Reading 'ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE' by John Keats

Ode to a Nightingale

I

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock[1] I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards[2] had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,--

That thou, light-winged Dryad[3] of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

II

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

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

Tasting of Flora[4] and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song[5], and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South[6],

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene[7],

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:

III

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

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

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

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

IV

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus[8] and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

V

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;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine[9];

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.

VI

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

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

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

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

To thy high requiem become a sod.

VII

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:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth[10], 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.

VIII

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

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

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

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

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

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

[Footnote 1: a poisonous plant which produces death by paralysis

Footnote 2: In Greek mythology, Lethe was a river of the underworld which the dead men had to cross to reach to Hell. The water of Lethe induced forgetfulness. The dead were supposed to have drunk water from it to forget their past life.

Footnote 3: In Greek mythology, Dryad was a wood-nymph.

Footnote 4: the Roman Goddess of flowers; here used for flowers themselves

Footnote 5: In the early Middle Ages the poets of southern France, the troubadours of Provence, were particularly famous for their love lyrics.

Footnote 6: wine manufactured in the warm Southern countries of Europe

Footnote 7: Keats identifies bright red wine with the water of Hippocrene (a fountain on Mount Helicon in Greece which was the haunt of the muses) because he looks upon wine as a powerful source of poetic inspiration.

Footnote 8: Bacchus was the God of wine in Greek mythology whose chariot was pulled by lions or leopards.

Footnote 9: Eglantine is properly the sweet-briar, though popularly applied to various varieties of the wild rose. "Pastoral" presumably because often referred to in pastoral poetry.

Footnote 10: Ruth, the famous Biblical character, was a Moabite woman, who after the death of her husband migrated with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to Judah. There she gleaned corn in the field of Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi. Her heart, paining for home, was soothed by the song of the nightingale.]

What I Feel:

   Keats listened to the song of the nightingale which transported the poet from the human world full of sorrows and sufferings to the bird’s world of eternal joy. The poet, being a human being with limited potential, at first seek inspiration from wine to share the bird’s happiness, but soon leaves the idea and relies on the power of poetic imagination to do so. But his personal despondencies—death of his brother Tom, departure of his brother George and his wife to America, the severe criticism of his poems by reviewers, his own sufferings from consumption and his sad affair with Fanny—remind him of his unhappy state of which the bird is never affected. So finally he bids adieu to poetic fancy because it can not keep him confined to the bird’s world for ever.

   The subject of the ode is not the nightingale but as aspiration towards a life of ideal beauty beyond this mortal world.