Ode to a nightingale

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

“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.”

Question 2

Death, time and impermanence

Answer 2

• “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.

Question 3

Intoxication, Consciousness, and Isolation

Answer 3

• 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.
• 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.

Question 4

Art, nature and beauty

Answer 4

• “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!).

Question 5

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

Answer 5

• 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.
• 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”).

Question 6

‘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,

Answer 6

• Lines 5 to 10 explain the causes of the speaker’s aching heart and “drowsy numbness.” The speaker addresses the nightingale, which the speaker perceives as “happy.” Insisting that the speaker is not jealous of the nightingale’s apparent happiness, the speaker states that this intoxicated and melancholy state of mind is down to “being too happy in [the nightingale’s] happiness.” This is a paradox that anticipates the tension elsewhere in the poem. On the one hand, the speaker is delighted and emotionally moved by the nightingale’s song; on the other, the speaker is troubled and anxious.
• These sounds represent the “light-winged[ness]” of the bird. And here, too, is the poem’s second allusion to Classical Greek mythology. Dryads are tree spirits, minor (and mortal) goddesses that are intimately connected to the trees. They are also notoriously elusive, which is also true of the nightingale bird (and its song).
• It’s worth noting here that there is some disagreement among critics about whether the poem is set during the day or night. The bird itself is traditionally depicted at night-time (the clue is in the name!), but the presence of “numberless” shadows suggests that there is a light source falling on the forest. It’s also “summer,” which is the time of year in England when the days are longest.

Question 7

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!

Answer 7

• The second stanza begins with a direct expression of the speaker’s longing for intoxication. The speaker calls out for a “draught” (a glass) of “vintage” (wine), particularly that which has been kept in a dark, cool place for a long time (and therefore has deepened in quality and flavor). The speaker’s longing for wine is not to be taken too literally, but more as a dramatic response to the nightingale’s song. Wine from the “deep-delved earth” is a stand-in for the speaker’s desire to somehow possess the depth and purity that the nightingale’s song conveys. Assonance and generally drawn-out vowels help put across the speaker’s intense longing (though the specific terms of this longing are not yet drawn in full detail):
• These open sounds suggest a long stretch of time of the kind that the speaker refers to in the “ag[ing]” of the “vintage” wine. Elsewhere in the poem, the speaker expresses deep-rooted anxieties about the passing of time—particularly how it prevents beauty from lasting forever and makes death inevitable—so the discussion here is in part about possessing something that would represent a small victory over time itself (wine that has survived a “long age”).
• Lines 13 and 14 expand on this idealized depiction of wine. This dream beverage would “tast[e]” of “Flora” and nature’s greenery. The capitalization of “Flora” indicates that it is an allusion to the Roman goddess of flowers, rather than the scientific family name for plants and flowers (Keats’s poems often contain many references to Greek and Roman myth). It would also taste, more paradoxically, of:
• In other words, of happy and joyous experience (dancing, singing, and sunshine). The caesurae here give the line a bounce that evokes dancing. “Provençe” is part of southern France (and a well-renowned region for wine!). The mention of dancing is perhaps an allusion to the mythological figure of Bacchus/Dionysus, who encouraged his followers to liberate themselves through intoxication, dance, and ritual. As mentioned, the speaker isn’t really longing for wine, but for some ideal state of mind.

Question 8

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;

Answer 8

• This speaks volumes about one of the poem’s main tensions—beauty in art vs. beauty in nature. At the root of the speaker’s anxiety is the idea that the speaker’s art—the poem itself—can never be as glorious as the nightingale’s song because it depends on human consciousness and, in particular, human language. The nightingale’s beauty seems more pure because it exists beyond words and thereby ignores the human world and its many problems (some of which are outlined in this stanza).
• Here, then, the speaker continues with the longing to “fade far away” with the nightingale—to “dissolve” and forget the trials and tribulations of being human. The soft alliteration of /f/ sounds in “fade far” and “forget” make the link clear between the perceived freedom of the nightingale and the bird’s lack of human consciousness (which the speaker wants to “forget,” as per the mention of Lethe in the first stanza). The nightingale has “never known”—and never will know—the typical suffering in human life: “weariness,” sickness (Keats had recently lost his brother to tuberculosis), and aging. The many caesurae in lines 23, 24, 25, and 26 make the lines feel awkward and ponderous, representing the idea of ongoing human struggle.
• Lines 25 and 26 particularly focus on the fading of youth, which fits in with the poem’s overall concern about the way that beauty cannot last forever. (Indeed, rightly or wrongly, the speaker believes that the nightingale is a rare example of beauty defeating the relentless march of time; see the penultimate stanza). Youth is personified here as a sickly figure, already a kind of “spectre” because it is haunted by the inevitability of aging and death—of the irretrievable loss of beauty.

Question 9

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.

