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John KeatsOde to a Nightingale
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1819A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Ode to a Nightingale” is a revival of the Horatian ode, which in itself is rooted in Greek literary tradition. The ode is an Ancient Greek song performed at formal occasions, usually in praise of its subject. In general, a Horatian ode has a consistent stanza length and meter, as in “Ode to a Nightingale.” While the Horatian ode used several two-to-four-line stanzas, Keats here structures his ode in eight separate stanzas of 10 lines each. The rhyme scheme is ABABCDECDE, and the meter of most lines is iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English and also the easiest to commit to memory, which gives this dense ode a memorable, musical quality. In an iambic pentameter line, there are five instances of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented or stressed sound. For instance, consider the scansion of the opening two lines of “Ode to a Nightingale”:
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk” (Lines 1-2).
The exception to this metric pattern is the eighth line in each stanza, composing iambic trimeter (three pairs of the iamb).
The regular rhyme and meter mean this is among the most highly structured of Keats's odes. Against the poem’s rhapsodic, reverie-like narration, the regular rhythm provides a unique tension, as if illustrating the poem’s concern with examining contradictions. Apart from rhyme and meter, the poem also uses alliteration to enhance its incantatory, rhythmic quality. In Line 21, the repeated, exhaled “f” sound of “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” creates an aura of mystery and melancholy. This effect is amplified in Line 23 when the poet laments “the fever and the fret” of existence. Later in the poem, the speaker speaks of “faery lands forlorn” (Line 70). The word forlorn itself is repeated, a bell to toll back the speaker to his “sole self” (Line 72). Here, the emphasized “s” sound reminds the speaker of his alienation from nature.
Repetition is also used in the poem, as in “Away! away! for I will fly to thee” (Line 31) and “Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades” (Line 75). In both instances, the repeated exclamatory clauses, ending with a long, stressed syllabic sound, highlight the euphoric and desperate tone of the speaker.
Metaphor, Personification, and Imagery
The poet uses the metaphor of flight to symbolize the power of art and the imagination. The speaker flies with the nightingale on the “viewless wings of Poesy” (Line 33), which means poetry enables him to be transported away from his troubles. The metaphor of flight recurs through the poem’s length, and the nightingale itself can be seen as a symbol that combines the innocence and beauty of nature and the immortality that true art possesses. The poet also uses a metaphor to describe the nightingale, calling her a dryad or a tree-spirit from Greek mythology. The comparison is a metaphor since it is implicit rather than explicit. Other instances of metaphor occur in Lines 15-18, when the poet describes a decanter of wine as a “beaker full of the warm South.” The wine here is a metaphor for the sunny, joyful Provencal countryside. Further, the wine is the “blushful Hippocrene,” a fountain that blushes, its red color implicitly compared to a blushing beauty. The wine’s bubbles are “winking” and the mouth is “purple-stained,” continuing the metaphor of a mischievous, beautiful entity. Another metaphor is the implicit comparison of the moon to the queen of the fairies, and the stars as her attendants.
There are several instances of personification in the poem, such as in Lines 36-37 when the moon are stars are personified: “The Queen-Moon is on her throne, / Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays.” The nightingale is personified as a Dryad, and in Lines 52-53, Death is personified and referred to as “him,” with the speaker wooing Death with “soft names in many a mused rhyme.” In Line 74, the poet personifies the fancy or the imagination as a “deceiving elf,” a fairy hellbent on tricking people. The frequent use of personification shows that imagination, beauty, and death are powerful forces in the speaker’s inner landscape, so much so they are entities in their own right.
The poem’s rich use of metaphor and personification enhances its imagery, creating a vivid mental picture in the reader’s mind and allowing the reader to feel with their senses the landscape of the poem. For instance, the description of the wine, “Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth” (Line 12), precisely evokes the picture of wine bottles cooled in a cellar and recreates for the reader a longing for a cool drink in a warm season.
When the speaker escapes with the nightingale into a dark forest, they rely on their sense of smell and hearing to identify the world around. The speaker uses evocative phrases such as “embalmed darkness” (Line 43) and “murmurous haunt of buzzing flies” (Line 50) to conjure up a dark, perfumed landscape inhabited by the sounds of nature. “Murmurous” is also an example of onomatopoeia, a word or phrase that mimics the sound it indicates. “Embalmed darkness” has suggestions of synesthesia, a figure of speech that uses one sense to describe the experience of another. Here, darkness, usually perceived by the sight, is described in olfactory (smell) terms. Another instance of synesthesia is in Lines 13-15, when the wine is described as “tasting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provencal song, and sun burnt mirth.” Wine (taste) is described in terms of sight (country green) and touch (sunburnt mirth).
Allusion
In poetry, allusion is a literary device that refers to another literary work, mythology, religion, culture, or person. An allusion draws its efficacy from shared knowledge: Often allusions refer to things with which the reader may have some familiarity. When Keats was writing, most literate readers were schooled in the Greek and Latin classics, poets such as Spencer and Shakespeare, as well as the Bible. Hence, “Ode to a Nightingale” contains many references from these sources.
The first allusion of the poem occurs in Line 2, when the speaker says the nightingale’s song stuns him to the extent he feels he drank hemlock. Hemlock is a poisonous plant that causes death by paralysis. More significantly, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is said to have died by drinking a cup of hemlock. In Line 4, the speaker compares their state of rapture to a loss of senses, as if they were sinking to Lethe, a river of the underworld in Greek mythology. The souls of the dead drank from the Lethe to forget their past life.
Another instance of an allusion from Greco-Roman culture occurs in Line 13, when the speaker refers to Flora, the goddess of flowers, to indicate the flowers themselves. The wine he longs to drink tastes of Flora (flowers) and the green countryside. Thus, the wine is a metaphor of nature itself. In Line 32, the speaker says he wishes to be transported, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards” but through poetry. The allusion here is to Bacchus, the god of wine and pleasure. Bacchus was often depicted as riding a chariot pulled by leopards (“pards”). A more poignant and personal allusion occurs in Line 26, when the speaker laments that there is a world “Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies.” Here, Keats may be referring to his younger brother Tom Keats, who died of tuberculosis on Dec. 1, 1818. “Ode to a Nightingale” was written in 1819, shortly after the death of Tom.
The poet also draws from Spencer and Milton to enrich his poem. The term “darkling” (Line 33) is an allusion to a line from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “As the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note” (Book 3). The image of the moon as a fairy queen may be an allusion to Spencer’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). In Lines 65-67, the poet uses a biblical allusion: “Perhaps the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” In the “Book of Ruth” in the Bible, the Moabite (from the land of Moab) Ruth marries an Israelite and moves to Judea. After her husband dies, Ruth laments him while working in the fields. The corn is “alien” because it in Judea or Israel rather than Ruth’s native Moab.
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