The Full Text of “Ode to a Nightingale”
1My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
2 My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
3Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
4 One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
5'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
6 But being too happy in thine happiness,—
7 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
8 In some melodious plot
9 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
10 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
11O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
12 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
13Tasting of Flora and the country green,
14 Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
15O for a beaker full of the warm South,
16 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
17 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
18 And purple-stained mouth;
19 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
20 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
21Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
22 What thou among the leaves hast never known,
23The weariness, the fever, and the fret
24 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
25Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
26 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
27 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
28 And leaden-eyed despairs,
29 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
30 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
31Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
32 Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
33But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
34 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
35Already with thee! tender is the night,
36 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
37 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
38 But here there is no light,
39 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
40 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
41I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
42 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
43But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
44 Wherewith the seasonable month endows
45The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
46 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
47 Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
48 And mid-May's eldest child,
49 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
50 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
51Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
52 I have been half in love with easeful Death,
53Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
54 To take into the air my quiet breath;
55 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
56 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
57 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
58 In such an ecstasy!
59 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
60 To thy high requiem become a sod.
61Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
62 No hungry generations tread thee down;
63The voice I hear this passing night was heard
64 In ancient days by emperor and clown:
65Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
66 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
67 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
68 The same that oft-times hath
69 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
70 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
71Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
72 To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
73Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
74 As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
75Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
76 Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
77 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
78 In the next valley-glades:
79 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
80 Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
The Full Text of “Ode to a Nightingale”
1My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
2 My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
3Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
4 One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
5'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
6 But being too happy in thine happiness,—
7 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
8 In some melodious plot
9 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
10 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
11O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
12 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
13Tasting of Flora and the country green,
14 Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
15O for a beaker full of the warm South,
16 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
17 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
18 And purple-stained mouth;
19 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
20 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
21Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
22 What thou among the leaves hast never known,
23The weariness, the fever, and the fret
24 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
25Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
26 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
27 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
28 And leaden-eyed despairs,
29 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
30 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
31Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
32 Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
33But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
34 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
35Already with thee! tender is the night,
36 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
37 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
38 But here there is no light,
39 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
40 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
41I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
42 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
43But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
44 Wherewith the seasonable month endows
45The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
46 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
47 Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
48 And mid-May's eldest child,
49 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
50 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
51Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
52 I have been half in love with easeful Death,
53Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
54 To take into the air my quiet breath;
55 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
56 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
57 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
58 In such an ecstasy!
59 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
60 To thy high requiem become a sod.
61Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
62 No hungry generations tread thee down;
63The voice I hear this passing night was heard
64 In ancient days by emperor and clown:
65Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
66 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
67 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
68 The same that oft-times hath
69 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
70 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
71Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
72 To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
73Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
74 As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
75Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
76 Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
77 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
78 In the next valley-glades:
79 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
80 Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
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“Ode to a Nightingale” Introduction
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"Ode to a Nightingale" was written by the Romantic poet John Keats in the spring of 1819. At 80 lines, it is the longest of Keats's odes (which include poems like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy"). 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 (something the speaker would very much like to escape!). 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."
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“Ode to a Nightingale” Summary
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My heart is in pain and my body feels numb and tired. I feel like I've drunk from the poisonous hemlock plant, or like I've just taken some kind of opiate drug and fallen into the waters of Lethe (the river in the ancient Greek mythological underworld that makes you forget everything). Nightingale, I'm not jealous of how happy you sound—I feel like this because I am too happy to hear you sing so freely and beautifully. You are like a Dryad—a mythical tree spirit—in your patch of overgrown greenery and shadows, singing summer's song with all your might.
I wish I had some vintage wine that has been stored for years deep in the belly of the earth, wine that tastes of flowers and the countryside, of dancing, folk singing, and happy sunshine! If I could drink a bottle of wine that would transport me to warmer southern lands, one full of water from the mythical Hippocrene spring that grants poetic inspiration. The bubbles would play on the surface of the glass and in my wine-stained mouth. I could get drunk, forget the world, and escape with you, Nightingale, away into the dark forest.
