Page 326 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

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

or “faery land.” Keats might be thinking of the stories of knights, fairies, and monsters from Edmund Notes
Spenser’s famous Renaissance poem, The Faerie Queene. After it flies out the window, the nightingale
is alone and abandoned–“forlorn”–in this strange land.

Stanza 8 Summary

Lines 71-72
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Why did he have to use the word “forlorn?” It reminds the speaker of how he has also been
abandoned – by the nightingale itself. All of a sudden, he gets sucked back into the normal world
after several pleasant stanzas of exploring the nightingale’s realm. For him, the word “forlorn” is
like, when you are having a really great dream and then all of a sudden you hear your alarm clock
and remember that you have to wake up and go to class. It’s a big disappointment. The speaker is
pulled back into his own mind, his “sole self.”
Lines 73-74
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
He admits that his attempts to use his imagination (“fancy”) to “cheat” his way into the nightingale’s
world have not been as effective as he would have liked. He bids good-bye to the bird and then
lashes out at his imagination for being a “deceiving elf,” like the character Puck from Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although “fancy” is famed for being able to create new worlds, the
speaker has not been successful at permanently escaping the everyday world.

Lines 75-78
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:
Now it becomes clear that the nightingale is flying away. The speaker bids goodbye twice more to
the nightingale using the French word, “adieu,” which means, “good-bye for a long time.” The
bird’s sad or “plaintive” song grows harder to hear, as the bird flies from the nearby meadows,
across a stream, up a hill, and into the next valley. Now he can’t hear it at all.

Lines 79-80
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Now that the bird is left, the speaker’s not sure if he ever entered its world at all. He thinks that
maybe the experience was just a “waking dream” and not really true. But has the speaker returned
to the “real” world? Maybe the nightingale’s world was reality, and the “real” world is just a dream.
Everything is topsy-turvy, and he doesn’t know what is true from what is fancy. He wonders if he
is a awake or sleeping.

28.2.5 Themes
With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes
of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the

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