Ode to a Nightingale "Tender Is The Night"
by John Keats

Context: In this famous ode the poet sings of leaving the harsh realities of the world, in which he is not happy. He asks that he might drink from some vintage that would take him to the nightingale "away in the forest dim," where there is no weariness, no fretting, no old age, no death come too soon. This thought is one that comes to him when, as he says, "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/ Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past. . . ." In the fourth stanza of the poem the poet refutes the idea of some potion to bring happiness, regardless of its vintage. Instead, he says, he will fly away "on the viewless wings of Poesy" to the world of the nightingale and its beauty and happiness. The quotation is also famous, of course, as the title of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.