Ode to a Nightingale (Poem Summary)

Poem Summary

Lines 1-10

The ode opens midway through an experience that might seem typically “poetic”: the speaker is alone and undergoing an emotional response to something of extreme natural beauty — the nightingale’s song. Some readers have argued that the physical setting is actually daytime and that the nocturnal imagery predominating much of the poem is only symbolic. The woods, after all, are described as “beechen green” — a color the speaker might not detect in darkness — and as casting “shadows numberless” from, it might seem, some source of light. Yet later in the ode the speaker envisions many objects he cannot physically “see.” Further, the sum effect of infinite shadow must be full darkness, a highly figurative description but one most readers probably comprehend without much resistance. Lastly, the nightingale, as its name suggests, is famed (especially in literature) to sing at night.

External sight, however, is important more in its absence than in its presence. At night, internal visions often replace the physical world that darkness obscures. In keeping with this, the poet describes a “numbness” of his senses comparable to that brought on by poison or by “some dull opiate.” Further, he never actually witnesses the nightingale. Instead, its presence is revealed only by sound, as later the qualities of the woods are revealed by scents. The bird’s song haunts the speaker until his “heart aches,” but the ache is not simply a form of loneliness or self-pity. Rather, it is the ache we sometimes experience in the presence of great beauty — the ache of wanting to bridge the distance between ourselves and the object of beauty, to perhaps possess the object or even to “become” it. Keats once described this impulse while criticizing a painting by the American Benjamin West, whose work Keats felt lacked the aesthetic urgency necessary to create such an ache: “There is nothing to be intense upon,” he wrote of the painting; “no woman one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality.” Thus, the speaker’s pain, while genuine, is also a type of happiness — of “being too happy in thine (the nightingale’s) happiness.” This is the first of the ode’s many paradoxes — happiness in pain — but the reader also must note the ease with which one thing becomes another even in the first stanza. The nightingale already has transformed into something more than a bird. It is a wood-nymph, a “light wingéd Dryad,” which suggests the qualities of nature that are apart from man’s experience. The “ache” compels the speaker to attempt to identify with — to get closer to — these natural qualities. His own qualities — the aspects of human consciousness, which create man’s essential separation from nature — stand in the way.

Lines 11-20

The speaker first considers wine as a means of overcoming the consciousness that separates him from the nightingale. Wine is obviously associated with “dance,” “song,” and “mirth” — three activities or states that temporarily make us forget ourselves. Wine has also played a role in the ceremonies of many religions, including those of the ancient Greek Dionysian cult and Christianity. The use of wine in religious rituals hints at the connection people have made between the effects of intoxicating drugs and achieving transcendental experiences: that by quieting or changing the normal state of human consciousness, a person might enter a state of spiritual inspiration. Keats addresses this possibility in other poems. Here, he associates wine with the Provencal troubadours, whose songs attempted to identify completely with the beloved, and with the “warm South,” where life is imagined to be lived in an easier and less self-conscious manner. Similarly, the speaker considers wine to be, like the nightingale, both immune to the pressures of time (it is “cool’d a long age”) and a symbol of organic nature (the “deep-delved earth, tasting of Flora and the country green”). Finally, he compares wine with the waters of the “blushful Hippocrene,” the fountain of poetic inspiration, which the speaker considers to be “full of the true.” Drunk, the speaker hopes, he can “leave the world unseen,” fading with the nightingale away from the concerns of man and “into the forest dim,” which is the unthinking state of nature.

Lines 21-30

In mythology, to drink the waters of the Lethe (the river of Hades) is to forget the sadness of life, yet to reach the Lethe one must first die. Thus, death is oblivion and vice-versa. In the third stanza, the speaker focuses on the forgetfulness of death. He wishes to enter the “immortal” world of the nightingale, to “leave the world unseen” and to “dissolve, and quite forget” the sufferings of a human world overshadowed by the knowledge of death. That world, characterized by “weariness” and “fret,” is one ravaged by the consequences of human foresight, “where but to think is to be full of sorrow.” Because consciousness brings on “leadeneyed despairs,” youth lives under the gloom of death and beauty becomes tainted by the knowledge that it is passing. Thus, under the normal conditions of man’s existence, both beauty and the response to beauty are undermined by the limiting nature of time and death. In contrast, the nightingale does not need to “forget” or to be numbed by wine. On the contrary, it “hast never known” the fear of time and death because it does not “think.” It therefore can enjoy a “happy lot” and sing “of summer in full-throated ease.”

Lines 31-40

After the highly lyricized affirmation of his intent (“Away! Away! for I will fly to thee”), the speaker selects as his means of escape “the viewless wings of Poesy” instead of wine. The choice between the two seems to acknowledge something about their relationship. In his letters Keats insists that poetry — or the intense, poetic identification with some external object — enables a person to transcend the rational “meaning” of his own existence. More than escapism, Keats considered this power a kind of “Negative Capability” inherent in man, the ability to overcome the “doubts” and “uncertainties” of life through the selfless regard for beauty. This idea calls to mind the songs of the troubadours. Intense poetic fancy, like wine, releases a person from the clarity and logic of the “dull brain.” This type of vision is “viewless” because it originates from the spirit rather than from the eyes, yet even in physical darkness the world of the nightingale is mysteriously illuminated by the “Queen-moon and her starry Fays.” This light from “heaven” is enough to produce rich, “verdurous” visions of nature. Thus, though the speaker “cannot see,” the visions produced by his imagination are among the most beautiful and sensuous in the poem.

