Keats 's Poem About A Nightingale

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In the spring of 1819, Keats was visiting his friend’s house which had a nightingale’s nest built near. He sat under the tree for several hours and ended up creating his poem, Ode to a Nightingale (Appendix E). The title itself can clearly imply that the poem is about a nightingale, a bird that is known to sing at night. Throughout the poem, Keats writes about his anguish, “My heart aches, and drowsy numbness pains” (1), how the bird gives him happiness, “‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, / But being too happy in thine happiness” (2), and how he wishes to escape with the bird, “And with thee fade away into the forest dim” (20). In almost every other stanza, he symbolizes what the world is to him, “Here, where men sit and hear each other groans / Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs / Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies” (24-26). Keats personifies death and beauty is this poem. He says that “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes” (29), meaning that beauty does not last forever and that “I have been half in love with easeful Death” (52), meaning that it is easy to think about death, especially since it is usually on his mind. He tries to escape reality and join the bird’s world through drinking wine and listening to its songs, “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen” (19). In stanza five, he describes the bird’s world. Although he cannot see, he imagines “what flowers are at my feet / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs”

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