Ode to a Nightingale

The poem is an ode, a celebratory lyric poem addressed to something, in this case, a nightingale. Conventionally, the ode is formal in tone and regular in structure. It regards its subject with reverence and celebration. In ancient Greece and Rome, odes were public poems performed to the accompaniment of music. They typically celebrated victories and public figures. Romantic poets like Keats took the ode form and used it to pay homage to Romantic ideals such as the relationship between self, nature, and art. In the process, they made the ode a deeply personal form, as can be seen in “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Though “Ode to a Nightingale” follows a regular stanzaic structure and an ABABCDECDE rhyme scheme, its tone and mood deviates from that of a traditional ode. For one, the poem is rhapsodic in tone, where the speaker loses himself in admiring the nightingale. In doing so, the distinction between the speaker and his subject grows blurred. In the end, the poet’s ode is as much to the nightingale as it is to the human condition. While traditional odes—meant to praise a subject—are laudatory, “Ode to a Nightingale” has a bittersweet edge. The poet admires the nightingale, but its lightness of being also reminds him of the heaviness of human life.

The eight-stanza poem (each stanza composed of 10 lines) is structured as a movement mimicking the nightingale’s flight and buoyancy. One of the fundamental conceits—metaphor and notion—of the poem is that the nightingale is immortal. This of course is more hyperbolic than factual, since the nightingale, being an animal, is as mortal as a human. In fact, the lifespan of the bird is much shorter than that of an average human being. What is immortal about the nightingale is its song and spirit—this has remained unchanged and free through the millennia. As a bird, the nightingale is free from the constraints and forced changes of consumerist human existence. It is this freedom that the speaker considers immortality. In a metaphorical sense, the nightingale’s song represents the immortality offered by art. Art outlives its artist, and it is timeless in that sense. Just like a piece of music or song can remain in the public consciousness for centuries after its creator’s passing, the nightingale’s song is immortal. Buried in his admiration of this timeless song is the speaker’s hope that his creation—the poem he is writing—withstands the same test of time. Thus, the poem is self-referential, examining the poetic process and the poet’s concerns about the work being created.

The poem’s wistful, bittersweet mood is established from the first line itself, with the speaker describing his state of rapture as “a drowsy numbness” (Line 1), as if he has drunk an intoxicant or a poison. This odd comparison immediately sets up a continuum between delight and pain, beauty and death. The speaker knows the simile is strange, because he hastens to assure the bird that he is not envious of its lot, rather the bird’s joy has caused an excess of emotion in him. His state is “too happy” (Line 6), a phrase that already establishes the premise that the speaker’s state is imbalanced and temporary. It cannot be sustained. The speaker also sets up a binary between lightness and heaviness, and illumination and darkness. From the very beginning, the nightingale is described as a “light-winged Dryad of the trees” (Line 7), filled with a buoyancy and spontaneity the speaker feels evades him. Because of this lightness of being, the nightingale can burst into songs of summer with “full-throated ease” (Line 10). The reference to dryads, tree-nymphs in Greek mythology, is the first of many such mentions from Greek and Latin mythology in the poem. Keats often uses imagery from classical Greek literature and culture to signify beauty and perfection in his poems. Further, a dryad being a creature who embodies a tree as a beautiful nymph, it can be seen as a symbol of transformation and transmutation. A dryad can switch between its tree-form and humanoid form; the speaker longs for a similar ability to inhabit liminal states.

In Stanza 2, the bird’s song—associated with summer’s warmth and headiness—reminds him of the south of France (Provencal), with its vintage wine, green countryside, and “sunburnt mirth” (Line 14). There is a reference to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring. The poetic tension in these lines arises from the speaker’s actual reality and the reality (“mirth” or joy, warmth, celebration) for which he longs. It becomes apparent that the speaker is caught between the melancholy of his life and the little flashes of respite nature and art provide him. Envisioning the wine of Provencal, he imagines the purple wine to be the fountain on Mount Helicon, sacred to the nine muses of the arts and music in Greek mythology. For the speaker, there is no separation between art, nature, and pleasure: Whichever state enables him to lose himself or his sense of ego is desirable. The wine enables the speaker to fly away with the nightingale and “fade away into the forest dim” (Line 20), or the beautiful, tantalizing unknown, where the speaker is free from his burdens.

The wistful alliterative “f” sounds continue into the third stanza with the line, “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” (Line 21). They return in Line 23 with the phrase, “the fever and the fret.” For the speaker, the dim, green world of leaves and trees is a break from a world in which mortality reigns supreme. The poem’s biggest dilemma is the problem of human frailty, and the third stanza brings this theme home. The world signifies fever and worry, groaning and greying men, palsy and pale youths who die. The line, “where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies” (Line 26) is particularly poignant, since Keats lost his younger brother to tuberculosis not long before the poem was written. Keats himself would die of the disease when he was 25. With penicillin and antibiotics yet to be discovered, tuberculosis—known as consumption because of the accompanying weight loss—was a virtual death sentence in the 19th century.

