Ode to a Nightingale

Ode to a Nightingale

The Poem
“Ode to a Nightingale” is a poem in eight numbered stanzas; as the title suggests, it takes the form of a direct
address to a nightingale. The speaker, evidently the poet John Keats himself, hears a nightingale singing. This
beautiful but melancholy sound, which has inspired legends since the time of ancient Greece, fills him with
complex and conflicting emotions. It makes him happy because he can empathize with the bird’s zest for

living and procreating at the height of the spring season; at the same time, it makes him sad because he is
alone and has been preoccupied with morbid thoughts.
In stanza 2, Keats wishes he had a whole “beaker full” of wine so that he could get intoxicated and lose
consciousness. He describes the red wine in loving detail, then goes on to specify the mortal woes from which
he would like to escape—primarily those associated with old age, sickness, and death. “Where youth grows
pale and spectre-thin and dies” refers to his brother Tom, who had recently died of tuberculosis, the disease
which was to claim Keats’s own life in less than three years.
Since Keats has no wine, in stanza 4 he decides to escape by creating poetry. He makes his poem engrossing
by seeming to take the reader along with him in the process of creating it. He will become a wild bird in his
imagination and share in the nightingale’s view of the world. This notion represents the essence of the
Romantic spirit: the attempt to achieve what is known to be impossible.
Nightingales are rather small, retiring birds that live in forests, thickets, and hedgerows. Consequently, in
stanza 5 Keats imagines the nightingale’s world as being dark and mysterious but at that time of year full of
the scents of blossoming plants. This is the high point of the poem, but he is unable to sustain his illusion.
Thoughts of death intrude. In stanza 6, he confesses sometimes to “have been half in love with easeful
Death.” He feels comforted by his experience of sharing in the nightingale’s immortal consciousness,
however; he realizes that life goes on, and his own death is a small matter in the overall scheme of things. The
idea of death even seems “rich.” In line 1 of the seventh stanza, Keats addresses the nightingale as “immortal
Bird” and traces the nightingale’s song through historical and magical settings.
Then his near-religious experience comes to an end. He is inexorably drawn back into the world of reality,
with all its mortal concerns. The bird’s plaintive song fades into the distance, and the poet is left wondering
about the validity and nature of his experience.
Forms and Devices
This entire poem is based on a single poetic conceit that is so matter-of-factly taken for granted that it is easy
to overlook: The poem tacitly assumes that the bird to whom Keats is addressing his ode is immortal—that in
fact only one nightingale exists and has ever existed. It looks exactly the same and sounds exactly the same as
birds of that species have looked and sounded for countless centuries. Furthermore, the nightingale is
immortal because it has no conception of death. Only human beings suffer from the fear of death and the
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feeling of futility with which death taints all human endeavor. Finally, the bird can be considered immortal
because of the familiar Greek legend that the nightingale is the metamorphized soul of the ravished princess
Philomela.
The bird that Keats hears singing can be only a few years old at most, yet the subtle assumption of its
immortality is perfectly natural because the nightingale looks the same and sounds the same as its ancestors,
which were heard “in ancient days by emperor and clown” and even further back by Ruth, whose story is told
in the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament. Keats was an ardent admirer of William Shakespeare, and the
naturalness of the poetic conceit in “Ode to a Nightingale” shows that Keats appreciated and understood the
essence of Shakespeare’s greatness, which lay in his use of simple, natural imagery—rather than imagery
employed by some of his better-educated contemporaries that was pretentious, bookish, and artificial.
Keats’s outstanding poetic gift was his ability to evoke vivid images in the mind of his reader. “Ode to a
Nightingale” is full of such vivid images, the most famous of which is his “magic casements, opening on the
foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” Because of the spell that Keats has created up to this point, the
sensitive reader is given a glimpse of those bright, blue, foam-crested seas through those magic
casements—but only a glimpse of that magical world is ever allowed to any mortal, and then both Keats and
his reader must return to reality, with its troubles, fears, and disappointments.
Another example of Keats’s inspired imagery is contained in the lines, “The coming musk-rose, full of dewy
wine,/ The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” With one stroke, Keats creates a large half-open
flower glowing with soft interior lighting like a comfortable pub where the flies like to gather with their
elbows on the tables to sip wine and talk about whatever flies might talk about on long summer eves.
Other striking images in “Ode to a Nightingale” are the beaker “full of the warm South” that has “beaded
bubbles winking at the brim,” the syncopated effect of “fast fading violets covered up in leaves,” and poor
Ruth standing in tears in a land so alien and unsympathetic that even the very grain in the fields looks strange
and unappetizing.
Keats soon discovered that his forte lay in his vivid visual imagination, and his greatest poems are so crowded
with visual imagery that they seem like beautiful murals.
Themes and Meanings
In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats is really only talking about the beauty of nature and how painful it is to
think of dying and having to leave it. These are thoughts with which every reader can identify. What makes
Keats a great poet is that the feelings he expresses are common to all humanity. This feature, found in all of
his greatest poetry, is called universality, and it is generally regarded as the distinguishing feature of all great
art. An aspiring writer can learn from Keats that the secret of creating important work is to deal with basic
human emotions.
Keats was going through considerable mental anguish when he wrote this poem. His brother Tom had just
died of tuberculosis. He himself had premonitions of his own death from the same disease, which turned out
to be true. He was in love with young Fanny Brawne but found it impossible to marry her because he had
rejected the career in medicine for which he had been trained; he was finding it impossible to make a living as
a writer. Like many present-day poets, he was tortured by the fact that he had chosen an impractical vocation;
yet, it was the vocation for which he believed he was born, and it was the only thing he wanted to do.
The ode has a piquant, bittersweet flavor, not unlike the flavor of a good red wine, because it deliberately
blends thoughts of beauty and decay, joy and suffering, love and death. Keats had rejected the teachings of the
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established church, as can be seen in his posthumously published sonnet entitled “Written in Disgust of
Vulgar Superstition,” in which he describes Christian church dogma as a “black spell.” This left him in the
position of having to find his own answers to questions that the church had automatically answered for
centuries. Keats thought that all religions consisted of stories made up by imaginative individuals to mask the
real truth about life. Borrowing from Greek mythology and other sources, he tried to create new stories;
however, as a modern man with a modern scientific education, he knew that his stories were inventions,
whereas the poets and prophets of the past really believed in the gods about which they talked; they were not
using them as mere poetic metaphors. This is why Keats cannot stay with his nightingale. The elusive bird
might even be seen as a metaphor for the alienated condition of modern man.