Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale

Ode to a Nightingale

By John Keats (1795-1821)

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: 

'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, 

                Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 

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! 

O for a beaker full of the warm South, 

         Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 

                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: 

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. 

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! 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. 

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; 

                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. 

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. 

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, 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. 

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? 

First Stanza

Hemlock can act as a sedative, or as a poison.

Lethe, one of the five rivers in Hades. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness. The  others  are Acheron (the river of sorrow),  Cocytus (the river of lamentation), Phlegethon (the river of fire) and Styx (the river that separates Earth and the Underworld). In order to be reborn, the souls of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their previous earthly life.

In Greek myth, a Dryad is a tree spirit.

      As the long sentence which form the first stanza develops, we realise that the poem begins with the poet already listening to the song of the nightingale. We also realise that something contradictory and paradoxical is taking place.  “Numbness pains” his “sense”, yet numbness would usually prevent one from feeling pain. Hearing the bird makes his heart ache, yet it also acts as an opiate which should mitigate pain. The paradoxical is seen in that feeling happy is the reason given for feeling pain. How are we to understand this? Let us begin with the pain/happy paradox. Notice that he is not just feeling happy, he is feeling all “too happy” (my italics)  on hearing the “happiness” of the bird song. Feeling ‘happy for’ the bird, serves to make him realise his own low condition. This ‘low’ state is emphasised by the combination of “drains” and “sunk”. Their suggestion of sinking contrasts with what one imagines as the elevated, aerial position of the “light-winged” bird perched at some height within the crown of a tree. Perhaps the pain-inducing numbness is a psychological pain in that his ‘drugged’ numbness deprives him of his sense of life’s  possibilities – the vivid spontaneous  life that  the bird enjoys with “full-throated ease”. 

      Dryads in Greek myth were tree nymphs (nymphs are female) and were thought of as immortal – later in the poem, the bird will be addressed as “immortal bird”. To treat the bird as a Dryad is to suggest that it is a female; however (and here we willingly grant poetic licence as we suspend ornithological fact), it is chiefly the male bird that sings. As the nightingale’s name suggests,  they sing at night (though not only at night) and their preferred habitat is dense thickets of bushes and trees. Keats places his bird amongst beeches, “beechen green”, with dark nocturnal shadows – ‘green’ in a somewhat figurative rather than visual sense ­because, as this is summer, they are felt to be at the peak of their leafy fulness, their ‘greenness’. The “plot’ is “melodious” because the bird’s song is melodious and the plot, the place where the bird is perched, is, by a transferred epithet, seen as melodious because of the song. To say that the bird “singest of summer” is not to ascribe any conscious intention on the bird’s part: it sings of summer because that is the season when the male bird instinctively shows, through its song, its genetic ‘prowess’ to any listening female bird. It instinctively “singest” of its breeding quality not of summer; it is the poet who identifies the song as a song of summer. Similarly, to say that the bird experiences “happiness” seems to give is it a human feeling. When we attribute our human feelings to nature we are creating what has been termed a “pathetic fallacy” – ‘pathetic’ in an older sense of ‘feeling’ (usually feelings of pity and sadness), rather than in the sense of useless. ‘The cruel sea’ is an example of a pathetic fallacy: the sea does not have feelings, cruel or otherwise. Returning to the bird, it is simply being itself, as we might say, ‘to the max’. This is a key moment in its instinctive drive to reproduce its kind.  If it attracts a mate, more nightingales will follow, but if it does not, its line dies.  At this point,  having introduced the term “pathetic fallacy, I want to consider it further.  The word ‘happy’ can apply to circumstances as much as it does to inner feelings. The word has its roots in Middle English happe which, of itself, is not a feeling but something that happens to you and this could be good or bad luck, but it is the good luck sense that prevailed as the word developed into happy. So the bird is indeed happy in that its particular mix of nature and nurture has brought it to this peak condition as it gives out its song.   The bird itself is, as Keats puts it in another poem, a “senseless tranced thing” (see, “Bards of passion and of mirth”),   but it is in the happy or fortunate condition of being able to announce itself in song. It can also, unwittingly, bestow feelings of happiness on a human listener.

Second Stanza

Draught here is not a current of cool air but a single act of drinking.

Vintage, a vintage wine.

Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and of the season of Spring.

Provence, a region of south east France associated with the medieval troubadours who were famous for their poems and songs. Given the ‘vintage’ context, dance, song and mirth suggest festivities around the grape harvest.

Hippocrene was a fountain in a region of Ancient Greece. It issued at the foot of Mt. Helicon, a mountain sacred to the Muses. Its waters were regarded as a source of poetic inspiration. By “the true, the blushful Hippocrene” Keats means the wine – “the blushful” refers to the red wine so distinguishing it, presumably, from clear spring water. Hippocrene is a conflation of two Greek words: the word for a spring and the word for a horse. They have been put together in such a way as to say ’the spring of the horse’. The horse referred to being Pegasus, the immortal winged horse. Pegasus was said to have made the spring when he stamped the ground with his hoof.

