of the nightingale, to the ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy
ways’ of his poetic bower, and the ‘leaden-eyed despairs’ of human life.
• He cannot therefore dismiss what he has dimly perceived and described, for this
may, indeed, be the true reality:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?