ODE TO A Nightingale Summary PDF

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Ode to a Nightingale...

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ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE SUMMARY The poem begins as the speaker starts to feel disoriented from listening to the song of the nightingale, as if he had just drunken something really, really strong. He feels bittersweet happiness at the thought of the nightingale's carefree life. The speaker wishes he had a special wine distilled directly from the earth. He wants to drink such a wine and fade into the forest with the nightingale. He wants to escape the worries and concerns of life, age, and time. He uses poetry to join the nightingale's nighttime world, deep in the dark forest where hardly any moonlight can reach. He can't see any of the flowers or plants around him, but he can smell them. He thinks it wouldn't be so bad to die at night in the forest, with no one around except the nightingale singing. But the nightingale can't die. The nightingale must be immortal, because so many different kinds of generations of people have heard its song throughout history, everyone from clowns and emperors to Biblical characters to people in fantasy stories. The speaker's vision is interrupted when the nightingale flies away and leaves him alone. He feels abandoned and disappointed that his imagination is not strong enough to create its own reality. He is left confused and bewildered, not knowing the difference between reality and dreams.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE ANALYSIS FORM AND METER Ode in Iambic Pentameter Keats and his Romantic peers almost single-handedly revived the ode form for modern readers with poems like, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn," among others. The ode is an Ancient Greek song performed at formal occasions, usually in praise of its subject. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a particular kind of ode – a Horatian ode, after the Roman poet Horace. In general, a Horatian ode has a consistent stanza length and meter, while other kinds of odes do not – but we don't need to get too far into the weeds here. Suffice it to say that this poem might be the most famous representative of the ode form as a whole. "Ode to a Nightingale" is notable for being the longest of Keats's six "Great Odes." It is also often considered the most personal, with its reflections on death and the stresses of life.

The poem has eight separate stanzas of ten lines each, and the meter of each line in the stanza, except for the eighth, is iambic pentameter. The eighth line is written in iambic trimeter(ahh! too many prefixes!), which means it has only six syllables per line instead of ten. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English. In iambic pentameter, lines are ten syllables long and an unaccented syllable is followed by an accented one (it sounds like da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM). For example, check out line 2: My sense, | as though | of hem|-lock I | had drunk Keats does an excellent job of keeping the meter pretty regular through the poem, without making it sound awkward or strained. At some places, he even adds a syllable to certain words in order to fit the rhythm, like in line 44: But, in | em-balm|-ed dark|-ness guess | each sweet In this line, the "-ed" of "embalmed" is pronounced as a separate syllable; it's an old poetry trick that Shakespeare also used. You probably also noticed that the poem has a rhyme scheme: ABABCDECDE. Keats experimented with several different patterns of rhyme in his various odes, but there's nothing too complicated about this one.

SPEAKER The speaker is such a good actor that he can even fool himself. First he demonstrates his acting chops by pretending to be drunk. He's like an alcoholic who would do anything for a drink, except he wants a drink that contains the essence of the south of France and the Mediterranean sea coast. He stumbles around like the person who has had one beer at a party and starts shouting, "I'm so wasted!" But this act isn't enough to convince himself that he has really consumed this special drink, so he uses his own poetry to create the illusion that he has left the world behind. The speaker is definitely a poet because he tells us so. Lucky for him, playing with language does the trick, and he manages to convince himself that he has been transported to a completely new setting and perspective. Unlucky for him, he commits an amateur mistake: he flubs a line. He wasn't supposed to use the word "forlorn!" (line 70). This word breaks the spell of the performance, and he recognizes that the nightingale has flown away. The speaker must be under a lot of pressure if he wants to leave the world so bad. Actually, he's down on life as a whole, and at a couple points you might worry that he'll try to end it all. But we're never fully convinced by all his talk about how easy Death will be, and we don't think he's convinced, either. It's all just a show. Also part of the show is the speaker's display of his knowledge of Greek myth and the Bible. He's well read, with an active imagination, and he wants you to know it.

