ode to a nightingale

I have been in love with easeful death

Highlights the speaker's wish to escape life The following stanza is a continuation of the narrator's suicidal ideation

Negative Capability

Keats: the ability to accept ambiguity and paradox without having to resolve them

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards

Suggests that drinking is only an impression of inspiration → it is merely a short-term solution

Light winged Dryad of the trees//In some melodious plot

The greatest part of the nightingale's song is that it is not human, and as such it is free from the corruption of mankind

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

The immortality of the nightingale lies not in the bird but rather the song "In ancient day by emperor and clown": the nightingale's song resonates with everyone

Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget [...] the weariness, the fever and the fret

The narrator envies the birds ability to fly → mirrors Keats's desires to escape through his poetry

Singest of summer in full-throated ease

The nightingale embodies the warmth of the summer - Keats envies the joy of the nightingale

Thy plaintive anthem fades//Past near the meadows

The nightingale's beauty will never truly die, but will move → perhaps to be heard by someone else

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

The nightingale's song is what keeps him alive → in death he wouldn't be able to hear the music

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

The poem begins with the speaker in a depressive episode

O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been//Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth

The speaker attempts to drink to join the nightingale → "that I might drink and leave the world unseen". Keats was well know for his love of claret.

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but on the viewless wings of Poesy

The speaker substitutes alcohol for poetry 'Bacchus' suggests the speaker was pained further by his alcohol consumption

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

here the speaker laments on the inavibility of death. Keats may be especially reffering to his brother whom he nursed in sickness, and his own fears of tuberculosis

Country green...Provencal song...the blushful Hippocrene

the idyllic countryside imagery highlights the speaker's desire for adventure The mention of "hippocrene" suggests the speaker is also searching for poetic inspiration - at the time keats's poetry was not well received

structure

the poem has a regular line length apart from the 8th line in the stanza, reinforcing the last 2 lines in the stanza which often overturn previous imagery

as though hemlock i had drunk/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

the speaker is detached and disconnected from reality. keats references socrates through the mention of hemlock. however, the mention of lethe - the river of forgetfulness - suggests the speaker is not grappling with a philosophical problem but rather attempting to forget reality