"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats, one of his 1819 odes. It was written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London, or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem which describes Keats' journey into the state of negative capability. The tone rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and, instead, explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly relevant to Keats. The nightingale described experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, it is capable of living through its song, a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life, as Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—a "sod" over which the nightingale sings.
Many critics favor "Ode to a Nightingale" for its themes but some believe that it is structurally flawed because the poem sometimes strays from its main idea.
Background
Of Keats's six major odes of 1819, "Ode to Psyche", was probably written first and "To Autumn" written last. Some time between these two, he wrote "Ode to a Nightingale".Bate 1963 p. 498 It is possible that "Ode to a Nightingale" was written between 26 April and 18 May 1819, based on weather conditions and similarities between images in the poem and those in a letter sent to Fanny Brawne on May Day. The poem was composed at the Hampstead house Keats shared with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, possibly while sitting beneath a plum tree in the garden.Gittings 1968 pp. 316–318 According to Brown, Keats finished the ode in just one morning: "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of the nightingale."Bate 1963 qtd p. 501 Brown's account is personal, as he claimed the poem was directly influenced by his house and preserved by his own doing. However, Keats relied on both his own imagination and other literature as sources for his depiction of the nightingale.Motion 1999 p. 395
The exact date of "Ode to a Nightingale", as well as those of "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode on a Grecian Urn", is unknown, as Keats dated all as 'May 1819'. However, he worked on the four poems together, and there is a unity in both their stanza forms and their themes. The exact order in which the poems were written is also unknown, but they form a sequence within their structures. While Keats was writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the other poems, Brown transcribed copies of the poems and submitted them to Richard Woodhouse.Gittings 1968 311 During this time, Benjamin Haydon, Keats' friend, was given a copy of "Ode to a Nightingale", and he shared the poem with the editor of the Annals of the Fine Arts, James Elmes. Elmes paid Keats a small sum of money, and the poem was published in the July issue.Bate 1963 p.533 The poem was later included in Keats' 1820 collection of poems Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.Stillinger 1998 p. 15
Structure "Ode to a Nightingale" was probably the first of the middle set of four odes that Keats wrote following "Ode to Psyche", according to Brown. This is further evidenced by the poems' structures. Keats experimentally combines two different types of lyrical poetry: the odal hymn and the lyric of questioning voice that responds to the odal hymn. This combination of structures is similar to that in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". In both poems, the dual form creates a dramatic element within the text. The stanza form of the poem is a combination of elements from Petrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets..
Keats incorporates a pattern of alternating historically "short" and "long" vowel sounds in his ode. In particular, line 18 ("And purple-stained mouth") has the historical pattern of "short" followed by "long" followed by "short" and followed by "long". This alternation is continued in longer lines, including line 31 ("Away! away! for I will fly to thee") which contains five pairs of alternations. However, other lines, such as line 3 ("Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains") rely on a pattern of five "short" vowels followed by "long" and "short" vowel pairings until they end with a "long" vowel. These are not the only combination patterns present, and there are patterns of two "short" vowels followed by a "long" vowel in other lines, including 12, 22, and 59, which are repeated twice and then followed up with two sets of "short" and then "long" vowel pairs. This reliance on vowel sounds is not unique to this ode, but is common to Keats's other 1819 odes and his Eve of St. Agnes..
The poem incorporates a complex reliance on assonance—the repetition of vowel sounds—in a conscious pattern, as found in many of his poems. Such a reliance on assonance is found in very few English poems. Within "Ode to a Nightingale", an example of this pattern can be found in line 35 ("Already with thee! tender is the night"), where the "ea" of "Already" connects with the "e" of "tender" and the "i" of "with" connects with the "i" of "is". This same pattern is found again in line 41 ("I cannot see what flowers are at my feet") with the "a" of "cannot" linking with the "a" of "at" and the "ee" of "see" linking with the "ee" of "feet". This system of assonance can be found in approximately a tenth of the lines of Keats's later poetry..
