Ode to a Nightingale

Grade Levels

Excerpt

This worksheet gives students an opportunity to practice identifying and analyzing allusions. Allusions broaden the scope of a text and imbue passages with deeper meaning by subtly drawing on unexplained references to literature, history, science, geography, philosophy, mythology, or other aspects of a culture. Allusions are thus a powerful tool often employed by writers and are well worth understanding. In completing this worksheet, students will be able to identify, analyze, and interpret allusions, thereby accessing deeper meanings within the text.

The English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) penned his classic “Ode to a Nightingale” in the summer of 1819 during a creative outpouring that produced four other well-known odes. In the poem, the speaker muses on the mystery of death during an imagined conversation with a nightingale. “Ode to a Nightingale” is replete with allusions to the world of Greek mythology, a tradition that supplied Keats’s imagination with countless images, locales, figures, and metaphors.

Skills: analysis, close reading, drawing inferences from text, interpreting implications of allusions

Learning Objectives:
In completing this activity, students will

• identify different types of allusions and locate examples of allusion within a text;
• analyze examples of allusions to determine their purpose in the context of a passage of text;
• analyze examples of allusions to interpret their meaning and determine how they inform a passage of text.

About

Our eNotes Classroom Activities give students opportunities to practice developing a variety of skills. Whether analyzing literary devices or interpreting connotative language, students will work directly with the text. The main components of our classroom activities include the following:

• A handout defining the literary elements under discussion, complete with examples
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• An answer key or selected examples for reference, depending on the activity

In completing these classroom activities, students will be able to classify and analyze different literary elements, thereby developing close-reading skills and drawing deeper inferences from the text.