This poem follows a pattern

Jack Stillinger sees in

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” many Romantic poems:
1. Poet has a problem.
2. Poet reflects on problem in
1.
a kind of imaginative,
transcendent reverie.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
3. Poet returns from it but
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
somehow changed.
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
In short, there is a kind of
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
mental departure and a
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
return, suggesting some
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
insight has been gained.
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Here the poet begins in pain
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
and envious of the bird,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
not unlike Shelley in “Ode
to a Skylark.”

Note: unlike Wordsworth, the

later Romantics liked to
include classical allusions.
 The poem has suicidal and
ideas and “deathy” imagery
throughout.

Those parts are underlined.

Beethoven thought of
2.
suicide and said,
“only art held me back.”
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Being burried is a
Tasting of Flora and the country green, reoccurring image. Being
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! underground is in stark
O for a beaker full of the warm South, contrast with the bird that
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, rises above.
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth; “Fading” is a key repeated
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, word in the poem.
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
The poem shows Romantic
interest in altered states of
consciousness; in stanza 1,
a “dull opiate” is mentioned;
here wine is referred to with
classical allusions.
3. This is a powerful
stanza, sad and
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget moving in its
What thou among the leaves hast never known, description of the
The weariness, the fever, and the fret pain the speaker
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; wishes to leave
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, behind.
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow “Keats’s brother
And leaden-eyed despairs, Tom, wasted by
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, tuberculosis, had
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. died the preceding
winter.”
 We’ve seen reference
to Bacchus (the
Roman name for the
Greek god Dionysus)
in “Kubla Khan” and
4. “Ode to the West
Wind.”
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, Here, we see a shift—
But on the viewless wings of Poesy, away from alcohol-
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: inspired vision and
Already with thee! tender is the night, instead to pure poetic
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, vision itself.
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light, Keats already feels
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown with the bird, as he
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. imagines himself
rising into the dark
sky.

Tender Is the Night

was used as a title for
a novel by F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
 Keats is known for being
one of the most sensual
of poets, meaning he
writes with a lot of
sensory descriptions:
5. everyone includes
imagery, but Keats
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, includes a lot of the
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, sense of touch, taste,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet smell, and sound—
Wherewith the seasonable month endows especially here.
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Remember, the
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; underlined parts signal
And mid-May’s eldest child, the “deathy” images and
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, phrases that appear
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. throughout the poem,
even when death is not
explicitly being
discussed (it’s like the
mindset of the speaker
being hinted at through
his descriptions).
 Here’s where the speaker
appears most suicidal, but
at the end of the stanza he
begins to arrive at a
realization, one like
6.
Shelley’s in “Ode to a
Skylark”:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Even if the bird seems to
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
transcend the problems of
To take into the air my quiet breath;
the world (just as the
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
speaker is looking for such
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
an escape), the bird is
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
nothing like him and could
In such an ecstasy!
care less if he died.
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
A “sod” is a British term for
an idiot (among other
things). He would be an
idiot to die. A “sod” is also
a piece of turf, again
hinting at the “deathy”
underground imagery of
the poem.
 The speaker begins to
see a wider picture
here, and he no longer
appears so alone.
7.
He thinks of other
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! people over time,
No hungry generations tread thee down; lonely people, who
The voice I hear this passing night was heard must have felt like him
In ancient days by emperor and clown: hearing the bird’s
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path song: ancient
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, emperors and clowns,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn; Ruth (from the Bible),
The same that oft-times hath and sailors upon rough
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam seas.
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
At times, everyone
feels sad with longing,
and recognizing this
common thread in
humanity marks a shift
away from the
seduction of death.

8.
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 fam’d 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?
Wordsworth can only hold onto
glimpses of immortality and
Coleridge is only allowed a little
taste of paradise; here, too, the
poetic vision is fleeting. The
poet’s own words like a bell
wake him from his reverie, and
he suggests his imagination
(linked to his suicidal thoughts)
can no longer cheat or deceive
him.
There is a reversal in the main
pattern of imagery, too. The
bird’s song, which prompted
the speaker’s suicidal
thoughts, is now distant from
the speaker—the song is faded,
buried deep in the next valley.
Adieu!—it is as if the speaker
says farewell to death, farewell
to thoughts of fading away and
being buried.