My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—-
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—-
To thy high requiem become a sod
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
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:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—-do I wake or sleep?
Notes
Haydon, in one of his letters to Miss Mitford (Corresp. &c., Vol. 2, pg. 72) says of Keats-- "The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely."
Lord Houghton says the Ode was suggested by the continued song of a nightingale which, in the spring of 1819, had built its nest close to Wentworth Place. "Keats," says his Lordship (Aldine ed., 1876, pg. 237), "took great pleasure in her song, and one morning took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he remained between two and three hours. He then reached the house with some scraps of paper in his hand, which he soon put together in the form of his Ode."
(stanza 2): Of Keats's partiality for claret enough and too much has been made; but with his delightful list of desiderata given to his sister in a letter, now before me, it is impossible to resist citing as a prose parallel to these two splendid lines of poetry the words, "and, please heaven, a little claret wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep -- with a few or a good many ratafia cakes."
(stanza 3): The sixth line very clearly bears out Haydon's words connecting the sadness of the poem with the death of Tom Keats, and should be compared with the passage about his sister in the letter to Brown written from Rome on the 30th November, 1820,-- "my sister - who walks about my imagination like a ghost - she is so like Tom." In the same letter he says "it runs in my head we shall all die young."
(stanza 7): In the last line of this stanza the word "fairy" instead of "faery" stands in the manuscript and in the Annals; but the Lamia volume reads "faery", which enhances the poetic value of the line in the subtlest manner -- eliminating all possible connexion of fairy-land with Christmas trees, tinsel, and Santa Claus, and carrying out the imagination safely back to the middle ages.
~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.
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Wonderfully Melancholy
I love how Keats comes to almost curse the bird for its joy while he lives in such gloom, then wishes to start his life anew, living outside the world that entraps him. But he cannot, and wakes from his daydream to come back to his destined life. He speaks mostly of the civilized world and its utter plight, while nature, which has gone unchanged, never seems to lose its mirth. -
Stanza 5 of Nightingale...
From guest Dirk (contact)
Does anyone notice anything unusual or pecualiar about Stanza 5 of Nightingale?...what does it have to do with the rest of the poem? -
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I checked this poem with my own book: The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900. Stanza 5 is indeed a part of this poem.
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This has always been one of my favorite poems, because of the wonderful language, constant flow, and the well displayed emotions.
I feel, that in these stanzas, Keats has written about himself. He has not built a character, because he, himself is the character. I feel that this poem, is a monologue of his own life, and the nightingale speaks for him. In other words, he's chosen a nightingale as the medium to say his words. This, I feel has added a certain beauty to this poem.
I feel, you will agree with me to this, that the last stanza has the same feel of William Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper"
Anyways, i love this poem of his.
Ankita -
He touches my heart.
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Yes, he obviously envies and admires the bird, although I'm not so sure he wants to BE it. He definitely wants its condition though: free, untroubled by cares, powerfully creative. I don't see your 1st suggestion. Why do you think he died and then came back as a nightingale?
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My dear friends of the muse...may i be so bold as to say that he had experienced death only to come back and as a nightingale? He holds this creature in the highest regards and perhaps aspires to be that which he cannot. Please add to this, I am most impressed with the previous comments.
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Oops! The rather lengthy commentary above is mine. Can't seem to stay away from this poem.
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A dryad is a semi-divine being. It is a spirit of nature. That's the connection that Keats is making between the bird and the dryad. On your line "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird": 1st - It's not an oxymoron. As "anonymous" says, it's a simple statement. 2nd - The bird is a microcosm of everlasting nature. All nature is contained in it, and nature doesn't die. In this sense the nightingale, too, is immortal. This is what Keats means through the rest of the stanza. He talks about all others from the past who have also heard the nightingale's song. 3rd - The nightingale is also both him and his poem. He "transformed" himself into the bird in stanzas 3&4 (at least temporarily). So since the bird is immortal, he is also immortal, or at least part of him is; call it "the soul" or whatever. His transformation into the bird is achieved through the poem itself ("...on the viewless wings of Poesy"). The poem is the transformative device, and it, too, is immortal. All true poetry is and Keats is acknowledging that here. Finally, it's worth noting that he talks about the bird's immortality just after he considers how nice death would be for him. It's only at the end of stanza 6 that he decides he'd rather not die; he'd rather live to hear the immortal song of the immortal bird. Perhaps he hears the sound of his own immortality woven into the themes of the birdsong. Keats was amazing.
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I think, perhaps, that old John was deep in his cups when he wrote this one. And, I think, perhaps that HE is the nightingale, or at least his lost youth is. It is the stuff of remembrance, and dreams. "Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep?" His last line says it all.....
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it means that he was not born to die because hes immortal. its a statement. "you are not born to die because you are immortal"
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How can a nightingale also be a dryad? And some1 help me with the oxymoron of the sentence "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird"
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A beautiful poem, incorporating the brilliant use of metaphors to convey a sense of oblivion.
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I reread this poem for the umpteenth time this evening, and finally realized that the dryads are the nightingdales... He doe such an amazing job of subtly getting alot of information in there.
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