The Oxford Companion to English Literature

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‘Ode to a Nightingale’

‘Ode to a Nightingale’,
a poem by Keats , written 1819 , published 1820 .

Keats's friend Charles Brown relates that a nightingale had nested near his house in Hampstead (now known as Keats House), and that one morning Keats sat under a plum-tree in the garden composing his ode on ‘some scraps of paper’. Briefly, 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.

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