SPEAKER The speaker is such a good actor that he can even fool himself. First he demonstrates his acting chops by pretending to be drunk. He's like an alcoholic who would do anything for a drink, except he wants a drink that contains the essence of the south of France and the Mediterranean sea coast. He stumbles around like the person who has had one beer at a party and starts shouting, "I'm so wasted!" But this act isn't enough to convince himself that he has really consumed this special drink, so he uses his own poetry to create the illusion that he has left the world behind. The speaker is definitely a poet because he tells us so. Lucky for him, playing with language does the trick, and he manages to convince himself that he has been transported to a completely new setting and perspective. Unlucky for him, he commits an amateur mistake: he flubs a line. He wasn't supposed to use the word "forlorn!" (line 70). This word breaks the spell of the performance, and he recognizes that the nightingale has flown away. The speaker must be under a lot of pressure if he wants to leave the world so bad. Actually, he's down on life as a whole, and at a couple points you might worry that he'll try to end it all. But we're never fully convinced by all his talk about how easy Death will be, and we don't think he's convinced, either. It's all just a show. Also part of the show is the speaker's display of his knowledge of Greek myth and the Bible. He's well read, with an active imagination, and he wants you to know it. The speaker is such a good actor that he can even fool himself. First he demonstrates his acting chops by pretending to be drunk. He's like an alcoholic who would do anything for a drink, except he wants a drink that contains the essence of the south of France and the Mediterranean sea coast. He stumbles around like the person who has had one beer at a party and starts shouting, "I'm so wasted!" But this act isn't enough to convince himself that he has really consumed this special drink, so he uses his own poetry to create the illusion that he has left the world behind. The speaker is definitely a poet because he tells us so. Lucky for him, playing with language does the trick, and he manages to convince himself that he has been transported to a completely new setting and perspective. Unlucky for him, he commits an amateur mistake: he flubs a line. He wasn't supposed to use the word "forlorn!" (line 70). This word breaks the spell of the performance, and he recognizes that the nightingale has flown away. The speaker must be under a lot of pressure if he wants to leave the world so bad. Actually, he's down on life as a whole, and at a couple points you might worry that he'll try to end it all. But we're never fully convinced by all his talk about how easy Death will be, and we don't think he's convinced, either. It's all just a show. Also part of the show is the speaker's display of his knowledge of Greek myth and the Bible. He's well read, with an active imagination, and he wants you to know it.

SETTING The poem is set both inside and outside a forest. We'll explain. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker peers into the woods from outside and tells the nightingale, "Whoa, dude, I'm jealous that you get to live in there. How can I get a place like that?" He imagines that the bird is living it up in the forest like a pleasure-seeker in the sun-soaked Mediterranean. When he compares the forest to the world outside, the place where most humans live, it makes the outside world look like the site of endless death and decay. Talk about a skewed perspective! He ignores all the good parts of the human world. Then the giant bird of Poetry comes along to drop the speaker smack into the middle of the forest at night: the nightingale's home! The thick foliage blocks the light from the moon and the stars and creates a pleasant smell of many different plants. Through this whole scene, he continues to hear the heartbreaking song of the nightingale. Then his imagination takes him back through time, and he experiences the nightingale through others who might have heard the same song. But just as quickly as he left the regular world, he returns to it again. Once again the forest seems like a desired but inaccessible place as the nightingale flies away to find a new perch in the next valley.

SOUND CHECK This poem sounds a lot like a car shifting gears. The same high-quality motor is present the whole time, but it jumps between different levels of intensity. The poem begins in a low gear, with the slow thuds of d and u sounds: "drowsy," "numbness," "drunk," "drains," "sunk," "Dryad." The engine is just kind of idling, but you can tell that enormous power lies behind it. Sure enough, in the second stanza, the poem takes on new intensity. as the speaker begins to express his bittersweet desire rather than just telling us about it. He speaks in exclamations like, "O for a beaker full of the warm South!" This down-and-up progression continues through the third and fourth stanzas. The third stanza slows down to focus on the word "where" that frames the human world, but this depressing lull only motivates him to shift to high gear in order to escape. The exclamations return in the fourth stanza, as he cries out for a change: "Away! Away!" These shifts between manic and quiet moods are a hallmark of Keats's poetry, and the rest of the poem follows a similar pattern. The speaker slows down in the next few stanzas to smell the flowers (literally), and also to listen to the nightingale singing at night. The thought of his own death brings him back to cruising speed with a jolt, and he declares that, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" (line 61). The poem ends in this higher gear, as the speaker's words follow behind the departing nightingale, crying out, "Adieu! Adieu!" like a brokenhearted lover watching his beloved flee. This poem may have a nice engine, but the nightingale's is even better.

TITLE The first thing the title tells us is the form of the poem, the ode. But it's not just any ode, it's an ode that is addressed "to" its subject. Throughout the poem, the speaker talks to the

nightingale as if it were a person. The title helps set up this little trick. The "nightingale" is a bird that is known for singing at night – and beautifully, at that. But nightingales also play an important role in the history of poetry.

CALLING CARD You know a literary reference is obscure when you try to look it up online, and the only mention you can find takes you right back to the poem! Such was the case for Shmoop with words like "Hippocrene," a fountain of poetic inspiration. Chalk it up to Keats's amazing knowledge of Greek and Roman literature and mythology, which is up there with Shakespeare's (though Shakespeare is still the king in this department). Keats uses this knowledge oh-so-appropriately in a poem that derives from an Ancient Greek form, the ode. Show off.

TOUGH-O-METER Keats can get very flowery with his language, and his frequent references to Greek mythology can drive a reader who is unfamiliar with "dryads" and "Hippocrene" straight into the arms of his or her encyclopedia. But this is really just a poem about a guy who wants to get drunk and leave the world behind. Not everything makes perfect sense, but neither do drunken people. If you can't figure out why the moon is described as a queen or what a "magic casement" is, just imagine someone pointing at Keats and tipping an imaginary bottle back, the universal symbol of, "Don't mind him – he's had a bit too much today."...