Lines 41-50

The reader should note the sonic devices that contribute to the sensuous effect of the fifth stanza. One of these is the alliteration of the “m” sound in the final three lines: “mid-May,” “coming,” “musk-rose,” “murmurous,” and “summer.” Another is the assonance, or the repetition of internal strong-vowel sounds, that occurs throughout the stanza: “flowers,” “boughs,” “child,” “wine,” “flies,” etc. These sonic devices emphasize the natural beauty of the nightingale’s world. Curiously, though the speaker “cannot see,” the woods’ beauty is conveyed through “sight” details: “white hawthorn,” “violets covered up in leaves.” Because the darkness precludes the speaker’s physical perception of these sights, we must assume they represent an ideal world conjured in the speaker’s imagination: the nightingale’s world. In such a world, death is portrayed far differently than in the human world of stanza three, where “men sit and hear each other groan.” “Embalmed darkness,” which in human terms might be associated with the grave, is here depicted as the natural aroma of “sweet” organic growth. While the violets are “fast fading,” their death is a natural consequence of the “seasonable” progression that leads to “the coming musk-rose” and “flies on summer eves.” Thus, death has its place in the natural order of things. By yielding to new life, death is in fact part of the process of fertility and regeneration, which is a form of immortality.

Lines 51-60

Having become attuned to nature’s “immortal” process of death and fertility, the speaker in stanza six approaches the possibility that “it is rich to die.” More than wine or even poetry, death here represents the consummate state of identification with the nightingale’s world, for it is the knowledge of death that in stanza three marks the essential division between man and nature. The speaker has in mind an “easeful Death,” a cessation “upon the midnight with no pain.” To some readers, this might imply that the speaker would willingly die if death were not accompanied by physical suffering. But a likelier interpretation is possible. If the man’s misery (the “leadeneyed despairs” of stanza three) are brought on by consciousness (“to think is to be full of sorrow”), then to pass eternally from consciousness is to escape forever life’s pain. Death, in other words, retains power only over a living man who is able to fear his own end; through death, therefore, death can be overcome. This, of course, has paradoxical implications. While the beauty of the nightingale’s call reminds the speaker that consciousness is what alienates him from nature, the speaker also realizes that death would end his perception of that same immortal beauty: “Still wouldst thou (the nightingale) sing, and I have ears in vain.”

Lines 61-70

The speaker, the violets, and every individual thing born of nature must die. Yet the nightingale is an “immortal Bird.” Since the speaker cannot reasonably believe one creature alone possesses the power to avoid physical death, other meanings for immortality must be suggested. In one sense, perhaps, it is the nightingale’s call that is immortal. The same song (though sung by different individual nightingales) has been heard over time by all types of people — both “emperor and clown.” Its beauty thus transcends the human boundaries of time, class, and even geography. Upon hearing the same call, the Biblical Ruth (or so the speaker imagines) felt the same sense of alienation the speaker has experienced. In this sense the call is immortal because it speaks to man in a way that does not change over time. In a second sense, the nightingale itself is immortal simply because it “was not born for death. Lacking the ability to think — and thus to foresee its own destiny — it cannot conceive of its own passing as humans can. It feels no rift between itself and the natural world whose song it sings with such “full throated ease.” Free from fear, the nightingale is naturally immune to the power death has over thinking humans and is, in a way, “immortal.”

Lines 71-80

The word “forlorn” has at least two meanings that may come into play in the transition between the last two stanzas. In one sense, the word means “deserted” or “abandoned,” and this might apply to the “faery lands” of myth or the imagination. But in the transition the word calls to the speaker’s mind a second meaning: “desperate” or “without hope.” With this meaning, the word “is like a bell” that calls the speaker away from his vision and back to the objective world. Physically, we might assume the nightingale has simply flown away — “past near meadows, over the still stream” and finally into the next “valley-glades.” But in fact the nightingale itself has never appeared in the poem. What departs is the sound of its song and along with it the speaker’s vision. The language of departure recalls the speaker’s earlier consideration of death: the song “fades” and is “buried.” Yet the speaker’s identification with the nightingale is already ended even as the bird flies off. He is drawn back into his “sole self”; the song has turned from “happy” to “plaintive.” With the shattering of his identification, the speaker is left alone to puzzle over the experience. “Fancy,” which before was a means to immortality, has become a “deceiving elf” who “cannot cheat so well.” Thus, the final questions are ones of poetic consequence that the speaker cannot himself answer. Does the imaginative experience reveal truth, as in a “vision,” or is it simply a pleasant but false form of escape, as a “dream”?

Media Adaptations

• An audio cassette titled John Keats: Poems, is available from HighBridge Co.
• Poetry of Keats is available on audio cassette from Harper Audio.
• The Keats-Shelley Journal website can be accessed at: http://www.luc.edu/publications/keats-shelley/ksjweb.htm.