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The Painful Transience of Life

When the speaker announces, in the poem’s opening lines, that they feel at once heartbroken and numb, it isn’t immediately clear why. Not until the third stanza do we finally glimpse the reason for the speaker’s melancholy state of mind: namely, the pain associated with recognizing the transience of life. In the third stanza the speaker explicitly announces their desire to “fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the trees [i.e., the nightingale] has never known” (lines 21–22). The speaker then goes on to describe that to which the nightingale remains oblivious (lines 23–30):

     The weariness, the fever, and the fret
              Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
     Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
              Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
                     Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
                             And leaden-eyed despairs,
              Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
                     Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

In these lines, the speaker catalogs several types of physical and mental suffering that humans must endure as they age and their health declines. Importantly, though, decline doesn’t come only for the elderly. The speaker also specifically mourns the fact that youth, too, “grows pale, spectre-thin, and dies.” This line contains an oblique allusion to Keats’s own brother, Tom, who had died of tuberculosis not long before “Ode to a Nightingale” was written. Life is thus equally transient for both the old and the young, and this fact ensures that life is full of “sorrow” and “leaden-eye despairs.”

The Immortality of Art

In contrast to life’s painful brevity, the speaker celebrates the immortality of art. To be sure, the speaker doesn’t discuss art directly. Instead, they reference art implicitly through their focus on the nightingale’s song, which the speaker symbolically links to “Poesy” (line 33). The notion that the nightingale’s song is immortal may, on first reading, seem odd. After all, the poem ends with the nightingale flying away and its tune fading into “the next valley-glades” (line 78). What is it, then, that makes the nightingale’s song immortal? The speaker answers this question in the sixth stanza (lines 61–67):

     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

If the nightingale is immortal, it isn’t because the individual birds live forever. Instead, it’s because their song may be heard throughout history. Just as the speaker can hear this song in their own day, so too could people in “ancient days” hear it. This understanding of immortality echoes a common trope in poetry that characterizes verse as deathless because it lives on long after the poet’s passing. Thus, though Homer, Shakespeare, and Keats himself have all died, here we are today, in the twenty-first century, still reading and discussing their verse.

The Beauty of Art Can’t Save You

By focusing on the nightingale’s song, the speaker of Keats’s poem demonstrates how art can be transporting. Indeed, the speaker turns to “the viewless wings of Poesy” (line 33) to divert their attention from the pain of the ordinary world. Their delight in the song even leads them so far as to declare the nightingale an “immortal Bird” (line 61) whose artful tune, carried through countless generations, effectively transcends death. By the end of the seventh stanza, the speaker seems almost to have convinced themself that the nightingale’s song is a magical cure-all. Indeed, they describe the song as something from a fantasy world (lines 68–70):

                             The same [song] that oft-times hath
              Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
                     Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

But however transporting and even immortal the nightingale’s song might be, the speaker ultimately contends with the fact that the song can’t end suffering or reverse the mortality that defines human existence. Thus, the spell breaks in the final stanza, at which point the speaker comes back to themself (lines 71–73):

     Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
              To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
     Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
              As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

The fantasy world conjured by the nightingale’s song here becomes a “cheat” and a “deceiving elf,” nothing more than another form of intoxication—like hemlock, opium, or wine. In the end, then, the nightingale’s transcendent song cannot save the speaker.

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