John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a prime example of a Romantic-era poem that combines a deliberate structure with complex and compelling literary devices to create a depth of meaning that encourages readers to see the world in new ways. The British Romanticism of the nineteenth century's first half reacted against the Enlightenment movement's stern rationalism, which emphasized scientific observation, logic, and firm objectivity over personal encounters with nature, emotion, and subjectivity.

"Ode to a Nightingale" exhibits many Romantic characteristics, including a focus on the beauty and wonder of nature. Romantic poets immerse themselves and their readers in the natural world, describing it vividly and drawing out deeper meanings. Romantic poems like this one also focus on high ideals (such as immortality), emotion ("My heart aches..."), individualism (the speaker's isolation in the garden), imagination (as when the speaker sees the moon as a queen and the stars as "Fays"), and a return to the mythology of the ancient world (like "Bacchus and his pards").

Keats adds the poetic form of the ode to his Romanticism. An ode is a hymn or lyric usually written in a high, formal style that focuses on praising something. Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is usually categorized as a Horatian ode because of its regular meter and rhyme scheme. In this case, of course, the ode praises the nightingale, or more precisely, the nightingale's song, which symbolizes the beauty of nature and art.

This particular ode offers a consistent structure. Its eight stanzas each have ten lines, nine of which are in iambic pentameter. In other words, each line has five stressed (and five unstressed) syllables, which follow an unstressed-stressed pattern. Line 2 in the first stanza provides a prime example: My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk. The bold-type syllables are stressed.

While Keats maintains iambic pentameter in most of the poem, he switches to iambic trimeter (only three stressed syllables) in the eighth line of each stanza. This switch serves to break up the rhythm and emphasize or contrast the content of the eighth line. In stanza 3, for instance, the speaker sighs about the weariness and sorrow of life, and the shorter eighth line, "And leaden-eyed despairs," brings his description to a climax. On the other hand, the eighth line of stanza 4, "But here there is no light," contrasts the bright "wings" of Poesy and the moon and stars that dominate the stanza.

Occasionally, the poet also varies his metrical structure for emphasis. The very first line of the poem, for example, reads as follows: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains. The line starts with a typical iamb, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, but then another stressed syllable appears, making two stresses together: "heart aches." This highlights the speaker's deep emotion and sets the tone for the poem. It is a pain that is never fully overcome.

As for the rhyme scheme of "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats chooses something unusual: ABABCDECDE. The first stanza shows the pattern with "pains" and "drains" as A, "drunk" and "sunk" as B, "lot" and "plot" as C, "happiness" and "numberless" as D," and "trees" and "ease" as E. The poet does, however, allow his rhymes to slip a bit on occasion. In stanza 2, "been" and "green" look like they should rhyme, but they do not, and neither do "forget" and "fret" in stanza 3. Keats is more concerned with descriptive language than strict rhyme, so he sometimes chooses words that hint at rhyme rather than actually rhyme.

The structure of "Ode to a Nightingale" is perfectly complemented by the poet's expert use of literary devices, including simile and metaphor, alliteration, personification, allusion, and symbolism. Similes and metaphors present comparisons to help readers grasp lesser-known things through better-known things. When the speaker talks of his drowsy senses, for instance, he compares the experience to having taken the numbing poison hemlock or "some dull opiate."

Alliteration and personification add further interest to the poem. Alliteration (the repetition of initial word sounds) appears throughout the piece. In stanza 3, for example, the letter "f" appears frequently at the beginning of words: "fade," "far," forget," "fever," fret," "few," and "full." The repeated sound ties the stanza together and suggests a kind of sighing appropriate to its content. Personification gives human qualities to inanimate objects. In the second stanza, the poet writes about "beaded bubbles winking at the brim," nudging readers to picture the bubbles as little eyes filling the Hippocrene spring with life.

"Ode to a Nightingale" is packed with allusions, mostly to Greek and Roman myth, like the Hippocrene (a place sacred to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts), but also to the Bible. For instance, the speaker mentions Bacchus, the god of wine, and the leopards that pull his chariot but maintains that he does not need the simulation of drink when he has the "wings of Poesy" to carry him upward.

Yet the speaker also alludes to Ruth, who appears in the Old Testament. She is a Moabite woman who followed her mother-in-law back to Israel after her husband's death and became an ancestor to King David. She, too, would have heard and been comforted by the nightingale's song even amid her tears and struggles.

Finally, the poet employs a deep symbolism in "Ode to a Nightingale." The nightingale's song represents the beauty found in nature and in the art that imitates nature. This beauty remains while all other things pass away in sorrow and grief. It travels down through the generations, and while it will not solve the problems of human existence, it does bring comfort and inspiration to all who experience it, including the speaker and, perhaps, even the readers themselves.