Ode to a Nightingale Stanza by Stanza Explanation and Paraphrase

Tags: John Keats , Notes & Analysis , Poetry

Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

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.

Stanza by stanza explanation of "Ode to a Nightingale

This ode by John Keats is based upon the single conceit that the little nightingale that the poet addresses is immortal:

1. It assumes that the bird is the only one that has ever existed because it looks and acts the same as birds of this species have for centuries.

2. It assumes that the nightingale is immortal since, unlike humans who fear death, it cannot conceive of death.

3. It assumes that the bird is immortal because the nightingale stands for the ravished princess Philomela's metamorphized soul.

· Stanza I

As a Romantic poet, Keats validated emotional expression as an aesthetic source of experience. In this stanza, then, he expresses his unhappiness, saying it is not envy of the bird's lighthearted song of "summer in full-throated ease."

· Stanza II

In his melancholy, the poet wishes that he could drink "a beaker full from the fountain of the Muses on Mt. Helicon," where waters of inspiration flowed. With the nightingale, he could disappear into the forest away from his trials in life. Here, the poet revels in the idea of the glorified past, both classical and medieval.

· Stanza III

In the continuation of his wish to "fade away," the poet wishes to leave the cares and anxieties of his life:

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
and leaden-eyed despairs

for the beauty and wonder to the next, where Beauty and new Love know nothing of this sorrow.

· Stanza IV

The poet tells the nightingale to fly away because he will come on the "wings of Poesy"; that is, with his imagination, the poet will connect both to this world and that of poetic fancy. In line 35, the poet is suddenly transported,

Already with thee! tender is the night....
But here there is no light

but the nightingale lives in darkness. Because the imagery here is connotative of night, the poet may be sleeping.

· Stanza V

Hovering between the real world and the world of the spirit, the poet touches what he cannot see and describes all with colorful imagery:

Fast fading violets covered up in leaves:
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy white,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

· Stanza VI

In this stanza, Keats expresses his obsession with death and envisions his soul with that of the nightingale, but if he dies they will part.

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art ouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

· Stanza VII

The poet realizes that the nightingale is not meant for death; his voice is immortal as the voice of the bird has been the same for ages and is ubiquitous:

This voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown...

· Stanza VIII

This musing of the poet is but transitory, and he must return to the real world,

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

While the little nightingale's song has elevated his spirit, the poet wonders if he is awake or dreaming,

...the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do....

The poet has had a transcendent experience, connecting with Nature in the creation of his art, but he is left disappointed as he feels a certain disillusionment in the limits of the imagination. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a beautifully personal lyric by the Romantic poet, John Keats, who loved the classical world, and all that is an expression of the aesthetic.