‘Ode to a Nightingale’ begins with the persona describing his melancholy, inspired by a nightingale’s singing - “My heart aches…” The monosyllables create a slow, deliberate rhythm, reflecting his mood.
Sadness numbs his senses. He compares this to having drunk hemlock, a poisonous European herb, or consumed an opiate and “Lethe wards sunk.” Lethe is an allusion to one of the five rivers of the Ancient Greek underworld, Hades. The Ancient Greeks believed that a soul drank from Lethe before reincarnation to eradicate the memory of their previous life. The repetition of ‘s’ in ‘a drowsy numbness pains my sense,’ combined with the long ‘o’ and ‘a’ sounds, sonically reflects the speaker’s soporific state.
The speaker addresses the nightingale, stating that his sorrow is not the result of envy but of feeling the bird’s joy too deeply. He uses a metaphor, comparing it to a ‘light-winged Dryad’ - a spirit inhabiting forests, suggesting that the nightingale seems mystical, existing on a plane beyond the earthly one. Its beautiful singing contrasts with his sadness, emphasised by repetition of ‘happy’ and the visual and auditory imagery of:
“In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”
O for a draught of vintage!
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for wine, which he associates with pastoral images of singing, dancing and cheer. The Romantic poets idealised the country as a place where people were happy and pure and saw cities and industrialisation as forces corruptive to innocence. The gustatory image, “Tasting of Flora,” is an allusion to the Roman goddess of flowers and spring; “Provencal song” refers to the music of Provence, a region located in South-Eastern France, and “mirth” means happiness.
The persona longs for a drink from the “Hippocrene,” a Greek mythological fountain on Mount Helicon believed to inspire poetry. The alliteration of ‘b’ in "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" cleverly imitates the bubbles. The persona hopes the drinking might cause him to leave the Earth and ‘fade away into the forest’ with the nightingale.
In the third stanza of ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ the speaker reveals that he desires such an escape because he wants to forget the suffering of Earthly life, which the nightingale does not experience. “Weariness, fever, and the fret” refers to exhaustion, sickness and anxiety. Palsy refers to paralysis and involuntary shaking.
The monosyllabic list “few, sad, last gray hairs” reflects the slowing down that comes with age. In the stanza’s final lines, the persona asserts that youth, love and beauty are fleeting. Thinking causes sadness and despair.
Stanza four opens with an imperative “Away! Away!” as the speaker implores the nightingale to depart. The persona will follow him, traveling, not on the escapism enabled by Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, and “his pards,” the leopards which drew his chariot, but on the “viewless wings of Poesy,” or poetry.
The exclamation “Already with thee!” commands attention, as the persona suddenly announces that he is with the nightingale. He uses a metaphor, comparing the moon to a Queen and the stars to her “Fays” or fairies. In contrast, the persona is in a dark forested area, the only light being that which filters from the sky through the gloom and the trees.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet
Stanza five is a rich description of the speaker’s surroundings. It is so dark that he identifies the plants and flowers around him through their scents, employing olfactory imagery, “The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild…”
In the sixth stanza, the speaker again addresses the nightingale – “Darkling I listen” - saying that he has often felt the urge to die. He personifies Death, stating that he has “Call’d him soft names,” implying that death has seemed like a friend, offering comfort. In this moment, death appeals strongly, as the nightingale’s ecstatic song will ease the pain. In the final two lines, however, the speaker realises that, were he dead, the bird would continue to sing and he would have “ears in vain.”
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?
The seventh stanza develops this idea, beginning “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” The nightingale’s song has been heard for generations and in various contexts – by emperors and clowns, by the biblical Ruth and in fairytales, and, thus, unlike the speaker, the bird is immortalized.
In stanza eight, the persona returns from the nightingale to himself. The bird’s song fades, and the speaker bids him farewell – ‘Adieu! Adieu!’ The poem ends with the persona asking rhetorical questions – did he really hear the nightingale or was it a vision or a dream? Did his poetry and imagination transport him to another plane of existence or not?
Jasmine Crittenden - Jasmine Crittenden (B.A.)(Hons.)(First Class) is a writer and editor specialising in music, literature and travel.
Join the Conversation