the bird. The "full-throated" song of the nightingale makes the world more beautiful because of its melodies.

Stanza 2: The speaker longs for a good "vintage," or wine, that has been cooled in the earth. He describes the way the bubbles of the wine "wink," or burst, at the brim of the glass and the way the wine stains his mouth purple. He longs to drink enough to "fade away" with the nightingale into the forest, leaving his own world behind.

Stanza 3: The speaker longs to forget those worldly concerns the nightingale has never been concerned with. His own world is full of weary people, sick people, and stressed people. People complain to each other endlessly about their troubles. The beauty of youth fades and dies, and human thoughts are "full of sorrow."

Stanza 4: Though he longs to "fly to" the nightingale, he doesn't really think wine will take him there. He begins to consider that poetry may be able to accomplish this feat. Suddenly, he is "already with" the bird, and the images of night are tender. The home of the nightingale is dark, and "there is no light" underneath the canopy of trees.

Stanza 5: The darkness surrounds the speaker so completely that he can't tell which flowers surround him. The smells of various flora compel him to appreciate this world: violets, hawthorn, eglantine.

Stanza 6: The speaker reflects that there have been times when death has seemed the easier option and that he has been "half in love" with the idea. He notes that it seems "rich to die" and that he would prefer to die at midnight "with no pain" and with the nightingale singing "in ecstasy" at that moment when he "ceases" to exist. He also realizes that just after the moment of his death, the bird would continue to sing.

Stanza 7: The nightingale is immortal because the song it sings has been sung in exactly the same tones since the "ancient days." Perhaps Ruth heard these same notes as she stood heartbroken "amid... alien corn" in the Old Testament.

Stanza 8: The use of the word "forlorn" causes the speaker to return to reality, no longer in the magical and imaginative world of the nightingale. He tells the bird goodbye as he listens to its song fade away over the meadows, stream, hills, and valleys. He is left confused, wondering which is the real world—the dream world of the nightingale or this world which appears to be reality. Which is the dream and which is reality? The speaker is no longer certain.

This ode by John Keats is based upon the single conceit that the little nightingale that the poet addresses is immortal:

1. It assumes that the bird is the only one that has ever existed because it looks and acts the same as birds of this species have for centuries.
2. It assumes that the nightingale is immortal since, unlike humans who fear death, it cannot conceive of death.
3. It assumes that the bird is immortal because the nightingale stands for the ravished princess Philomela's metamorphized soul.

• Stanza I

As a Romantic poet, Keats validated emotional expression as an aesthetic source of experience. In this stanza, then, he expresses his unhappiness, saying it is not envy of the bird's lighthearted song of "summer in full-throated ease." 

• Stanza II

In his melancholy, the poet wishes that he could drink "a beaker full from the fountain of the Muses on Mt. Helicon," where waters of inspiration flowed. With the nightingale, he could disappear into the forest away from his trials in life. Here, the poet revels in the idea of the glorified past, both classical and medieval.

• Stanza III

In the continuation of his wish to "fade away," the poet wishes to leave the cares and anxieties of his life:

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
and leaden-eyed despairs

for the beauty and wonder to the next, where Beauty and new Love know nothing of this sorrow.

• Stanza IV

The poet tells the nightingale to fly away because he will come on the "wings of Poesy"; that is, with his imagination, the poet will connect both to this world and that of poetic fancy. In line 35, the poet is suddenly transported,

Already with thee! tender is the night....
But here there is no light

but the nightingale lives in darkness. Because the imagery here is connotative of night, the poet may be sleeping.

• Stanza V

Hovering between the real world and the world of the spirit, the poet touches what he cannot see and describes all with colorful imagery:

Fast fading violets covered up in leaves:
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy white,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

• Stanza VI

In this stanza, Keats expresses his obsession with death and envisions his soul with that of the nightingale, but if he dies they will part.

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art ouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

• Stanza VII

The poet realizes that the nightingale is not meant for death; his voice is immortal as the voice of the bird has been the same for ages and is ubiquitous: 

This voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown...

• Stanza VIII

This musing of the poet is but transitory, and he must return to the real world,

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

While the little nightingale's song has elevated his spirit, the poet wonders if he is awake or dreaming,

...the fancy cannot cheat so well 
As she is famed to do....

The poet has had a transcendent experience, connecting with Nature in the creation of his art, but he is left disappointed as he feels a certain disillusionment in the limits of the imagination. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a beautifully personal lyric by the Romantic poet, John Keats, who loved the classical world, and all that is an expression of the aesthetic.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
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.

