Ode to a Nightingale

By John Keats

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

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-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

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 ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

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

John Keats was a prominent English Romantic poet, known for his deep emotional
expression and vivid imagery. Born in 1795, he produced a remarkable body of work in
a short time, as his career was tragically cut short when he died at the age of 25 from
tuberculosis. Keats wrote during the later phase of the Romantic era, a period marked
by a focus on nature, beauty, imagination, and emotion. Unlike the political concerns of
some Romantic poets, Keats was more concerned with the aesthetic experience and
the transient nature of life. He was greatly influenced by classical Greek literature and
the Romantic ideals of intense emotion and individual experience, often reflecting on
beauty and mortality in his poetry. His famous works, such as "Ode to a Nightingale",
"Ode on a Grecian Urn", and "To Autumn", explore these themes with intricate language
and sensory detail.

Keats' poetic style is characterized by rich imagery, sensuous detail, and the use of
negative capability—a concept he coined to describe the ability to accept uncertainty
and the unknown. His odes, in particular, demonstrate his mastery in evoking complex
emotional states, balancing joy and sorrow, life and death. Themes of beauty, love,
nature, and the inevitability of death run through much of his poetry, especially as Keats
himself faced the harsh reality of his own mortality. His work often meditates on the
fleeting nature of human experiences, as seen in "Ode on a Grecian Urn", where the
static beauty of art is contrasted with the impermanence of life. Keats’ legacy as one of
the greatest Romantic poets remains influential, particularly for his ability to find
profound meaning in the contemplation of beauty, nature, and the transience of human
existence.
 Poem Summary

"Ode to a Nightingale" was written by John Keats in the spring of 1819. At 80 lines, it is
the longest of Keats's odes. The poem focuses on a speaker standing in a dark forest,
listening to the beguiling and beautiful song of the nightingale bird. This provokes a
deep and meandering meditation by the speaker on time, death, beauty, nature, and
human suffering. At times, the speaker finds comfort in the nightingale's song and at
one point even believes that poetry will bring the speaker metaphorically closer to the
nightingale. By the end of the poem, however, the speaker seems to be an isolated
figure—the nightingale flies away, and the speaker unsure of whether the whole
experience has been "a vision" or a "waking dream."

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, 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 hawthorne, eglantine, violets,
and the musk-rose, “the murmurous 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 faery
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.

Poem Analysis

With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’ 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 set against the eternal renewal of the
nightingale’s fluid music. 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” and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to
follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the
nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself
with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to
embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the
nightingale’s music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But
when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself,
recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the inescapable. As the
nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken,
unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

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.