Ode to a Nightingale

• Themes

  • Death
  • Sleep
  • Impermanence
  • Intoxication
  • Beauty
  • Nature
• Structure


  • Like most of the other odes, its written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable. The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five.
  • rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes).
• "’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,—"

  • Keats now addresses the nightingale. The heartache he feels is not because he is envious of the bird, but because he is excessively happy for the bird’s happiness.
  • The device of addressing someone absent or an object or, as here, a bird which can’t understand language, is known (somewhat confusingly) as apostrophe.
  • Keats' theory of negative capability can be identified here.
• "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 Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!"


  • wine derived from the earth, tasting of plants — flora — and reminiscent of dance and the poetry of song. The wine would ‘taste’ of these sensual things, an example of synaesthesia, as dance and poetry have no ‘taste’..
  • Flora is the Roman goddess of flowers - mythology is typical of Keats and the Romantic poetry.
  • wine being ‘cool’d for a long time alerts us to Keats' obsession with legacy of his poetry
• "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;"

  • problems the nightingale has never known - depressing picture of mankind, presenting the suffering of humanity as communal -suffering, aging, and death.
  • alliterative ‘f’s continues, reinforcing idea of frailty - men who 'hear each other groan’ seem unable to help each other, though they are aware of human suffering.
  • The ‘few, sad, last, gray hairs’ is a monosyllabic string that can only be spoken slowly, like someone drained of energy.
• "Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow."


  • Keats suggests root of suffering is thinking itself. (Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”) - explains why he believes the nightingale does not suffer like humans. Beauty cannot last and love will only be able to ‘pine’ at beauty temporarily. The heaviness of tears and sorrow is all that awaits man.
  • capitalises ‘Love’, suggesting the emotion as an abstract idea, an essence in the sense of Platonic forms - Romantic
• "But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:"


  • The wings of poetry on which Keats will fly to the nightingale are ‘viewless’ (invisible). Keats admits that his own brain is not very helpful on this flight and confuses and slows down his trip to the nightingale.
  • Instead of gaining inspiration from Bacchus, the god of wine, the speaker alters his consciousness through poetry alone. His brain limits him, causing him to struggle throughout the poem to achieve a pure state of bliss.
• "But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;"


  • cannot see them - Keats guesses at what plants are around him. He doesn't know if season is spring or summer, but is content to see them both
  • The word ‘embalmed’ means ‘covered by a balm’ conveys timelessness, amplified by his confusion
  • could refer death, as bodies are sometimes embalmed before burial. It is in death that one can only truly experience the world of the nightingale
  • Keats also references Titanias speech in MSND
• "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;"

  • Keats ponders on death, a subject about which he often wrote - obsession with mortality is suggested in the phrase ‘call’d him soft names’, implying that he had contemplated death and ways to die.
  • Whereas most people associate death with emptiness, Keats speaks of death as ‘rich.’ He would like to die during the night and with the nightingale singing - Though his ears would no longer function and his body would be dead,
• "Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn;"


  • Keats is hearing the same immortal nightingale Ruth heard in the Old Testament, when she chose not to return to her own Moabite people.
  • Followed mother-in-law Naomi - she worked in fields in her new home and Keats imagines her sadness until she married Boaz and found her role among her new people.
  • In following Naomi she has what she wanted. Keats sees this otherwise joyful story in terms of the pain of homesickness; sadness consistent with the melancholy mood of his poem.
• "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?"


  • imagery relating to the natural world is a classic Romantic technique. The reference to ‘a vision’ shows the speaker’s confusion as he has returned to reality after transcending the mortal world through the nightingale’s song.
  • It is worth asking, what is the difference between a vision and a waking dream? Perhaps, he wonders if he has had an insignificant dream, or presciently glimpsed some vision of his future.
• "Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"


  • Keats is no longer captive to the nightingale’s song - still uncertainty. Which one is reality, the sensuality of the bird’s song, or the ‘numbness’ described in the opening stanza?
  • ambiguous - “Am I awake or asleep?” or “Should I stay awake or fall asleep
  • poem ends with two rhetorical questions to which there are no answers, apart from the irony of the reader’s knowledge of Keats' early death. The caesura in the middle of the last line is most poignant of all because the answer is, tragically, eternal sleep.