I long to disappear, to forget what you, Nightingale, have never had to know. You live untouched by all the exhaustion, sickness, and worry that come with being part of the human world, where people sit and listen to each other groan in pain, where disease and old age are inevitable, and where youth fades and dies. For human beings, even just to think is to feel suffering, heavy sadness, and pain. In the human world beauty never lasts, and neither does love.
I will fly far away from the human world and to you! I don't need to get a ride from Bacchus (the god of wine). No, I can fly on the wings of poetry instead—even if human consciousness might confuse me and slow me down. Nightingale, I'm already with you in my imagination! The night is gentle, and the moon, the queen of the sky, is sitting on her throne surrounded by her stars. But it's dark where I'm standing, with only a small amount of light making its way through the lush but gloomy trees and winding, moss-covered paths.
I can't see the flowers in the forest around me, nor tell what fragrant plants hang from the trees. The darkness surrounds me, and I try to imagine what is growing in the surrounding space. It's spring time, and the forest is full of grass, shrubbery, and fruit-trees. There are hawthorns and sweet briars, and purple violets hiding under the mulch of leaves on the forest floor. And the musk-rose, with its luxurious scent, will be here soon, crowded by the humming mass of flies in the summer evening.
My mood darkens as I listen to your song, Nightingale. I've often romanticized death, written about and personified it in poetry, half-longing to die myself. Right now seems like a good time to die, to end the pain of human suffering while listening to you, Nightingale, let your ecstatic song pour out from your soul. If I died, you'd go on singing, but your song would be wasted on my ears.
You weren't born to die like me, immortal Nightingale! You don't have new generations of people breathing down your neck. The song I hear is the same one heard many, many years ago in the time of emperors and court jesters. Perhaps it's even unchanged since Biblical times, when Ruth (who stuck by her mother-in-law after she herself was widowed) stood in fields of corn. It's the same song that would charm open the windows of ships on dangerous seas, the same song that could be heard in the forlorn lands where fairies dwell.
Thinking about the word "forlorn" makes me feel like I'm alone again! Goodbye, Nightingale. My imagination can't trick me into thinking I can really fly away with you. Goodbye, Goodbye! Your song grows quiet as you fly past the meadows, over the nearby stream, and up the hill-side. Now you're in the next valley. Was this whole experience real or an illusion? The nightingale's song has gone. Am I awake or asleep?
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“Ode to a Nightingale” Themes
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Death, Time, and Impermanence
“Ode to a Nightingale” dwells on the idea that nothing can last. The speaker sits in a forest, listening to the beautiful song of the nightingale. The speaker perceives “immortality” in the figure of the bird—a creature that, the speaker believes, is unplagued by human anxiety about the inevitable march of time towards death, and whose song has echoed across the centuries. Eventually, though, even the nightingale flies away—leaving the speaker with a deep sense of loss and a seeming reassurance that everything inevitably fades.
A good way to think of the poem, then, is as an elegy for things that haven’t yet died. The speaker’s ability to enjoy the world is dampened by the awareness that nothing will be around forever. Perhaps that’s why the speaker is paradoxically “too happy” to hear the nightingale’s song in the first stanza. This happiness is, in a sense, already over—and thereby also feels excessive to the speaker.
Later the speaker focuses on how time relentlessly presses down on people, producing “weariness” and sickness and making people age. Youthful vigor and beauty “fade” as a slow march towards death takes over. Even “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.” In other words, beauty cannot stay beautiful, and “new Love” will also soon be gone. Even the natural world comes to represent the crushing progress of time to the speaker, as flowers fade "fast" and become covered by a mush of autumn leaves surrounded by buzzing flies (insects that are often representative of death in literature). Considering all this, the speaker states that it “Now more than ever seems it rich to die” and no longer live with “pain.” The speaker thinks it might be easier (or “easeful”) to just do away with time and impermanence at the earliest opportunity—via death.
