Ode to a nightingale full#

Perhaps even Ruth (whose story is told in the Old Testament) heard it. The song of the nightingale that he is listening to was heard in ancient times by emperor and peasant. Many a time, he confesses, he has been 'half in love with easeful Death.' The nightingale is free from the human fate of having to die. Now, he feels, it would be a rich experience to die, 'to cease upon the midnight with no pain' while the bird would continue to sing ecstatically. In the darkness he listens to the nightingale. He cannot see what flowers are growing around him, but from their odor and from his knowledge of what flowers should be in bloom at the time he can guess. As soon as he realizes this, he is, in spirit, lifted up above the trees and can see the moon and the stars even though where he is physically there is only a glimmering of light. But wine is not needed to enable him to escape.

Ode to a nightingale full#

The wine would put him in a state in which he would no longer be himself, aware that life is full of pain, that the young die, the old suffer, and that just to think about life brings sorrow and despair. Keats longs for a draught of wine which would take him out of himself and allow him to join his existence with that of the bird. The bird's happiness is conveyed in its singing. Envy of the imagined happiness of the nightingale is not responsible for his condition rather, it is a reaction to the happiness he has experienced through sharing in the happiness of the nightingale. Keats is in a state of uncomfortable drowsiness.