Poetry
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats · 1819
Opening lines
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:
Text quoted from rpo.library.utoronto.ca
Synopsis
Seized by a torpor as though from hemlock, the poet listens to a nightingale singing of summer in the woods. He dreams of a wine of the South that would let him fade away with the bird and forget weariness, fever, old age and the youth that dies. He joins it on the wings of Poesy, in a fragrant night where he guesses at the flowers without seeing them. Half in love with death, he thinks of dying as the song goes on, while the immortal bird repeats the voice that the emperor, the clown and Ruth in exile once heard.
Context
The ode was written in May 1819 at Hampstead, at Wentworth Place, the home of Charles Brown, where the author had been living since the death of his brother Tom, carried off by tuberculosis in December 1818. Nearly twenty years later, Brown related that the poet had composed it in a single morning under a plum tree in the garden, and that he had gathered up the sheets, which had been slipped behind books; biographers regard this account as embellished. The poem appeared in July 1819 in the Annals of the Fine Arts, without the author's name, then in the 1820 collection. The only draft in the author's hand is preserved at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Who it is for
Eight stanzas of ten lines, eighty lines in all, translated into French as early as 1910 and often since.
Prizes and reception
With two other odes of the same year, one of the English poems most often placed in the first rank; Fitzgerald took the title of Tender Is the Night from it.
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