The speaker also weighs up the human situation against that of the nightingale, calling the latter “immortal” and imagining its song as being the same as the song heard in “ancient” and even biblical times. But this, of course, is an exaggeration. The bird is not really immortal, but just appears so because its song is so beautiful that it seems like a small victory over time and death, briefly—and only temporarily—distracting the speaker from all this anxiety and grief about the fleeting nature of all things.
Ultimately, though, even the nightingale offers no lasting comfort. The speaker repeatedly bids it “adieu” (goodbye) as it flies away, starkly confirming the speaker’s anxiety that nothing good or beautiful can last forever. This disorientates the speaker, who wonders if this whole experience has been part of a “vision” or a “dream.” The poem’s final question can be interpreted in a number of ways, but perhaps it perfectly embodies the speaker’s feelings about death, time, and impermanence: “Do I wake or sleep?” That is, perhaps the speaker even while alive is already asleep—because the inevitability of death makes life itself into nothing more than a kind of waking dream.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Intoxication, Consciousness, and Isolation
The speaker wants to escape all the pressures and suffering that come with being human, and at times muses that drink or drugs might offer a release. That's because the speaker feels that consciousness itself is a kind of burden—that merely "to think is to be full of sorrow." The speaker thus wonders if intoxication, by dulling the senses, might help ease that sorrow. And though the speaker claims not to be envious of the “happy” nightingale—which doesn’t seem troubled in the same way—the bird serves as a reminder that the speaker can’t truly escape human awareness (other than through death). The bird, and the beauty of its song, starts to represent freedom from the limiting, isolating confines of the anxious human mind.
The poem both opens and ends with the speaker’s drowsiness, suggesting that the speaker finds consciousness exhausting. In the poem’s opening lines, the speaker describes feeling a “drowsy numbness” as if the speaker is drunk or has ingested an “opiate” (opiates are drugs derived from the poppy plant, including heroin, morphine, and, of course, opium). The speaker compares this to sinking in the river Lethe—the river in Greek mythology that causes forgetfulness in those who drink its waters.
In the second stanza, the speaker discusses a specific longing for alcohol. The speaker wants “a draught of vintage” or a “beaker full of the warm South.” This draws a link, then, between intoxication and comfort (the temporary relief from suffering). Drinking would dull the speaker’s perceptions, “leav[ing] the world unseen.” But the speaker doesn’t really want to get drunk—instead, the speaker is longing for purity and beauty, and it’s this longing that underpins the speaker’s focus on the nightingale’s beautiful song.
It's interesting that the speaker doesn’t actually describe the nightingale’s song at length. Instead, the poem focuses on the speaker’s personal awareness and how that is affected by the beauty of the nightingale’s singing. Even when trying to focus on something external, then, the speakers’ experience is always filtered through the speaker’s own perception; consciousness surrounds the speaker like the walls of a prison. Consciousness is thus not just exhausting, but also isolating.
Ultimately, the speaker casts aside intoxication as a means of escaping the suffering that comes with consciousness. The speaker rejects “Bacchus and his pards”—the Greek God of wine and his beastly followers—for the “viewless wings of Poesy.” In other words, the speaker briefly thinks that poetry and the imagination will solve the problem of consciousness, even “though the dull brain perplexes and retards” (that is, conscious thought gets in the way of poetry).
In the sixth stanza, the speaker also considers death as an alternative to intoxication. This would end the speaker’s suffering, but, as the speaker admits, would make also make the speaker “a sod” (a piece of earth) unable to perceive the beauty of the nightingale’s song. Suddenly, then, the poem briefly argues in favor of human consciousness because it at least allows for the experience of beauty, whether in the natural world or in art.