     Caught between two worlds, his low condition and the bird’s ‘happy’ condition, the poet longs for an escape, a release into an idyllic imagined world. Rather than swallowing a sedative, an opiate –laudanum being the (addictive) medical opiate of Keats’s time – he longs for an inspiring “draught” of a wine whose terroir (a French term for all the environmental factors that make a good wine) is a suitably poetic mix of a vegetation goddess (Flora), a Greek myth concerning Hippocrene (see above), a pastoral idyll and a joyous celebration expressed through dance and Provencal song. A rich fulness abounds – note how line six’s “full” repeats the “full” in line five.  Assonance, stressed syllables, alliteration, sensuous adjectives all combine to create a sense of the poet ‘tasting’ the richly suggestive  images. By stressing the first syllable of the first six lines and placing stressed syllables together, a sense of lingering and savouring is created. Take for example, “Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth” where six of its ten syllables are stressed and the stressed syllables often occur one after another. The beaker, brimful of wine, is given a central role in the general, carefree, animated spirit. The inanimate is animated: the wine can wink and the beaker’s (b)rim is given a “purple-stained mouth” and so becomes a drinker  – and if a (b)rim as mouth seems odd then remember the commonplace talk of the lip of a cup, or a beaker! If only the poet “might drink” of this inspiring vintage! In this way he could, leave “the world unseen”, that is unseen by anybody in the world and  leave behind the seen world. What better way to leave the world unseen by anybody than to enter a nocturnal wood? What better way to leave behind the seen world, the visible world, than to ‘enter’ the non-representational musical art of  wordless song ? In this way he wants to follow the bird and fade away into  nature.  Notwithstanding the hearty vigour of this imagined “warm South”, the poet seems no more substantial than a wisp as he gently fades away.

Stanza Three

Palsy, a paralysis or weakness of all or parts of the body.

    Stanza two’s ‘flight into Provence’ was designed to leave behind the world, to fade away and with its opening “Fade away”, stanza three picks up this idea and with its listing of the ills that “Flesh is heir to” (see Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy) shows what is prompting this desire to fade away, to dissolve, to forget. The cumulative  force of the listing of the many ills , a force further heightened by the repeated use of “where”, shows how difficult it is to fade away and forget. The world of human suffering is still too much with him. He is not a “senseless  tranced” bird who has never consciously known illness, suffering and death. He has seen and known illness and death at first hand – he had been trained as an apothecary and surgeon before dedicating himself to poetry and he had seen youth grow “pale and spectre-thin” as, in December 1818, he nursed his tubercular brother, Tom, through his final days. Keats himself was to die of tb in 1821. The “Ode to a Nightingale” is dated to 1819 – the exact month is not known with certainty. We need to bear these facts in mind as we read what seems to be a questionable absolute statement, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow”. To Keats’s personal experiences of mortality and suffering we can add the fact that average life expectancy in the UK in 1820 was 40.53 years – the figure for 2020 is 81.15. Remaining with the “but to think” line, notice the ironic reversal of “full”. In the first two stanzas “full” was brimful of plump, fruitful life but now it is “full of sorrow”, of the “spectre-thin”.  The stanza ends not in gray gloom and  despair, though certainly with sadness, as the detail of “lustrous eyes” (as opposed to being “leaden-eyed)  shows a keen, sensuous appreciation of personified Beauty and the brevity of Love is poignantly expressed.

Stanza Four

Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. He is sometimes depicted in a chariot drawn by leopards, Keats’s “pards”.

There is a tradition that sees the moon, particularly the full moon, as the ‘Queen of the Night’.

Fays are fairies.

        Keats now turns to another form of flight. Wine was, perhaps, too escapist, a way of avoiding,  “The weariness, the fever, and the fret”. ­All that can not be forgotten in stanza three implies that it was an unsuccessful way.  Poetry is now chosen as his form of ‘flight’. The “dull”, uninspired brain may perplex and retard but the creative imagination, the maker of inspired song, will give him the “wings” to join the singing bird. This brings an immediate reward, he feels that he is “already with thee”. All the signs are auspicious: the night is “tender” and “haply” (perhaps) there is heavenly pomp above with the “Queen Moon on her throne/Clustered around by all her starry Fays”.  “Haply” because the sky is unseen beyond the woodland canopy, though moonlight can occasionally be seen in fits and starts as the wind stirs the trees and moonlight breaks through.  He, however, must find his way through “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways”.

Stanza Five

Incense here means scent.

Embalmed: to embalm means to treat a corpse with spices to prevent it from decaying. In a figurative sense,  it means to keep something sweet and free from the odour of decay. The scent of the flowers keeps things ‘sweet’.

