John Keats, a widely admired poet of the English romantic period, composed his “Ode to a Nightingale” in eight stanzas (sections), each containing ten lines of rhymed iambic pentameter, with the exception of the eighth line of each stanza, which is short. Also, Keats invented his own rhyme scheme for the ode.
“Ode to a Nightingale” has become, along with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), one of the most famous poems in the English language. Readers are moved by his word-pictures, his evocation of the senses, and his subtle use of poetic language.
Notably, “Ode to a Nightingale” was composed in a single morning. Two facets of the poem are its original stanza form, masterfully adapted by Keats from earlier models, and its focus on a central symbol, the nightingale, whose interpretation remains elusive and thus poetically interesting. Whether the bird symbolizes the ideal type of music, art, or nature, the poet still suggests both its appeal to humanity and its contrast with human reality, a contrast between a cold immortality and the fading away that is human mortality.
The ode’s ambiguous language creates room for scholarly debate and explication. Debated by many critics is the difficult line “Already with thee!” in stanza four, which in one interpretation signals that the poet has entered a trance. However, this slippery language also contributes to the poem’s universal appeal, as readers have...
(The entire section is 484 words.)