He contrasts the heavy dullness he feels with the light, airy qualities of the bird. He expresses a death-like feeling of heaviness (hemlock) or a drug-induced forgetfulness (opiate/Lethe-wards).
Prompted by the song of the nightingale, Keats meditates on the contrast between the summer-like, happy, and full-throated ease of the nightingale’s song with the sorrow, disease, and decay plaguing humanity. It begins with the poet’s expression of despair. This is one of the most celebrated poems in English Literature. When he wrote Ode to a Nightingale in 1819, he had already started showing signs of tuberculosis which he contracted from his brother. His odes express the poet’s meditations on a quality or an object. His poetry is characterized by gracious, slow-paced movement and concrete, sensuous description in which all the senses combine to give the total apprehension of an experience.
Before he died at the age of 25, he wrote an astonishing succession of poems and sonnets in the space of a few years. John Keats (1795-1821) is considered one of the greatest Romantic poets in English literature. After Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, I thought it might be fun to experience a leap of a different sort-an imaginary leap into the world of nature and visionary experience, courtesy of John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale.
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