Page 317 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes 28.2.2 Summary

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a
drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest
and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather
from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer
from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine, “a
draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and like peasant dances, and let him “leave
the world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he
explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has
never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its consciousness that
everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty
cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through
alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but through poetry, which will give him
“viewless wings.” He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where
even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes
blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade,
but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-
rose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the
dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and
called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks
that the idea of death seems richer than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no
pain” while the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would
continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain” and be no longer able to hear.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not “born for
death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and
clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking
out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn
tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into
himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed
him and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking
dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or
asleep.

How in Stanza 7, does the birds song lead the speaker beyond his immediate
surroundings?

28.2.3 Form

Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike
most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” 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. “Nightingale” also differs
from the other odes in that its 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).

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