The speaker’s anxiety about conscious thought doesn’t find any comforting resolution. Though the poem considers what it means to have human awareness, the speaker admits that there are no easy answers. The temporary joy of the nightingale’s song, which seemed to distract the speaker from these questions, is over soon enough. This returns the speaker back to the speaker’s “sole self,” again suggesting that ultimately people are alone, confined within the limits of their own minds. And, as if to underscore this irresolution, the poem ends on a question that strikes at its heart: is the speaker awake or asleep? Dreaming, of course, allows dreamers to escape the limits of their reality—which is why the speaker feels that the brief glimpses of freedom in the poem may have been illusory all along.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Art, Nature, and Beauty
“Ode to a Nightingale” explores the relationship between two different types of beauty: the world of art created by humankind, and the rich variety of life created by nature. The poem questions whether nature—represented by the nightingale and its song—represents a kind of beauty greater than anything that humans can make, a beauty that is somehow purer and more eternal. The speaker considers this question throughout the poem, but ultimately finds no simple answer.
The speaker in “Ode to a Nightingale” is not detached from the poem itself—that is, the reader knows that the speaker is a poet and thereby wrapped up in trying to create beauty and art. The speaker weighs up the possible beauty of poetry (standing in for all art) against the overwhelming natural beauty of the nightingale’s song.
This opposition between two different types of beauty is outlined from the very beginning of the poem. In the first stanza, the speaker claims to delight in the nightingale’s song. The speaker is literally “too happy” to hear the bird’s call, its “full-throated ease.” Nature, here, is presented as engaging in a kind of creativity that is effortless and pure. The speaker doesn’t “envy” the bird—but even mentioning envy suggests that there might be a reason to harbor some kind of resentment towards what the bird represents. That is, the speaker perceives the bird song as a kind of eternal perfection, a beauty created by nature that humankind, for all its efforts and strife, struggles to match.
In the fourth stanza, however, the speaker momentarily does feel that human art is a worthy partner of nature's beauty. The speaker will “fly” to the nightingale on “the viewless wings of Poesy.” Perhaps, the speaker wonders, poetry can become the speaker’s own birdsong (and the sheer beauty of the poem itself might support this view). But the speaker’s contemplation of the nightingale deepens and undoes this brief moment of self-confidence. The speaker perceives the nightingale’s song as “immortal,” imagining the bird’s voice to have remained pretty much unchanged for millennia (even back to the biblical times of “Ruth”). Human art, on the other hand, is corrupted by interpersonal rivalry and competition—the “hungry generations” that “tread” people down (and it's worth noting that Keats was no stranger to the scorn and wrath of literary society!).
Soon enough, then, the speaker rejects “fancy” (the creative imagination) as a “cheat[er].” Fancy, personified as a “deceiving elf,” can never match the pure and simple beauty of the nightingale. That’s why, as the nightingale flies away from the speaker, untroubled by any of the speaker’s concerns, its song starts to sound “plaintive.” The melody becomes sad and mournful (no longer the happy song of stanza 1) because it reminds the speaker of their own limitations. And though human art can undoubtedly be beautiful, the poem seems to argue that art and nature exist in two distinct categories.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ode to a Nightingale”
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Lines 1-4
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:The poem opens in media res—in the middle of the action. The speaker, alone in the forest, listens to the nightingale's beautiful song. Through simile, the speaker's mood is compared to a "drowsy numbness" full of "aches" and "pains," similar to the intoxicated feeling that comes with ingesting hemlock (a toxic plant) or "opiate[s]" (a class of drugs that includes opium and heroin). It's not immediately clear yet to the reader just what is causing this state of mind (and body), however.
The soft /m/, /n/, /s/, and /l/ consonance and /d/ alliteration in these opening four lines give the opening its "drunk" and "drowsy" atmosphere:
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:These sounds are intended to intoxicate the reader, luring them into the poem as though through hypnosis. In other words, the poem wants to put the reader in a similar state of mind that the speaker is in during the poem.
