ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE (John Keats, 1795-1821)
"Ode to a Nightingale" was written in the spring of 1819. It is the longest of Keats's odes, and
focuses on a speaker standing in a dark forest, listening to the beguiling and beautiful song
of the nightingale bird. This provokes a deep and meandering meditation by the speaker on
time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering.
● The power of imagination
1) The relationship between the qualities of the nightingale and Romantic concepts of
the imagination
- In the poem, the speaker imagines the bird as immortal, transcending time and
place, human and supernatural, and unifying all: ‘The voice I hear this passing night was
heard/In ancient days […] the self-same song […]The same that oft-times hath /Charm’d
magic casements’. Here the speaker supposes that the song he hears is the same one
heard by all variations of people throughout all time- the time of emperors and court jesters,
biblical times (through the allusion to Ruth), when it was used to charm open the windows of
ships on dangerous seas, and when it was heard in forlorn lands where fairies dwell.
CONTEXT: In terms of how this relates to the genre of Romanticism, the belief that
imagination has the ability to illuminate, influence and transform the world into a coherent
vision was certainly a Romantic ideal, produced out of the rejection of the Enlightenment (the
‘Age of Reason). This was defined by the rigorous scientific, political and philosophical
discourse that characterised European society during the 18th century. Romanticism
rejected this; while the Enlightenment emphasised the importance of reason, Romanticism
emphasised imagination and strong emotion. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the
Romantics argued that elements of knowledge could be grasped through intuition. Infact, in
a letter to Benjamin Bailey (1817), Keats expresses: ‘O for a life of sensations rather than of
thoughts!’
- Moreover, the nightingale's power to draw the poet away from troubles, enabling
these to be forgotten for a period of time, is another quality of the bird which
correlates to Romantic concepts of imagination. Throughout the poem, the speaker
emphasises the bird’s influence on forgetting their qualms: ‘with thee fade away into
the forest dim’, ‘fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget’. The idea of escaping the
speaker’s current reality with the bird, instead embracing the ‘forest dim’ is a central
desire for the poetic voice. This is emphasised through the repetition of ‘fade’ in the
tricolon of ‘fade, ‘dissolve’ and ‘forget’, reinforcing the power of the nightingale’s
presence on the speaker. However, this is still a distance between the nightingale
and the persona, one being ‘immortal’ and the other ‘born for death’. Therefore, the
poetic voice can only retain his imagination temporarily, until they must return to
reality- ‘the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is fam'd to do’
CONTEXT: The Romantics believed strongly in imagination’s ability to enable people to
transcend their troubles and circumstances: ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty
must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions
"Ode to a Nightingale" was written in the spring of 1819. It is the longest of Keats's odes, and
focuses on a speaker standing in a dark forest, listening to the beguiling and beautiful song
of the nightingale bird. This provokes a deep and meandering meditation by the speaker on
time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering.
● The power of imagination
1) The relationship between the qualities of the nightingale and Romantic concepts of
the imagination
- In the poem, the speaker imagines the bird as immortal, transcending time and
place, human and supernatural, and unifying all: ‘The voice I hear this passing night was
heard/In ancient days […] the self-same song […]The same that oft-times hath /Charm’d
magic casements’. Here the speaker supposes that the song he hears is the same one
heard by all variations of people throughout all time- the time of emperors and court jesters,
biblical times (through the allusion to Ruth), when it was used to charm open the windows of
ships on dangerous seas, and when it was heard in forlorn lands where fairies dwell.
CONTEXT: In terms of how this relates to the genre of Romanticism, the belief that
imagination has the ability to illuminate, influence and transform the world into a coherent
vision was certainly a Romantic ideal, produced out of the rejection of the Enlightenment (the
‘Age of Reason). This was defined by the rigorous scientific, political and philosophical
discourse that characterised European society during the 18th century. Romanticism
rejected this; while the Enlightenment emphasised the importance of reason, Romanticism
emphasised imagination and strong emotion. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the
Romantics argued that elements of knowledge could be grasped through intuition. Infact, in
a letter to Benjamin Bailey (1817), Keats expresses: ‘O for a life of sensations rather than of
thoughts!’
- Moreover, the nightingale's power to draw the poet away from troubles, enabling
these to be forgotten for a period of time, is another quality of the bird which
correlates to Romantic concepts of imagination. Throughout the poem, the speaker
emphasises the bird’s influence on forgetting their qualms: ‘with thee fade away into
the forest dim’, ‘fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget’. The idea of escaping the
speaker’s current reality with the bird, instead embracing the ‘forest dim’ is a central
desire for the poetic voice. This is emphasised through the repetition of ‘fade’ in the
tricolon of ‘fade, ‘dissolve’ and ‘forget’, reinforcing the power of the nightingale’s
presence on the speaker. However, this is still a distance between the nightingale
and the persona, one being ‘immortal’ and the other ‘born for death’. Therefore, the
poetic voice can only retain his imagination temporarily, until they must return to
reality- ‘the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is fam'd to do’
CONTEXT: The Romantics believed strongly in imagination’s ability to enable people to
transcend their troubles and circumstances: ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty
must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions
