Ode to a Nightingale
by John Keats
 
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 thine happiness,

  

        That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,

  

            In some melodious plot

  

    Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

  

        Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

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O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
  
    Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
  
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,  

    Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt 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-stainèd mouth;

  

    That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

  

        And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

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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 grey 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.

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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.

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I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
  
    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
  
But, in embalmèd 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 cover’d 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.

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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 musèd 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.

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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 ofttimes hath

  

     Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

  

        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

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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?

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Ode to a Nightingale — Keats write this ode in May, 1819. The exact circumstances of its composition are unclear: Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown claimed that a nightingale lived near where he and Keats were living at the time (now known as the Keats House). Inspired by the song, Keats (according to Brown) wrote the poem in a single day. Brown’s story has a few problems, and he only wrote it down many years later, but Keats’s manuscript has survived. If it is indeed the original draft, he appears to have written it quickly and all at once. He does cross out some words and make revisions along the way, or perhaps later, but all in all surprisingly few. This poem truly seems to be an example of a great work written at a fever pitch under the influence of tremendous inspiration.

As for the topic, nightingales have been a common literary symbol for millennia. Even the word nightingale (which means night-songstress, though in fact only the male nightingale sings) goes back about a thousand years. Nightingales, as the name implies, sing at night, unlike most birds. The idea of a beautiful song emerging from the darkness has proven to be an irresistible poetic image.
 
hemlock — a poison derived from the hemlock plant and supposedly drunk by Socrates (469-399 B.C.) when he was sentenced to death by the Athenian government
 
opiate — literally any plant of the opium family, long used to relieve pain; opiates also cause drowsiness
 
Lethe-wards — towards Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that borders Hades, the underworld where the dead reside in Hellenic myth
 
Dryad — in Hellenic myth, a nymph (female spirit) inhabiting a tree
 
beechen — adjectival form of beech, a type of tree with glossy leaves
 
draught of vintage — a drink of aged, fine wine
 
Provençal — the adjectival form of Provence, a region of France between the Rhone River and Italy; Provence has a rich cultural heritage, with influence from the Celts, Hellenic Greeks, Romans, Franks, Spanish, and even Muslims.
 
South — Keats is referring to the Mediterranean countries
 
Hippocrene — Literally “horse’s fountain,” the Hippocrene was a fountain on Mt. Helicon, which is located in east-central Greece next to the Gulf of Corinth and separates the northern part of Greece from the Peloponnesus (the southern peninsula). The Hippocrene was supposedly formed when the flying horse Pegasus’s hooves truck a rock. The fountain was sacred to the Muses, and was said to be the source from which poetic inspiration flowed.
 
youth grows pale, and spectre-thin — The image here is the standard characterization of melancholy, one of the four major personality types traditionally associated with the bodily fluids. A primarily melancholy character is by nature thoughtful, introspective, and reflective, but if the humours become too out-of-balance, can become depressive, narcissistic, and self-loathing. Hamlet is an archetypal melancholy character.
 
Bacchus — An alternate name for Dionysus, the god of intoxication in Hellenic culture. Do not merely think of this as drunkenness. For the Greeks, Dionysus was the source of epiphanies and ecstasy. The name Bacchus (which the Romans adopted) derives from the Greek root word meaning frenzy.
 
pards — an old word for leopards
 
Poesy — poetry, often specifically the act of making or composing poetry
 
Fays — another word for fairies (also spelled faeries)
 
eglantine — also called eglantine rose or sweetbriar, a plant particularly well-known for its beautiful apple-like scent
 
Darkling — in the dark
 
sod — literally the dirt from which grass grows
 
Ruth — In the Old Testament, Ruth is a Moabite woman who marries into an Israelite family that is living in her country. When her husband dies and his mother Naomi returns to her home in Bethlehem, Ruth begs to stay with her. (Her sister Orpah reluctantly stays in Moab.) Ultimately, she marries another Israelite named Boaz and ends up the great-grandmother of David (although most scholars believe this was a much later addition to the story).
 
fancy — A term associated with the imagination; in the Biographia Literaria (1817), Samuel Taylor Coleridge had drawn a distinction between Fancy and Imagination itself, in that the imagination (which he divided further into the primary and secondary Imagination) was the true creative faculty, “the prime Agent of all human perception.” On the other hand, the Fancy “has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” In other words, the Fancy’s function is to manipulate that which already exists. The Fancy is therefore inferior to true imagination, which exists prior to and independent of perception.