Pastoral, amongst its many meanings, pastoral can refer to an idealised rural scene. Here the eglantine, the wild rose, is seen as embodying a rural ideal and so is the “pastoral eglantine”.

Pastoral can also refer to a literary form, usually poetry, that presents idealised shepherds living in an idyllic country setting. Such a place can be referred to as Arcadia. There is a Latin phrase, first used by Virgil, which is Et in Arcadia ego (literally, And (or also)  I [am] in Arcadia). It signifies that death also exists in the ideal or Arcadian place.

The “dewy wine” of the musk-rose could be both the flower-scented dew on the rose and the nectar which attracts many insects.

      In this nocturnal woodland darkness he cannot see what is around him. It is a world unseen but combining memory,  imagination and a  sixth intuitive sense he can “guess each sweet” – each flower and blossom. His not being able to see seems to stimulate him to ‘see’ all the more richly and sensuously. The place’s idyllic bountiful quality is suggested by using “pastoral” (see the above note) yet there are also reminders of Et in Arcadia ego (see above). That is, the presence of death. Keats’s use of “embalmed” is the figurative sense of keeping things sweetly smelling but it can not altogether escape a suggestion of its other sense of embalming a corpse (see above). The various flowers include the by now, in mid-May, “fast-fading violets”. Mortality is inescapable. The wood also offers the poet an entry into a virtual form of “easeful death” in that it is a world of gloom and darkness, albeit, paradoxically, rich with imagined life. This paradox is of the essence of life and death in nature. Nature’s cyclical, seasonal life is such that death fades into life’s renewal and life dissolves away into death.   

       This stanza is often rightly praised for its sumptuous, sensuous qualities. Take for example, the last line with its onomatopoeic insect ‘hum’.

Stanza Six

      Still within the making dark, dark[ling] wood, he listens to the nightingale and recalls times when he has been “half in love with easeful Death”. With the power of words and rhymes he imagines persuading Death to work like an opiate and painlessly release him from this life. Accompanied by the bird’s ecstatic song, now, “more than ever”, it seems a “rich” time to die painlessly, simply “to cease”. He would become the music and, free of alienating human consciousness – which creates the expectation and fear of death –  dissolve into nature. Yet the stanza’s last two lines sound a contrary note. The brain, lacking the exciting flights of imagination, may be “dull” but it is also realistic, and so is probably the agent that ‘perplexes and retards’ his thoughts of “easeful death”. With death, he loses the bird’s song which turns from an ecstatic song of summer and becomes a sad requiem mass whilst he is reduced to a monosyllabic lump, an earthen ”sod”.

Stanza Seven

Ruth is a woman in the Old Testament. Her story is told in the Book of Ruth. She was a migrant who whilst working as a lowly ‘gleaner’ in the fields longed for a return to her homeland.

    The bird of this stanza is said to be “immortal”. Clearly, this can not be true of any particular nightingale but if the capitalised “Bird” is taken to be the generic type, then it is not one of any one generation but of all. Furthermore, its  song is immortal, since, from the earliest times,  it speaks to all generations of people whether emperors or lowly clowns (peasants rather than court jesters).  Within the poem the nightingale’s song has been credited with a variety of emotional effects on listeners. It is an ecstatic song of summer; it makes a music fit for a requiem; in this stanza it is said (perhaps)  to have found a response in Ruth whose heart was full of sadness as she longed for her homeland. It is then credited with powers to weave a spell in a faery world. Thus the stanza passes  the song from ancient history (“ancient days”) into Biblical tale and than, most fantastically, into a world of ‘faery’, not the sentimentalised world often suggested by ‘fairy’ (note the difference in spelling),   but a folorn, dangerous land where windows open “on the foam/Of perilous seas”. Yet that “perilous” detail, and particularly the use of “folorn”, could be seen as a form of return of what has been  supressed,  the bleak realism of stanza 3,  for the “magic casements” could be about to open (as indeed they will in stanza seven), not on a faery land, but on the world of “weariness … fever … and the fret”, the world he had been trying to forget.

Stanza Eight

    Just as stanza three brought him back from Provencal intoxication, so the word “forlorn” brings him back to his “sole self”. His “back from thee to my sole self” being a  recoil from stanza four’s  “Already with thee”. The “viewless wings of Poesy” are now no more than “fancy”, which is a “cheat”, a “deceiving elf”, a creator of escapist dreams. Meanwhile, the bird, with its song now transformed into a “plaintive anthem”, has moved to the next valley. The poet wanted to “Fade away” and dissolve into the bird’s music but now it is the bird and its music that fades away. Yet, notwithstanding his dismissal of the work of fancy, he is left wondering whether what he heard in the bird song was a visionary revelation or merely a fanciful dream. With the music gone, has he woke up to reality or, without the music, is he awake yet asleep, devoid of vision,  in the mundane world?