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1. 
   mshurn Teacher
   College - Freshman

   eNotes Editor

   An ode by definition is a poem of celebration or praise that honors people or events or addresses nature. In Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," he contemplates the essence of the nightingale and contrasts it with his own worldly state and the nature of mortal life. He expresses a strong theme of Romanticism in the ode; nature, through the nightingale, is a world of beauty, peace, and freedom.

   The bird lives in harmony with nature, its forest melody one of happiness. It "[s]ingest of summer in full-throated ease." The nightingale, "among the leaves," has never experienced the miseries of human life:

   The weariness, the fever, and the fret

   Here, where men sit and hear heach other groan;

   Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

   Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies;

   Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

   And leaden-eyed despairs.

   He further glorifies the nightingale by observing that "[t]hou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"

   Within the ode, Keats moves from his contemplation of the bird to a contemplation of his own feelings. Losing himself in the nightingale gives him temporary relief from the sadness of his own existence. The natural world of the nightingale is superior to his own. Returning to himself as the music of the nightingale fades, he questions if his musings were real:

   Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?

    

   Sources:

   http://www.enotes.com/ode-nightingale-text/ode-nightingale

   http://www.enotes.com/ode-nightingale-text/reading-pointe...

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   Posted by mshurn on Friday July 3, 2009 at 9:10 AM
   
   

2. 
   mwestwood Teacher
   Community / Jr. College

   eNotes Editor

   John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" presents the general idea of the conflicted nature of life:  pain/joy, pleasure/numbness, life/death, mortal/immortal, real/ideal.

   The nightingale acts almost as a muse for the poet's reflections as he moves from his initial response to the song of the nightingale to the poet's distancing of himself from the bird in the final stanza.

   For instance, in Stanza I the poet, whose

   heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock

   is touched by the bird's song, causing him to wish that he could reach a state of numb astraction with the bird and

   ,,,leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim

   by becoming numb through drinking "a beaker full of the warm South."

   As a transition into the next stanza, Keats repeats the word fade; however, fade moves into dissolve as Keats contemplates death, not just a numbness to pain as he moves to Stanza IV in which he tells the "darkling" that he has been

   half in love with easeful Death," and "Now more than ever it seems rich to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain,/while thou art pouring forth thy sould aborad/In such an ectasy!

   Here Keats separates himself from the nightingale as he realizes that the "immortal Bird" is not meant for death:  There is a continuum for it as the "self-same song" has been heard by Ruth and others of the ages.  He bids "Adieu!" to the bird as is "tolled" by the song back to his "sole self" and reminded of his mortality. With all these conflicting musings,  Keats wonders in the last line of the ode if his thoughts are merely illusionary, "a waking dream."

    

    

   Sources:

   http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/index/html

   http://www.enotes.com/ode-nightingdale-text/ode-nightingale

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   Posted by mwestwood on Friday July 3, 2009 at 9:38 AM
   
   

3. 
   kc4u Teacher
   College - Senior

   eNotes Editor

   'Ode to a Nightingale' deals with the antinomy between the real and the imaginative: the poet's imaginative excursion induced by the song of the nightingale into the dimly dark, fragrant, nocturnal nature, and the journey back to the reality of lived existence. The bird's song serves as an intense reminder of the world of imagination, a world of permanence as opposed to the human world of transience, of suffering and decay and death. Looking for transportation to the world of the nightingale, the poet searches for possible modes of escape. Rejecting wine, old and new, he opts for the 'viewless wings of Poesy' to 'fade into the forest dim'. 'Already with thee' in line 35 marks the poet's empathy with the bird. The song-bird entices the poet through the dark forest, the 'embalmed darkness', the poet following the bird to some 'magic casements' opening on to the surging seas of 'faery lands forlorn'. The poet is then tolled back to the real world, confused and disenchanted, having known the limits of imagination, having felt the tragic disillusion of the journey of the mind.

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   Posted by kc4u on Friday July 3, 2009 at 10:03 AM
   
   

4. 
   pmiranda2857 Teacher
   High School - 10th Grade

   eNotes Editor

   In this poem, Keats develops themes that run concurrent with his other works, the question of the worth of human existence and whether the creative spirit that is inspired by nature, is capable of capturing the true essence of beauty that is expressed in nature and that is a reflection of a world that ordinary mortals cannot see.  Keats feels connected to the world beyond that which is seen. He tries to capture the essence of what he feels and sees in his mind's eye in his poetry.

   "A major concern in "Ode to a Nightingale" is Keats's perception of the conflicted nature of human life, i.e., the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness or lack of feeling, life/death, mortal/immortal, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection."

   Keats also celebrates life's simplicity in listening to the song of the nightingale.  This poem is one of five "Odes" that Keats writes to express his sense of being one with both nature and a higher level of existence.  Keats, like many creative geniuses, experiences a sense of struggle between his earthly life and the spirit realm which seems to call to him, and which he must venture to visit to gain insight into his artistic nature.

   Keats poetry is inspired by his ability to slip between the veil that separates the mortal world from the immortal world of eternity.  His poetry examines and reflects upon the mortal coil, but often, Keats recognizes that the immortal world holds much greater beauty and wonder.  He longs, as a mortal, bound to an earthly existence, to embrace the wonder and joy of the spiritual realm.

   "Wanting to escape from the pain of a joy-pain reality, the poet begins to move into a world of imagination or fantasy."

    

   Sources:

   http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/nigh...

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   Posted by pmiranda2857 on Friday July 10, 2009 at 5:45 AM