How does Keats describe nature in "Ode to a Nightingale"?

Like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats is often identified as a romantic poet. One of the most distinctive aspects about romantic poetry is, of course, its treatment of nature. In the works of the romantic poets, nature is sanctuary, guide, truth, perfection, imagination, and more. However, Keats, who was a generation younger than the high romantics, has some very distinctive ways of using nature in his poems. I’d like to explore a few of these uniquely Keatsian methodologies as they play out in "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), one of Keats’ three great romantic odes.

To begin with, Keats’s sensibility in “Ode to a Nightingale” is remarkably devoid of ego. The real experience of listening to a nightingale's song triggers in the poet a longing to dissolve into nature. This longing is not merely sensual, but goes much deeper: the poet wishes to merge his self with the larger consciousness of nature so he can experience everything. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, he does not seek to learn from nature or ascribe a morality to it. For Keats, nature represents a state of freedom from the self:

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim (stanza 2)

One way in which Keats creates this sense of complete identification with nature is through the use of synesthesia—or metaphors and descriptions that simultaneously appeal to two or more senses. The synergistic exchanges between sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell produce an effect which is both hallucinatory and vivid. The use of synesthesia illustrates how through “fading” away in nature, the poet becomes more alive to nature’s infinite possibilities rather than sink into oblivion. Thus, through losing the self, the poetic consciousness gains a much wider perspective, as we can see in the following examples from the poem:

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

In these lines from stanza 1, the “beechen green” sight of the trees is also a “melodious plot” of sound. In stanza 4, the world of nature into which the poet speeds along on the “wings of poesy” is thus described:

But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Here, the sense of sight (“light”) combines with the sense of touch felt as motion (“breezes blown”). The poet is describing the light let in through the gaps in moving leaves on a tree. Further, in stanza 6, “soft incense” from flowers and fruit “hangs upon the boughs.” Thus, the startling image of a scent (smell) weighing down (touch) the branches.

Finally, despite the longing for union with nature, the poet is surprisingly realistic about the limitations of human existence. Toward the end of the poem, he returns to his “sole self,” the singing nightingale having flown to the next glade. From the symbol of immortality in the preceding stanzas, the “deceiving elf” (or nightingale) has returned to being the living bird. “Fancy” or imagination is relegated to the level of cheating. The bird, symbolizing fancy, cannot trick the poet into believing there is a way out of the life he lives.

The poet’s tone in the end is that of admission—he does not have any answers or lessons to offer from his intense encounter with the nightingale:

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.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Though the poet’s final movement into realism may seem startling, the poem actually foreshadows it from the very beginning. In the opening lines to the ode, the nightingale’s song immerses the poet into a joy that is almost agonizing:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk

Such intensity of feeling cannot be sustained for a prolonged while. Thus, the only way for the poet to assume the vast consciousness of nature is through poetry and the act of writing itself.

Keats characterizes the nightingale as being at "ease" and "too happy in thine happiness." He means to say that the nightingale is so at ease that it has no cares at all. This contrasts with the speaker himself who is burdened with melancholy. The nightingale is full of happiness because it is not burdened with the knowledge of growing old, mortality and death, and the passage of time. In other words, the speaker knows these things. He is aware of his own mortality and the fact that life is fleeting. The nightingale, on the other hand, is not aware of these things and is, therefore, full of happiness. In the third stanza, the speaker notes how the nightingale is not burdened with these thoughts: 

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

The speaker tries to at least forget the knowledge of his own mortality. He supposes that wine ("a draught of vintage") might allow him to forget this and be more like the carefree nightingale. But this simply dulls his melancholy, so he tries to escape his worries via his own poetry. Past generations have heard the nightingale's song and future generations will as well. The best the speaker can hope for is that future generations will hear/read his poetry. He has resigned himself to the fact that human experience is necessarily burdened with knowledge of life and death. He ascribes a kind of immortality to the nightingale (and more particularly to the nightingale's song). It is immortal because it is not aware of (or does not acknowledge) death and the passage of time. 

What is the effect of the nightingale's song on Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale"?

