"Ode to a Nightingale" does reflect on the human experience of mortality,
which is the consciousness that we all will die, but it is primarily a poem
about a longing for escape from all the burdens of life. Many lines in the poem
speak to the desire to flee the world's problems, either to merge into the
nightingale and his song or to die.
For instance, addressing the nightingale, the speaker states that he would
like to escape into the bird's forest setting:
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
This sentiment carries over into the next stanza, which shows the
speaker's yearning to leave the pains of growing older and suffering behind,
along with all the troubles in general of being alive and part of society. The
speaker seems to wish to dissolve into nothing to escape:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forgetHe also says to the bird,
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee.The speaker notes,
many a timeFinally, the speaker says,
I have been half in love with easeful Death.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bellIn other words, the speaker has been trying to escape all sense of self in the nightingale's intoxicating song and even might welcome death, but he has found it impossible to do either despite all his yearning. He has, instead, been brought back to a consciousness of himself. As he says, his "fancy," or imagination, is not as able to deceive him as it is famous for doing.
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.
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