Ode to Nightingale

   
         “Ode to Nightingale” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the morality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of the Nightingale’s fluid music. The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced is ‘Ode on Indolence’ that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in ‘Nightingale’ it is a sign of tool full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness”, as the speaker tells the Nightingale; hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs for a ‘draught’ of vintage’ to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the  transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “ charioted by Bacchus and his pard’s and chooses instead of embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in “Indolence” the viewless wings of poesy”.

                                    The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanza five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourager’s the speaker to embrace the idea of dying of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the Nightingale’s music and never experiencing and further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn” he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is- an imagined escape from the inescapable. As the Nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or a sleep.

                                He can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there is no light”, he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on Grecian Urn”, which is in many ways a companion poem to “Ode to Nightingale.” In the later poem, the speaker art subject not subject to any of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale”, he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression the Nightingale song is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.