Thoughts, "Ode To a Nightingale"

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-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the 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 beaded 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:
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. 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.

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

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 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.

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 oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil 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?


    Every one of John Keats’ poems usually have a theme or topic that he talks about repetitively throughout his poem. In certain occasions his poems themes are clearly present, and are easily stated to the reader. While in other poems, the theme or main point could be hard to uncover. Keats is also good at having a theme in his poems that makes the reader think beyond the literal meaning, and focus more on a metaphorical, creative meaning. Like in a lot of the romanticism poet’s work, it is mostly likely you don’t understand the poem after the first time you read it. The poem above is ‘Ode to a Nightingale, by the poet John Keats. When it is read this poem to most people it is easy to say that it falls under the category of the poems that are usually not able to be understood from the first time that it is read.  Another thought I have about John Keats poems is that not everyone that reads his poems picks up the same meaning or theme. Although Keats might have made his poems so people extract one single main idea, from reading his poems I believe if someone reads a poem of his and another person reads it they may take a whole different understanding of the poem than the previous person did. Now, going back to the poem, “Ode to a Nightingale.” after reading this poem many times, I can easily say I do not have a complete clear understanding of it, but there are bits and pieces of it that I made sense of in my head, to start off I when I first read it I imagined that there was a lot of pain felt during this poem. The way I thought of this poem is that there was a loss happening by someone. Something or someone was going away or being taken away. However after reading it varies times I ended up changing my thought about the beginning of this poem. My understanding changed to believing that this person speaking is in a horrible situation, a place he does not want to be in, and he has the desire to go away. To escape “ fade far away, dissolve…” the fact I thought on e thing but then after analyzing the poem even more, proves how difficult it can be to decipher one of Keats’ poems.