Wine not having served him well as an escape (“Bacchus and his pards” in Line 32 refer to the Greek god of wine and revelry), the speaker turns to “the viewless wings of poesy” (Line 33). The wings are viewless because they are unseen; it is the poetic imagination that lets the speaker fly. Imagination lets him travel beyond the confines of the “dull brain” (Line 34) or rational mind that is finite. The speaker’s choice of vocabulary here shows his disdain for empty logic and literal thinking. Such thought confuses and slows the mind, since it believes the only reality is that which is seen right now. The speaker shuts off this part of his mind and soars with the bird into the dark, romantic, scented landscape of moon, stars, fairies, forests, and flowers. In this world, magic and nature are intertwined, because nature in all its beauty is miraculous and magical.

In Stanzas 4 and 5, the speaker often describes his path with the nightingale as dark and mysterious (“verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” [Line 40]; “embalmed darkness” [Line 43]). Again, the use of slightly negative descriptors for a state of rapture lends the poem its trademark edge. For instance, “embalmed” refers to a preserved and perfumed corpse, implying that the darkness in which the speaker finds himself is the peaceful dark of death. This contradiction can be better understood if one considers that for the speaker death is not necessarily a negative concept; nor does it signify decay. For him, death is escape from mortal troubles. The speaker’s description of the various flowers he smells in the dark is accurate and grounds the poem in its time and place, the “seasonable month” (Line 44) between spring and summer. Thus, it gives the reader a clear sense of the season in which the speaker finds himself and the season he anticipates. Hawthorn, wild rose (eglantine), violet, and rose are all flowers that bloom in the spring. The fast-fading violet implies spring is at an end, and summer, the season of warmth and joy in the poet’s native England, is fast approaching.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker expands on his relationship with the idea of death. The language used to describe his longing for death is sensual and erotic, as if he is wooing a lover (“Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme" [Line 53]). The erotic charge of the speaker’s words suggests he romanticizes death. He pleads for death to “take” (Line 34) his breath into the air and thinks this moment, when his mind is pleasurably still, is “rich” (Line 55) or ripe for death. The curious use of the descriptor “rich” for death, which otherwise is associated with emptiness, continues the motif of unusual phrases and metaphors. Further, the speaker wishes his death throes would be accompanied by the nightingale pouring its soul out into an ecstatic song. The symbols of sexual rapture and release reiterate the speaker’s desire to lose himself into nothingness.

Yet, pleasurable as this idea of escaping bodily contains and time is, the speaker can never fully let go of his physical reality. In the very next line, he notes that even though the nightingale would sing him a “high requiem” (a hymn during mass offered for the death) or a religious elegy, he would not be able to hear it, being by this point a “sod” (Line 60), a piece of dirt. The word “sod,” with its definite, monosyllabic sound and practical associations, introduces humor in the poem; it breaks the spell and brings the speaker back into his reality. Importantly, it also reveals for him the true nature of death: Death is not merely an “easeful” (Line 52) release but also non-existence. The speaker is unsure whether he wants non-existence, where he cannot hear the sound of the nightingale.

The reality is that the speaker cannot live in death. Death is final and irreversible. The speaker now rues his mortality, which seems strange given that he has expressed a wish to die. However, the seventh stanza reveals that the immortality for which the speaker aspires can only be achieved through art and through the speaker becoming his own poems and songs. Song—symbolizing the solace of art—is the only immortality a mortal being has on earth. That is why the nightingale’s song is timeless and why the speaker terms the bird immortal. The nightingale now becomes a symbol of the poet living through his songs. As the seventh stanza closes, the speaker’s reverie is coming to an end, suggesting that the rational mind is a powerful force.

In the final stanza, the speaker describes fancy or the imagination as a “deceiving elf” (Line 74) or a trickster. Briefly, she lulled the speaker into believing he was the same free spirit as the nightingale, but even such a talented trickster cannot obliterate solid reality. The speaker’s lot is to be left behind as the nightingale flits away over hills and streams, even its song eventually disappearing: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep” (Lines 79-80). The poem’s ending lines question the very idea of what is real and what is imagined. Is a state of ecstasy, such as the speaker experienced, not real, in the sense that it happened internally, in his mind? So fleeting was the appearance of the nightingale, the speaker wonders if he imagined it. Even if he imagined it, does that make the emotions he experienced any less real? All through the poem the speaker seems to be suggesting that the real world and the world of the imagination are separate; but by the poem’s end he presents the possibility that these exist in a continuum.