Keats's Ode to a Nightingale | Close Reading & Analysis | Greater Romantic Lyrics

keeps his o to a Nightingale was composed May 1819 and it's one of his most beautiful Odes the Nightingale has been a stock figure for many of the romantics and pre-romantics in the 18th and early 19th centuries and so kids is really relying upon this institution of Illusion which goes all the way back to Greek myth but he's he's also Reinventing the Nightingale in really interesting ways the poem traces the rise and fall of an imaginative flight of fancy that is occasioned by the beauty of the Nightingale it's a very interesting poem in that it's it's not grounded in so much a local space as wordsworth's tintern Abbey is for instance or even in a time or place as coleridge's Frost at midnight is it's instead grounded in this drowsy sensuous experience with the beauty of The Nightingales song you will see here that what predominates as the sense is not not really Vision as is predominant in Wordsworth but it's really sound so let's look at keats's Ode to a Nightingale my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sins again we have these present verbs aches pains as though of Hemlock I had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past and leithwords had sunk Hemlock of course being a poison the poison that that killed Socrates as though he had he had drunk Hemlock our emptied Soul some dull opiate to the drains opiate being made of the poppy flower so this has a Botanical natural connotation here which is then exchanged for the mythological culminating here in the Letha words had sunk Letha was the river according to Greek mythology where the souls would pass when they passed or drank from the river they would forget their past life and so there's this forgetfulness there's this drunkenness there's this medicinal state with which the speaker is comparing this experience it is not through Envy of thy happy lot but being too happy in thine happiness so now he's made an address he's addressing a thou thy happy lot and his compulsive repetition uh this polypton is change of form from happy happiness this exchange with that root word that's thou light winged dryad of the trees in some melodious plot of Beach and green and shadows numbers singest of Summer and full-throated ease a dryad again ...