Ode to a Nightingale

“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