Answer 9

• The third stanza juxtaposes two different locations—the “over there” occupied by the mysterious and beautiful nightingale, and the “here” of the human world, with all its tiredness, misery, and death. In line 17, the speaker explicitly links “sorrow” with human consciousness—just to “think” is be full of “despairs.” “Leaden-eyed,” meanwhile, means eyes that are dull and heavy with having to perceive the world, and also relates to the way that the speaker privileges the sense of hearing over seeing (because the nightingale’s song is an auditory beauty). Even the sound of “And leaden-eyed despairs” feels heavy, with its dull, repetitive, thudding d.
• In lines 29 and 30, the poem personifies “Beauty” itself as a fading figure. “Her lustrous eyes” cannot keep their shine, and no “new Love” can “pine at them beyond to-morrow.” In other words, beauty and love are both cursed by the fact that they cannot last. This is a common concern in Keats’s odes—essentially, the speakers of the odes are often weighed down by the way that time constantly exerts its power on human life. The end rhymes in line 27 and 30 link “sorrow” with “to-morrow,” indicating that this is an ongoing and perpetual fact of life.

Question 10

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!

Answer 10

• The speaker is taken hold of by a flash of inspiration and now rejects intoxication—represented by the allusion to “Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus/Dionysus is the Greek God of wine and revelry)—and the speaker’s turning to poetry (“Poesy”) to get the “wing” to “fly to” the nightingale. In other words, the speaker will use poetry to create the kind of lasting beauty represented by the nightingale. These “wings” of poetry are “viewless” because poetry, like the nightingale’s music, does not have to be a visual medium. That is, it can be consumed through the auditory sensory realm alone.
• On the other hand, though, poetry is dependent on language, which the speaker views as heavy and cumbersome, ultimately leading to the rejection of poetry/the human imagination too (in line 73). That’s why, even in this momentary hopefulness about poetry, the speaker admits that “the dull brain perplexes and retards” (“retards” is a verb meaning “to slow down” or inhibit progress). Suddenly, the speaker feels that they have succeeded in joining the bird (though maybe this is just based on the fact that the bird is within earshot, suggested by the word “already” in line 35).

Question 11

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;

Answer 11

• In the fifth stanza, the speaker attempts to put into practice the revelation in the previous stanza—that “Poesy” (just a literary way of saying “poetry”) can somehow match the beauty of the nightingale’s song, and thereby bring the speaker and the nightingale metaphorically closer together. This is one of the most sumptuously beautiful stanzas in all of Keats’s poetry, and in part an attempt to demonstrate the poet’s skill and worth. Lines 41-45 make particular use of /s/, /m/, /b/, /w/. and /th/ consonance:
• These alternately soft, resonant, and humming sounds depict the care and intensity of the speaker’s imagination.
• The speaker describes the “embalmed” darkness of the surrounding forest. In such pitch black, the stanza prioritizes the senses of smell and hearing (so it makes sense that these lines sound particularly beautiful). The speaker guesses at the specific surroundings in this forest, drawing not on visual stimulation but on the speaker’s own creativity and command of words. The speaker cannot “see what flowers” are on the ground, nor guess at those flowers and fruit (“each sweet” is being used as a noun in line 43) that hang from the trees—and so must create them in words and sound. The speaker imagines the beauty that is all around in this forest, linking it to the “seasonable month.” In other words, this stanza is about the cycles of abundant beauty that nature creates through the turning of the season.

Question 12

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.

Answer 12

• Lines 46 to 50 elaborate on the first five lines of the stanza, listing different proofs—as imagined by the speaker—of nature’s beauty (specifically tied to the “seasonable month,” probably May). The language here is intentionally sensuous, as much about the power of poetry to create its own type of aesthetic pleasure as it is about nature. A key word here is “pastoral,” which in another context can specifically mean a type of poetry that idealizes a natural scene—which is exactly what the speaker is doing, imagining the beauty in the surrounding darkness of the forest. Briefly, then, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature are in a kind of union (which doesn’t last long!).
• The list of different flowers demonstrates the variety and range of nature’s beauty, but even these are tied to the speaker’s anxieties about time and impermanence. The exquisite purple violets are “fast fading” (just as human life is shown to be in stanza 3). Indeed, this specific image of fading has already been presented earlier in the poem. The musk-rose, which is a fragrant symbol of spring and renewal, is “haunt[ed]” by “murmurous” flies, which can represent death and decay.
• The intense beauty of these lines is deliberately placed at odds with the subtle suggestion that none of it can last. This section, then, represents the point at which the speaker most strongly believes in the possibility of art to create beauty—and it is in the following stanzas when this temporary faith in the human imagination (“fancy”) starts to unravel.

Question 13

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;

Answer 13

• The suggestion of death and decay in the fifth stanza (through things like the “Fast fading violets” and the “flies” that already start to swam around the “musk-rose”) leads on to a more frank discussion of death in the sixth. This stanza opens with a rather unusual adjective: “darkling.” This means “to grow dark” or something that is characterized by darkness, and its placement in the phrase makes it apply to the speaker themselves. In other words, the speaker is “growing dark.” The speaker is signaling a shift into a darker mood, one that is more focused on death than beauty.
• To that end, the speaker admits that they have a Romantic tendency to focus on “Death” (here personified), as though “half in love” with it. The half that isn’t in love is presumably the same part of the speaker that laments the fact that beauty, because of the inevitability of death, can never last.
• The speaker (generally taken to be Keats himself) even draws the link between their own poetry and an obsession with death. Death has been described elsewhere by the speaker with “soft names” and “mused rhyme” (and the soft consonance here supports this sensation of gentleness). Interestingly, this section in line 53 could also read as amused—”a mused.” This perhaps suggests an element of naivety, or, more likely, the speaker’s latent suspicion that poetry ultimately fails in capturing or creating beauty, especially when compared to the simplicity and purity of the nightingale’s song.