These lines also help set up the poem's main themes (without spelling them out too explicitly). The reader can see/hear that the speaker is in some kind of psychic pain—and it will be up to the rest of the poem to explore the causes of this pain. Intoxication—which numbs the powers of perception—sets out the speaker's anxiety about the limits of consciousness (how it is like a mental trap). And nature is immediately an important presence, hinting at the poem's exploration of different types of beauty (specifically those of human-made art and those of the natural world). The allusion to Lethe (pronounced lee-thee) hints at the poem's concerns about death and decay (time and impermanence). Lethe is a river in the ancient Greek mythological underworld—and drinking from its waters is said to annihilate the drinker's memory (the word "Lethe" translates as "oblivion").
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Lines 5-10
'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. -
Lines 11-14
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! -
Lines 15-20
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,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: -
Lines 21-26
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; -
Lines 27-30
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. -
Lines 31-35
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! -
Lines 35-40
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. -
Lines 41-45
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
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; -
Lines 46-50
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. -
Lines 51-54
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; -
Lines 55-60
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. -
Lines 61-64
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown: -
Lines 65-70
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. -
Lines 71-74
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. -
Lines 75-80
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?
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“Ode to a Nightingale” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is a consistent presence in "Ode to a Nightingale" (which is also full of consonance and assonance). This is a very beautiful sounding poem, which is part of the point; the speaker is trying, in part, to use poetry to achieve the same kind of beauty embodied by the nightingale's song.
Alliteration also reflects the lines' content in certain points. In lines 1 to 3, for example, note the many /d/ sounds. This is a heavy, voiced consonant that adds a sense of weight and insisting thudding to these lines—which is appropriate, given that the speaker is talking about being very down:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drainsThe /d/ sound returns in line 12: "deep-delved" supports the image of "vintage" wine cooled in the belly of the earth. The two /d/ sounds are again quite strong, as though being dug into the line themselves.
Later in the first stanza, the alliteration of "singest" and "summer" suggests the first notes of a tune (as though the poem is going to play the /s/ song!). In doing so, alliteration evokes the sound of the nightingale itself. The /s/ sound is again associated with beauty and comfort via the alliteration (and broader consonance) in stanza 2:
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,The /s/ sound is connected to the bird throughout the poem, in fact. For instance, in line 59, the two /s/ sounds of "still" and "sing" echo the first mention of the nightingale's song in the first stanza (again, "singest" and "summer"). And in line 65, the alliteration suggests the continuity of the nightingale through the ages, from Biblical times all the way to the poem's present. The uniformity of /s/ sounds in "self-same song" suggests a tune that has gone unchanged over centuries, perhaps even millennia.
Line 15 also introduces alliteration start on the bright /b/ sound:
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,The /b/ sound rings out across these lines, adding a burst of brightness to this description. In line 17 the alliteration (and consonance) is almost onomatopoeic with the phrase "beaded bubbles." Try reading these lines out loud to notice how the /b/ cause the mouth to make a bubble-blowing action!
Another striking example stretches across the end of the second stanza and into the start of the third:
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
These /f/ sounds link three key components of the poem: the act of forgetting, the forest in which the speaker stands, and literal and metaphorical distance. The speaker can hear the distant sound of the nightingale among the trees, and longs to "fade" away from the human world, to "forget" the suffering and pain of human consciousness. This /f/ is a soft sound too, representing the way that "fad[ing]" is a gradual process.
The final key example is near the end of the poem. In line 70 "Faery" chimes with "forlorn" (and the latter word is then repeated at the start of line 71). This echoes the earlier association of /f/ with "fading," but also links the idea of being "forlorn"—sad and melancholy—with fantasy. If the "faery lands" are tied to the human imagination, which the speaker names with another /f/ word, "fancy," then it is in part this ability to deceive themselves that makes people "forlorn."
