In "Ode to a Nightingale," what is the speaker in love with?
Keats' speaker is in love with idea of death. He says: "I have been half in love with easeful Death." He goes on to say:
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .
To the speaker, the world is filled with numberless sorrows. These include weariness, stress, disease, growing old and infirm, wasting away and dying young, and despair. He would like to escape this into the ease and numbness he associates with the sleep of death. He would especially like to dissolve into death as he is listening to the nightingales's ecstatic song. It would become his "requiem."
He contrasts his unhappy state with that of the happy nightingale, who seems to him to sing an immortal song. The song—a work of art—has been the same beautiful melody that soothed Biblical characters like Ruth and people in...
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faraway places and times.
Nevertheless, after dreaming of the immortal song of the nightingale and of death, the speaker awakens back to life.
How does the speaker's desires manifest through imagery in "Ode to a Nightingale"?
Let's begin by discussing the speaker's desires in John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." As the poem opens, the speaker describes how his "heart aches" and how "a drowsy numbness pains" his senses, almost as if he has drunk the poison hemlock or indulged in some opiate. He is dull and listless, and he feels like he has sunk into the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Notice the images here of the poison and the opiate and the Lethe. The speaker clearly wants to rise from this sluggish, nearly lifeless state.
He hears the nightingale sing and begins to feel happy, yet he cannot come out of his dullness. He longs for "a draught of vintage," some rich wine that has come directly from the "deep-delved earth" itself and gives the flavor of the "warm South." With this drink, he can "leave the world unseen" and fade away with the nightingale into the "forest dim."
The imagery continues as the speaker reflects on what this leaving might be like. He wants to "Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known." Then he paints a bleak picture of the state of the weary world with its groaning and fevers and worries, old age and decay, and youths that fade "spectre-thin" and die. There is so much sorrow, so many "leaden-eyed despairs," that even beauty and love cannot overcome them.
Then the speaker thinks that he would rather fly away from the world through poetry rather than through wine (symbolized here by "Bacchus and his pards"). Now he will ride on the "wings of Poesy" up to the "Queen-Moon" and enjoy the dark richness of nature with its sweet smells and sounds, like the musk-rose and the "murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves."
The poet, however, appears to not even be satisfied with that, for he then muses on "easeful Death," with whom he has been "half in love." It would be ecstasy, he thinks, to pour forth his soul and fly through the air with the nightingale.
Yet the speaker's desires are not fulfilled, and the nightingale flies away as its song acts "like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self," the speaker laments. He wonders if he has experienced a vision or some kind of "waking dream" as the bird and its song float off into the night.