Question 14

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain To thy high requiem become a sod.

Answer 14

• Lines 55-60 are the clearest expression in the poem of the speaker’s death-wish (though it’s not necessarily to be taken literally). Consciousness—being human—is the root of suffering (“pain”), and dying would surely end that suffering. And, considers the speaker, there seems to be no “rich[er]” moment to die than while listening to the “ecstasy” of the nightingale’s song.
• The mention of “midnight” relates to the world of fantasy and folklore brought up in the fourth stanza (“Queen-Moon” etc.). Midnight is often depicted as a time when supernatural transformations are most likely to occur (and arguably this is something which the speaker longs for). That said, this moment in the poem seems distinctly grounded, depressed even. The speaker’s faith in their own ability to transcend suffering through art (and thereby join the nightingale) is starting to waver, and was only brief in the first place.
• These melodious open vowels (the /ow/ in “thou” and “soul,” and the similar vowel sounds of “pouring forth” and even “abroad”) recall the “full-throated ease” with which the nightingale sings its beautiful song. But there is a contradiction here: part of the speaker’s admiration of the bird comes from the way that the nightingale’s song is untroubled by human consciousness—but this also prevents the nightingale from being truly relatable too. The whole structure of the poem, then, is built on inevitable failure, the impossibility of communication between the speaker and the bird.
• As though realizing the above, the speaker has second thoughts about the death-wish expressed in lines 59 and 60. If the speaker were dead, the nightingale would go on singing—and the former wouldn’t be able to appreciate the latter’s beauty, even if that beauty does seem to come with a fair helping of psychic pain! The speaker would be nothing more than “a sod”—a part of the damp earth—in contrast to the bird’s “high requiem.” “Requiem” is an important word choice, denoting a type of song or piece of music written and performed to mark somebody’s death.

Question 15

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.

Answer 15

• Lines 65 to 70 cast the speaker’s imagination back even further than the “ancient days of emperor and clown.” Now, the speaker imagines the nightingale’s song being heard all the way back in biblical times, alluded to in the mention of “Ruth.” Ruth is a character in the Bible who demonstrates faith and loyalty by staying by her mother-in-law’s side after she (Ruth) is widowed. The speaker imagines the nightingale’s song bringing some semblance of happiness to Ruth in her darkest hour, the alliteration of “self-same song” suggesting the way in which the tune has remained the same across the centuries. Like the speaker, Ruth had a “sad heart” (similar to the “aches” mentioned in the first stanza). This is a fairly unusual allusion in Keats’s poetry, which tends to lean more on Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies.
• Lines 68-70 represent a brief return to the more fanciful world of myth and folklore. The speaker considers the enchantment of the nightingale’s song, imagining it “charm[ing]” open the windows of seaborne travelers. In this dreamy image, the beauty of the song brings comfort to sailors on “perilous seas,” and wanderers “in faery lands forlorn.” The language is once again intoxicating and sensual, which tends to happen when the speaker focuses intently on the beauty of the nightingale’s music:

Question 16

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Answer 16

The bell simile isn’t chosen at random, but relates to the rest of the poem. First of all, it is a sound, fitting into the poem’s general focus on the hearing sense (as opposed to the visual, as Keats focuses on in, for instance, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”). Also importantly, bells are often used to mark solemn occasions—like funerals or anniversaries of significant historical events. This means that the “toll[ing]” of the word “forlorn” signifies an important—and final—shift in speaker’s state of mind. Having wrestled with the meaning of the nightingale’s song, and how the experience of this music relates to being human, the speaker finally feels their physical and psychological distance from the bird. The nightingale is elsewhere, out of grasp, both in terms of its position in the forest and in terms of its ability to provide the speaker with any comforting answers about life.

Question 17

In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Answer 17

Notice how the two options in the first question are both based on falsehood and unreality. The question isn’t poised between reality and illusion, but “a vision” and “a waking dream.” The mention of “vision” is also unsettling because the poem has relied so heavily on the auditory sense, almost entirely foregoing visual description. These questions, then, have a disorientating effect that matches with the speaker’s own confusion. Indeed, it does feel like the speaker has just awoken from some kind of stupor. The shift into the past tense with “fled” is important too, signaling that the nightingale—and everything that it represented—now well and truly eludes the speaker. For that reason, then, the speaker’s entire consciousness is disrupted, leaving the speaker unable to tell what is real anymore.

Question 18

Form

Answer 18

• 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.

Question 19

Meter

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Rhyme Scheme

Answer 20

“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.

Question 21

Historical context

Answer 21

• 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.

Question 22

Literary context

Answer 22

• 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.