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The structure of “Ode to a Nightingale” follows the speaker’s mind as it moves from anxious heartache to calm meditation and back again. The poem opens with the speaker in a contradictory mood, feeling a “drowsy numbness” despite also having a heart that “aches” (line 1). Although they claim to delight in the nightingale’s song, the speaker implicitly signals their pained anxiety. It’s precisely this pained anxiety that leads them, in stanza 2, to indulge in thoughts of wine-fueled oblivion. In stanza 3, it becomes clear that the speaker’s desire to fade away is linked to their having witnessed the terrors of a world “where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (line 26). To distract themself from these thoughts, the speaker turns first to poetry (stanza 4), then to the physical environment where they are listening to the nightingale (stanza 5). Now attending closely to the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks about the immortality of art, which steers them toward a more balanced perspective on the matters of life and death (stanzas 6–7). In the final stanza, however, the speaker’s reverie dissolves and, coming back to themself, they wonder anxiously if their experience has been nothing but a dream.

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