Page 318 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 28: John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Autumn

Notes

Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme
throughout the odes.

28.2.4 Analysis

The poem begins as the speaker starts to feel disoriented from listening to the song of the nightingale,
as if he had just drunken something really, really strong. He feels bittersweet happiness at the
thought of the nightingale’s carefree life.

The speaker wishes he had a special wine distilled directly from the earth. He
wants to drink such a wine and fade into the forest with the nightingale. He wants
to escape the worries and concerns of life, age, and time.

He uses poetry to join the nightingale’s nighttime world, deep in the dark forest where hardly any
moonlight can reach. He can’t see any of the flowers or plants around him, but he can smell them.
He thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to die at night in the forest, with no one around except the nightingale
singing.
But the nightingale can’t die. The nightingale must be immortal, because so many different kinds of
generations of people have heard its song throughout history, everyone from clowns and emperors
to Biblical characters to people in fantasy stories.
The speaker’s vision is interrupted when the nightingale flies away and leaves him alone. He feels
abandoned and disappointed that his imagination is not strong enough to create its own reality. He
is left confused and bewildered, not knowing the difference between reality and dreams.

Stanza 1 Summary
Lines 1-2
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
The speaker says that his heart hurts as if he has just drunken poison. “Hemlock” is the poison that
the Greek philosopher Socrates took when he was put to death for corrupting the youth. The speaker
feels woozy and numb, like when the dentist puts you on Novocain. Imagine him swaying back
and forth, kind of drunk and out of it.
The “ache” in his heart almost sounds pleasurable, the way he describes it. Like when you hear a
sad song you really love that just pierces your heart, and you’re like, “This makes me so sad!” but if
anyone tried to turn it off you’d throttle them.

Lines 3-4
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
“Poison” is a bit exaggerated. He’s not dying, after all. He tries another approach to explain how he
feels. He feels as though he has drank some powerful drug or painkiller (“opiate”) that causes him
to “sink” into a kind of oblivion.

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