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Allusion
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Hyperbole
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Paradox
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Personification
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Repetition
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Rhetorical Question
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Simile
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"Ode to a Nightingale" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Hemlock
- Opiate
- Lethe-wards
- Thy/thine
- Lot
- Thou
- Light-winged Dryad
- Beechen green
- Draught of vintage
- Hath
- Deep-delved
- Flora
- Provençal
- Mirth
- Beaker
- The warm South
- Hippocrene
- Fret
- Palsy
- Spectre
- Leaden-eyed despairs
- Bacchus and his pards
- Poesy
- Retards
- Starry Fays
- Verdurous
- Embalmed darkness
- Seasonable
- Hawthorn/Eglantine/Violets/Musk-rose
- Murmurous
- Darkling
- Easeful
- A mused rhyme
- Abroad
- Ectsacy
- High requiem
- Sod
- Ruth
- Alien corn
- Oft-times
- Casements
- Forlorn
- Adieu
- Fancy
- Plaintive anthem
- Valley-glades
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Hemlock is a poisonous plant, famously ingested by Socrates as a means of committing suicide.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ode to a Nightingale”
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Form
As the title suggests, this poem is an ode. The ode is a verse form that dates back to ancient Greece. Keats's poem consists of eight stanzas of ten lines apiece, making this the longest of his odes.
The first stanza discusses the speaker's "drowsy numbness" brought on by the beauty of the nightingale's song; in the second, the speaker longs for intoxication to dim the speaker's senses and conscious mind, so that the speaker can escape the suffering of the human world (stanza three). Stanza four is a brief but vital shift, and sees the speaker momentarily believing that poetry ("Poesy") can bring about comfort. The speaker puts this faith in poetry into practice in stanza five, conjuring a rich and sensuous vision of the forest through beautiful word selection; then, in stanza six, the speaker's mood darkens again. In stanza seven, the speaker weighs up the unchanging nature of the nightingale's song through the ages against the tiring and turbulent human world. Finally, in stanza eight, the speaker is pretty much back where things started—only now the temporary beauty and solace offered by the nightingale has "fled" too.
In its original form, the ode was often celebratory; this ode does celebrate the beauty of the nightingale's song, but the overall tone is searching and melancholic. The way that the poem seems to meander through different emotions and subjects is part of Keats's attempt to find a form that would suit what he called the negative capability. This term relates to an artist's ability to strive for beauty over philosophical certainty, and indeed to not shy away from intellectual confusion or irresolution. Perhaps that's why this poem ends not with a statement, but two rhetorical questions that ask whether the speaker's experience was even real. Likewise, Keats's poem does not fit into the more traditional formats originally established for odes (associated with the ancient poets Homer and Pindar). Keats developed his ode form because he felt that the other established forms did not quite fit what he wanted his poems to do.
One other point worth noting is that odes, in the classical era, were generally sung and/or accompanied by music and dance. Music is an important part of this poem, with the speaker hearing a particular beauty in the nightingale's song that seems to be partly based on the fact that this song doesn't require any language. That is, the song sounds pure and free because it isn't weighed down by words, which would signal the presence of human consciousness.
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Meter
As with Keats's other odes, "Ode to a Nightingale" is mostly written in iambic pentameter. Recall that iambic pentameter just means that there are five poetic feet per line, each with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern (da-DUM). Line 2 provides a clear example:
My sense, | as though | of hem- | lock I | had drunk,
The general regularity of the meter has a hypnotic effect on the reader which, combined with the poem's sensuous sound, is intended to draw the reader into the poem in the same way that the nightingale's song has caught the attention of the speaker.
That's not to say that there aren't a number of metrical variations throughout. In the very first line, for example, the second foot is actually a trochee (stressed-unstressed), helping focus attention on the speaker's aching heart before returning to the steady iambic meter:
My heart | aches, and | a drow- | sy numb- | ness pains
Another interesting variation comes in line 10:
Singest | of sum- | mer in | full-throat- | ed ease.
The trochee at the start of the line (Singest) makes the line feel more active, conveying the way that the nightingale's song is both instinctive and "full-throated." In the nightingale's song the speaker hears a kind of freedom, and this is reflected in the loosening of the iambic pentameter in this line. It's worth comparing this line to the last, in which another trochee highlights "Fled" at the start of the first foot. Again, this seems to underscore the bird's freedom and, in this case, to emphasize the speaker's isolation:
Fled is | that mu- | sic:—Do | I wake | or sleep?