When it comes to other sound patterns, Keats relies on double or triple caesuras in approximately 6% of lines throughout the 1819 odes. An example from "Ode to a Nightingale" can be found within line 45 ("The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild") as the pauses after the commas are a "masculine" pause. Furthermore, Keats began to reduce the amount of Latin-based words and syntax that he relied on in his poetry, which in turn shortened the length of the words that dominate the poem. There is also an emphasis on words beginning with consonants, especially those that begin with "b", "p" or "v". The first stanza relies heavily on these three consonants, and they are used as a syzygy to add a musical tone within the poem..
Compared to his earlier verse, spondees are relatively abundant in his 1819 odes and other late poems. In "Ode to a Nightingale" they are used in just over 8% of his lines (compared to a mere 2.6% in Endymion). Examples include:.
/ × / / × × / / × / Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth (line 12)
× / × / × / / / / / Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last, grey hairs (line 25)
To Walter Jackson Bate, the use of spondees in lines 31–34 creates a feeling of slow flight, and "in the final stanza . . . the distinctive use of scattered spondees, together with initial inversion, lend[s] an approximate phonetic suggestion of the peculiar spring and bounce of the bird in its flight.".
Poem
The first and sixth stanzas exemplify the juxtaposition of rapture and morbidity in the poem:
Themes "Ode to a Nightingale" describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature. In the words of Richard Fogle, "The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual: inclusive terms which, however, contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and common sense reason, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream."Fogle 1968 p. 32 Of course, the nightingale's song is the dominant image and dominant "voice" within the ode. The nightingale is also the object of empathy and praise within the poem. However, the nightingale and the discussion of the nightingale is not simply about the bird or the song, but about human experience in general. This is not to say that the song is a simple metaphor, but it is a complex image that is formed through the interaction of the conflicting voices of praise and questioning.Bate 1963 p. 500 On this theme, David Perkins summarizes the way "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" perform this when he says, "we are dealing with a talent, indeed an entire approach to poetry, in which symbol, however necessary, may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry, any more than it could with Shakespeare, but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions".John Keats 1979 p. 500 However, there is a difference between an urn and a nightingale in that the nightingale is not an eternal entity. Furthermore, in creating any aspect of the nightingale immortal during the poem the narrator separates any union that he can have with the nightingale.Perkins 1964 p. 103
The nightingale's song within the poem is connected to the art of music in a way that the urn in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is connected to the art of sculpture. As such, the nightingale would represent an enchanting presence and, unlike the urn, is directly connected to nature. As natural music, the song is for beauty and lacks a message of truth. Keats follows Coleridge's belief, as found in "The Nightingale", in separating from the world by losing himself in the bird's song. Although Keats favours a female nightingale over Coleridge's masculine bird, both reject the traditional depiction of the nightingale as related to the tragedy of Philomela.Vendler pp. 77–81 Their songbird is a happy nightingale that lacks the melancholic feel of previous poetic depictions.Gittings 1968 p. 317 The bird is only a voice within the poem, but it is a voice that compels the narrator to join with in and forget the sorrows of the world. However, there is tension in that the narrator holds Keats's guilt regarding the death of Tom Keats, his brother. The song's conclusion represents the result of trying to escape into the realm of fancy.Vendler pp. 81–83
Like Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To a Skylark", Keats's narrator listens to a bird song, but listening to the song within "Ode to a Nightingale" is almost painful and similar to death. The narrator seeks to be with the nightingale and abandons his sense of vision in order to embrace the sound in an attempt to share in the darkness with the bird. As the poem ends, the trance caused by the nightingale is broken and the narrator is left wondering if it was a real vision or just a dream.Bloom 1993 pp. 407–411 The poem's reliance on the process of sleeping is common to Keats's poems, and "Ode to a Nightingale" shares many of the same themes as Keats' Sleep and Poetry and Eve of St. Agnes. This further separates the image of the nightingale's song from its closest comparative image, the urn as represented in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The nightingale is distant and mysterious, and even disappears at the end of the poem. The dream image emphasizes the shadowiness and elusiveness of the poem. These elements make it impossible for there to be a complete self-identification with the nightingale, but it also allows for self-awareness to permeate throughout the poem, albeit in an altered state.Bate 1963 pp. 502–503