This third stanza is a continuation of the thoughts expressed in the first two stanzas. Keats was haunted by his fears of death. He had tuberculosis and died of the disease in Italy when he was only twenty-six--a great loss to English literature. Percy Shelley commemorated Keats as Adonais in his poem of that title. 

Keats obviously wants to escape from his melancholy thoughts about his mortality. Evidently he was becoming overly fond of wine as a means of escape. He dreaded death because it would put an end to his creative work when it had scarcely begun. He was in love with a girl named Fanny Brawne but could not marry her because he expected to die. She is probably the Beauty he has in mind where he says:

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Nor new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

And he is the youth he has in mind in the line:

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

The lines that immediately follow are especially revealing:

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

Keats does not want to think. He wants to forget. He would prefer complete oblivion, but since that oblivion through the imaginary beaker of wine is not available, he will try to escape "on the viewless wings of poesy," as he says in the fourth stanza. That is, he will escape into pure fantasy. He succeeds in doing so--but only temporarily. In the last stanza he says:

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.

What appeals to Keats about the nightingale is that it seems to be immortal. It doesn't have to worry about death, as he does. It seems immortal because the bird always looks like the same bird and always sings the same notes. In his imagination he escapes into that bird's world. At first he finds himself in a fantasy world under the bushes where the bird customarily nests. He describes that little world with its scents and flowers. But then he travels back in time to when Ruth of the Old Testament heard that very same bird singing that very same song "amid the alien corn." And he travels beyond time into "faery lands forlorn" before he is called back to reality by the word "forlorn" which reminds him of his forlorn condition. 

The third stanza is a sort of prelude to Keat's taking off into his imagination to escape from his thoughts of death. In the next stanza he will seem to take flight.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy...

Where

I think that Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" represents the aspirations of art and artists in its hopeful grasp to escape the drudgery of reality and aspire to an idyll where nightingales sing.  I sense that the opening stanzas of the poem are ones that identify a need to escape.  Within these lines, one gets the impression that the true artist is one set apart from the herd mentality of the rest of society.  The true artist, according to Keats, seeks to move his sense of identity into a realm where truth beauty and art exists.  This is something that can only be appreciated by a select few, and the opening stanzas suggest this.  Evidence of this can be seen with the first three words of "My heart aches," almost implying that the artist possesses a heightened sensitivity that others lack.  The artist seeks sanctuary in alcohol, but that is only temporary and will only "fade away" the artist's pain, and not much else.  In the third and fourth stanza, we see the artist reconfigure themselves.  The speaker begins to understand that there is a need to seek something better, something more elevated, something more of an idyll.  This can only be accomplished, not through alcohol, but rather through poetry and art (Away!  away! for I will fly to thee,/ Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/ But on the viewless wings of Poesy,").  It is here where the portrait of the artist emerges for Keats, and it is poetry and art that will allow the thinker, the artist, to reach that realm where the nightingale singes its song, heard and appreciated only by the imperceptible few.  In this striving, the artist achieves something close to immortality.  In a world of impermanence and mutability, the artist can achieve something that few can:  A lasting testament to the good, the true, and the beautiful.  As the poem closes, the speaker understands that this vision is so much an idyll, that he thinks of it as a dream.  The poem's lasting meaning is that it is in the realm of art where greatness can happen and can be realized.  While other pursuits, like Keats' own medicine, are noble, poetry and art is what sustains the soul, allowing it to aspire where only the nightingales dare to tread.

A critical analysis of a work of literature is the presentation of one's opinion about a particular work, and this opinion must be backed up by close critical reading and a sound understanding of the text one is evaluating. An example of a critical analysis of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" might proceed as follows:

In the poem, Keats grapples with many important ideas, and one of the most important ideas he touches on is the desire to escape the human condition. Depending on how you look at it, the nightingale can symbolize art, nature, and more. In any case, the nightingale represents a state of being set apart from the human condition, and it is this state that Keats primarily envies. Indeed, the poet wants to transcend his own experience and live in the happier state of being that the nightingale represents. By doing so, he also hopes to escape the human condition, which he characterizes as an experience fraught with toil, hardship, and misery. In other words, Keats imagines the nightingale to represent an idealized world free from the anguish of human mortality and suffering, and it is this idea that informs most of his poetic musings. With this context in mind, it makes sense that the first words of the poem are "My heart aches" (1).