Ode to Nightingale

by John Keats
 a.A ghost or spirit of a dead person
1. Hemloc b.An adjective that refers to a kind of a
k tree with smooth gray bark
c.A group of bushes or small trees that
2. Opiate grow close together
3. Beeche d.Happiness and laughter
n e.Borderline
f. An evergreen tree with soft wood that
4. Mirth could produce poison
5. Brim g.Sad and lonely
6. Specter h.A drug that is used to cause sleep or
7. Thicket reduce pain
i. A type of bush or small tree with pink
8. Hawthor and white flowers and small red fruits
n j. Lament
Lethe Hippocrene

Dryad
Fays

Bacchus Death
Queen-Moon
Ruth
John Keats
English Romantic poet John Keats was
born on October 31, 1795, in London.
The oldest of four children, he lost both
his parents at a young age. His father, a
livery-stable keeper, died when Keats
was eight; his mother died of
tuberculosis six years later.
After his mother’s death, Keats’s
maternal grandmother appointed two
London merchants, Richard Abbey and
John Rowland Sandell, as guardians.
Abbey, a prosperous tea broker,
assumed the bulk of this responsibility,
while Sandell played only a minor role.
When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew
him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to
apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon
and study medicine in a London hospital.
In 1816 Keats became a licensed
apothecary, but he never practiced his
profession, deciding instead to write
poetry.
Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt,
an influential editor of the Examiner,
who published his sonnets “On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and
“O Solitude.”
Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a
walking tour in Northern England and
Scotland, returning home to care for his
brother, Tom, who suffered from
tuberculosis.
While nursing his brother, Keats met
and fell in love with a woman named

Fanny Brawne.
Writing some of his finest poetry between
1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on
“Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of
the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing
“Hyperion” upon the death of his brother,
after completing only a small portion, but in
late 1819 he returned to the piece and
rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion”
(unpublished until 1856). a
That same autumn Keats contracted
tuberculosis, and by the following
February he felt that death was already
upon him, referring to the present as
his “posthumous existence.”
The fragment “Hyperion” was
considered by Keats’s contemporaries
to be his greatest achievement, but by
that time he had reached an advanced
stage of his disease and was too ill to
be encouraged.
He continued a correspondence with
Fanny Brawne and—when he could no
longer bear to write to her directly—her
mother, but his failing health and his
literary ambitions prevented their
getting married.
Under his doctor’s orders to seek a
warm climate for the winter, Keats went
to Rome with his friend, the painter
Joseph Severn. He died there on
February 23, 1821, at the age of
twenty-five, and was buried in the
Protestant cemetery.
 I.
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 suck
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine 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
 II.
O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of flora and country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With neaded 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;
 III.
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 to-morrow.
 IV.
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,
Cluster’d 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
 V.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in the embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
 VI.
Darkling, I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quite 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 would thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become sod.
 VII.
Thou was 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
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn
 VIII.
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?