The poet admires the nightingale's song because the bird sings with "full-throated ease." The poet recognizes a freedom of creativity and art in the song. In the third stanza, the poet notes that the nightingale does not have the concerns that he, a human being, has:

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;

The nightingale's song is beautiful and the poet recognizes the creativity of that song as something comparable to his art of poetry. So, he sees a common connection there. But the poet is particularly fascinated because the song comes from a creature who is not burdened by the realities of aging, sorrow, and death. To the poet, the nightingale sings without those concerns. He, on the other hand, writes poetry with those concerns always in mind. Keats was always too aware of his own mortality. And as an artist trying to create poetry that could be timelessly celebrated, he is thinking of immortality. He sees/hears that immortality in the nightingale's song because the song comes from a place in which mortality is not a concern:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;

The poet wonders what it's like to sing/create without those concerns. He also longs for his own poetry to achieve the kind of immortality he hears in the nightingale's song.

What techniques does Keats use in "Ode to a Nightingale"?

With regard to John Keats' poem, "Ode to a Nightingale," there are several literary techniques he employs. Keats' employs a vast number of literary devices to make his poetry more alive to its reader. I will give you a sampling.

In the first stanza, "Lethe-wards" uses an allusion (Lethe) to the mythological river one passed through after death. Drinking from the River Lethe brought forgetfulness so that the one who had died would not miss his former life. In stanza two, Keats uses personification multiple times, as in:

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

In the above, the author refers to bubbles winking, when winking is a human characteristic. In the third stanza, personification is used several times again.

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

In this, beauty does not have eyes, and love cannot "pine" (which means to "yearn" or "ache") for something. The fourth stanza uses repetition, in "Away! Away!" In the fifth stanza, there is again personification, but also wonderful imagery, especially with "...The murmurous haunt of flies...":

And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Stanza six provides personification again, directed to the nightingale itself:

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy...

Stanza seven uses alliteration, which is when a group of words all begin with the same sound, such as "self-same song." This stanza also alludes to the Biblical story of Ruth, living among people not her own, homesick, in the cornfields, while the eighth and last stanza uses a simile to compare the word "forlorn" and a "bell":

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

How does Keats appeal to the senses in "Ode to a Nightingale"?

Keats uses sensory details, particularly of the natural world, to construct a melancholy tone in "Ode to a Nightingale."

As the poem opens, the speaker is brokenhearted. His feelings of grief cloud his reasoning, and he finds himself filled with "numbness." He turns to the nightingale, whose sounds fill the air with happiness. He imagines the bird singing in a green "plot," filling the air with the sounds of summer's joy. These sensory details representing life and youth are juxtaposed against the speaker's own sense of loss.

In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the perfect bottle of wine, one that tastes of flowers, dance, and sunshine. Keats engages the sensory details of taste (or gustatory imagery) in this stanza, using associations that create positive, warm images.

In the third stanza, the speaker uses visual imagery to describe the loneliness of his own setting. There "is no light," metaphorically representing his feelings of directionless wandering. The trees are gloomy and moss covers his paths. The visual imagery here is foreboding and eerie, which is quite unlike the green plots of summer air which is associated with the nightingale.

In the darkness, the speaker cannot find the beauty of nature, which he is certain is all around him. He longs to see the flowers near his feet and longs to identify the source of the "soft incense" which hangs from the trees. He therefore begins to imagine what must be there in the darkness: white hawthorn, fading violets, and musk-rose. Again, Keats utilizes soft and peaceful visual and olfactory imagery to juxtapose his own feelings of darkness.

As the nightingale flies away, its "anthem fades." Without being able to hear its song, the speaker's own ability to distinguish reality from his imagination begins to fade as well. He has relied on his senses to ground him, and the auditory input from the nightingale has proven particularly inspiring until these final lines. Without the sensory input from the bird, the speaker struggles to navigate reality.

How does Keats depict natural beauty in "Ode to a Nightingale"?

Keats, as a Romantic poet, is undoubtedly famous for his description of natural beauty. One of the ways in which the descriptions of nature operate in this poem is the way that Keats creates a division between the earth where man dwells, which is characterised by suffering and pain, and the realm of the nightingale in the sky, which is described as being above the realm of humans in every way. Note the following description that establishes and explores this comparison:

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Note how the moon is imaginatively described as an enthroned queen surrounded by fairy stars in all of their beauty. The earth, on the other hand, is described as gloomy, twisting, mossy and dark, a place where there is "no light." The "ecstasy" of the sound of the nightingale's song, therefore, is strongly compared to the sufferings of mortal existence. Even though the description of earth is much darker, it is still arguably sensuous in the way it creates in our minds labyrinthine paths of "mossy ways" enshrouded by trees and darkness.