Little blips in the meter like this pop up throughout the poem to keep things interesting and draw readers' ears to certain phrases, even though overall the iambic pattern stays pretty steady. Eagle-eyed readers will notice, however, that there is one line in each stanza that doesn't conform to the pentameter—the eighth line in each stanza. These lines are still iambic, but have only three feet, making them iambic trimeter. Take line 8 (note that "melodious" scans as having just three syllables):
In some | melo- | dious plot
And line 16 (which is actually missing a syllable at the end of the line):
And pur- | ple-stained | mouth;
And line 28:
And lead- | ened-eyed | despairs,
This variation again keeps things interesting and conveys a sense of virtuosity or skill on the part of the speaker—which is important in a poem that is, at least in part, about the beauty of poetry itself.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Ode to a Nightingale" has a regular rhyme scheme throughout. Each of its ten-line stanzas follows the pattern
ABABCDECDE
This is a fairly ornate pattern that demands a great deal of skill, especially to sustain it over eight stanzas. The poem is in part the speaker's attempt to find a poetic equivalent to the pure beauty of the nightingale's song—a project which the speaker ultimately feels is doomed to failure—and the dexterity needed to manage the rhyme scheme is an important part of this desire. In other words, the complicated rhyme scheme showcases the speaker's skill and is meant to highlight the power and beauty of poetry itself.
Sometimes, the rhyme pairs in themselves tell almost act out the poem miniature. For example, take the third stanza—where the speaker outlines a longing to escape the world of human suffering (and exist in the more pure and natural world of the nightingale). The speaker wishes to "forget" (line 21) the "fret" (line 23) of being human, and longs to have "never known" the "groan[s]" of humanity that represent its suffering. Or, for example, take the rhyme of "self" and "deceiving elf" in lines 72 and 74. This rhyme foregrounds the way that the speaker—the poem's "self"—has been "cheat[ed]" by their imagination ("fancy"), here personified as an "elf." This ties the speaker to the act of deception, underscoring the way that it is ultimately self-deception.
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“Ode to a Nightingale” Speaker
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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 tragically experienced in the world of human suffering and disease (Keats had recently lost his brother to tuberculosis). That said, the poem itself doesn't tell readers the speaker's gender or age.
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 nightingales song. At other points, the speaker longs for intoxication or death to alleviate the pains of being human. 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.
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“Ode to a Nightingale” Setting
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"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, suggesting that the tree canopy is so thick that not much light actually gets through. 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 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 speaking, 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 (in other words, the speaker is imagining the surrounding scene rather than actually documenting it).
There is also an element of fantasy to the poem's setting. This is constructed through allusion to mythology (e.g., Lethe and Hippocrene) and the enchanting 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. That is, as the speaker expresses in lines 62-67, the nightingale's song is something that could be heard stretching all the way back to biblical times.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Ode to a Nightingale”
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Literary Context
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 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). 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.
Historical Context
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 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 (these sorts of critics might well be the "hungry generations [that] tread [the speaker down]" in line 62).
Indeed, the odes were written during a period when 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.
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More “Ode to a Nightingale” Resources
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External Resources
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Stephen Fry Reads the Poem — An excellent reading of "Ode to a Nightingale" by British national treasure Stephen Fry.
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A Contemporary's Review of Keats — A link to John Gibson Lockhart's snarky review of Keats's poetry in 1818.
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Portrait of John Keats by Joseph Severn — A painting done of Keats by his friend and contemporary Joseph Severn.
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More From Keats — A link to a detailed biography of Keats as well as more poems, including his other odes.
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Singing with the Nightingales — A beautiful recording first broadcast in 1924. This is a collaboration between a nightingale and a cello!
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Keats
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