Finding Peace in Tragedy: John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Life consists of a speckled, fusion of joy and sorrow, light and darkness, like a forest path in an evening ray of sun. "Lost in Thoughts," 19th century, by Everhardus Koster. Oil on canvas. Private collection. (Public Domain)

It can come over you in an instant: a sound, a look, a note, an image; a work of art that captures your mind and your heart, pulls you out of the humdrum of the everyday, and gives you a glimpse of another world. Sometimes, it’s a cherished memory unexpectedly recalled or an image of sublime beauty that takes us out of ourselves and gives us a wider view of our own existence, an event not unlike waking up from a dream.

Such an experience occurred for Romantic poet John Keats when he was staying with his friend Charles Brown during the spring of 1819. As Brown related:

“[A] nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand. ... On inquiry, I found those scraps ... contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale.”

A portrait of John Keats reading, 1821–23, by Joseph Severn. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London. (Public Domain)

These “scraps” became one of Keats’s masterpieces and one of the best-loved poems of all time, “Ode to a Nightingale.” According to “The Oxford Companion to English Literature,” “the poem is a meditation on the immortal beauty of the nightingale’s song and the sadness of the observer, who must in the end accept sorrow and mortality.” Enchanted by the wonder of a thing of beauty, Keats created his own work of exquisite and enduring loveliness.

An ode is a poem that celebrates or memorializes something, usually addressing that something in the second person. But there’s more: Commenting on the odes of Keats, Oregon State University poet-in-residence David Biespiel wrote, “To write an ode is to explore, delve into, probe, inspect, burrow, and sift whatever subject you want to with extreme consideration or immersion.”

Indeed, “Ode to a Nightingale” is, in every way, an immersion—of the senses in a lush scene, of the emotions in heartbreak and longing, and of the soul in its pursuit of peace.

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At its core, the poem expresses a longing for the transcendent, urged by the twin spurs of beauty and tragedy; the poet is pierced with a desire to “fade away,” to “dissolve” into the gorgeous natural beauty that surrounds him as he sits under a tree listening to a bird, to be absorbed into this lavish environment that has so transfixed him, and thus to be withdrawn from the sorrows of life. In his desire to become one with beauty itself, as embodied in the nightingale’s song, the poet passes through several distinct states of mind. He explores three possible routes to transcend suffering and unite with beauty: drugs, art, and death. But in the end, the poet reaches a kind of peace with the mixture of suffering and beauty present in life.

In the first three stanzas, the poet considers artificial means of achieving the ecstasy he desires through opiates and wine.

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: ...

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

...

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:

The river “Lethe” mentioned in the first stanza is one of the five rivers of the underworld in classical mythology, and it causes forgetfulness. This points to the speaker’s desire to blot out the pain of remembered sorrows. Keats lived a life peculiarly marked with tragedy and death. He was poor for much of his life. Keats’s father died when he was 8, his mother died when he was 14, and his brother died after a long illness when he was 23. He himself would pass away at the untimely age of 25, not long after he penned his ode to the nightingale. When Keats speaks of “youth [that] grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” these are no empty, stock images; Keats was likely thinking of his own brother who had died the previous winter.

The fourth stanza of Keats's poem reads, “Away! away! for I will fly to thee ... on the viewless wings of Poesy [poetry].” "Dancing Fairies," 1866, by August Malmström. Oil on canvas. National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden. (Public Domain)

But by the fourth stanza, the poet has rejected such artificial means of consolation in favor of the higher, more intellectual one of artistic inspiration and poetic imagination.

“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,/Not charioted by Bacchus [the god of wine] and his pards,/But on the viewless wings of Poesy [poetry].”

And even as Keats has recourse to the power of poetry for consolation, he demonstrates that power with his extraordinary technical and imaginative skill.

Keats’s verses are saturated with some of the richest sensory language of any poet. All five senses are engaged in this ode, from “drowsy numbness” to the “[taste] of Flora and the country green” to “soft incense [that] hangs upon the boughs” to the “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” to, of course, the “plaintive anthem” of the bird itself. Through poetic devices like this, Keats shows the power of this “rough magic” of verse, this “so potent art,” to borrow Prospero’s terms from “The Tempest.”

But is it potent enough, or is something more powerful needed? By the sixth stanza, the poet has moved from a celebration of poetry to a contemplation of death.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death ... 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.

I read these lines not as expressive of suicidal desire so much as a profound longing of the soul to reach for the uttermost ends of being, to become one with a beauty that surpasses death and suffering entirely. In the words of English professor William Harmon in “The Classic Hundred Poems,” “The meditation deepens as the speaker realizes that his wish to escape is not a wish to die, but rather to live more, with experience made richer by music and poetry.”

"The Angel of Death," 1880, by Evelyn De Morgan. Oil on canvas. De Morgan Collection, Barnsley, England. (Public Domain)

Keats wrote at the close of the stanza that if he died, “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/To thy high requiem become a sod.” The poet realized that this death would mean the loss of all of the beauty and richness of the world that he had just been celebrating and resting in. Although he would indeed dissolve into that natural beauty in a very literal sense—become “a sod,” a part of the earth—he would, at the same time, become inert to the nightingale’s “high requiem,” unable to hear or appreciate it anymore. To die would be the destruction of beauty—both the beauty of the speaker himself and the beauty that he enjoys in life.

After these thoughts of death, the poet’s mind naturally moved to immortality and timelessness in the seventh stanza:

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;

By placing the nightingale’s song in “ancient days” and making Biblical allusions, the poet managed to make the bird—or at least what it symbolizes, which is perhaps art or beauty itself—immortal. The poem begins to break the confines of one particular time or place, one particular person or story, and embrace the entirety of the human experience. It becomes universal. Human beings like Ruth have always experienced a mingling of tears and poignant beauty and joy, and art has always tried to capture these ineffable realities.

The nightingale becomes a symbol of immortal beauty in Keats's poem. An illustration of a common nightingale, 1907, by Arthur G. Butler. (Public Domain)

Life consists of a speckled, fusion of joy and sorrow, light and darkness, like a forest path in an evening ray of sun, where the tips of leaves breathe fire at the same time that the recesses of greenery retreat into darkness.

As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

Keats, I venture to say, would have agreed, and the poem makes clear that one must take both joy and sorrow together. In the final stanza, Keats wrote:

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? When I consider how my light is spent, Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

The moment of ecstasy and poetic vision has passed. But these final stanzas carry with them a tone of peace and acceptance. “Adieu!” the poet said, perhaps with a sad smile. He knew that the immortal bird was not for such a world as this. The “fancy”—that is, the imagination and its art—falls short of the reality, and the spell cannot continue forever. The poet accepted his shortcomings, his humanity, and his mortality.

"Lost in Thoughts," 19th century, by Everhardus Koster. Oil on canvas. Private collection. (Public Domain)

Keats’s moment of inspiration may be over, the bird may have left him, but something timeless and unchanging has nevertheless emerged from that moment of great power and insight: the poem itself. What the nightingale’s song was for Keats, his ode can be for us: a whisper of the transcendent that arrests our minds and hearts. All other sounds fade. We hear only the peaceful, plaintive song of the poet, like the lonesome call of a bird overhead.

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