Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn.
(Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2012)
1464
Ode to a Nightingale | John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale (composed May 1819)1
From Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock2 I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains3
One minute past,4 and Lethe-wards5 had sunk;
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-winged dryad6 of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
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10
2
Oh for a draught of vintage!7 that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm south,8
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,9
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim –
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3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness,10 the fever, and the fret
Notes
Ode to a Nightingale
1
Twenty years after the event Keats’s friend Charles Brown
recorded how this poem was composed: ‘In the spring of 1819 a
nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his
chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plumtree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into
the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand,
and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On
enquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained
his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing
was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas
on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was
his “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem which has been the delight
of everyone’ (Keats Circle ii 65). See also headnote, p. 1392.
2
hemlock can be used as a sedative; it should be noted that
Keats is not saying that he has actually taken hemlock.
3
drains dregs.
4
past ago.
5
Lethe-wards towards Lethe, river of forgetfulness in Hades,
from which souls drank to forget their past lives.
6
dryad wood-nymph.
7
vintage wine.
8
warm south wine from the Mediterranean.
9
Hippocrene spring sacred to the muses on Mt Helicon.
Keats means wine.
10
weariness Wordsworth had written of ‘hours of weariness’
amid the ‘din / Of towns and cities’ in Tintern Abbey 26–8.
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;11
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
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4
Away! Away! For I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,12
But on the viewless13 wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards;
Already with thee! Tender is the night,
And haply14 the Queen Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;15
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
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5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness,16 guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month17 endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild,
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose,18 full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
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6
19
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
55
Notes
11
Where youth…dies often taken to refer to the death of Tom
Keats from consumption, 1 December 1818. Cf. Wordsworth,
Excursion iv 760: ‘While man grows old, and dwindles, and
decays.’
12
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards Keats’s source,
Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica (1788), recorded that when
Bacchus (god of wine) travelled east, he ‘was drawn in a
chariot by a lion and a tyger and was accompanied by Pan
and Silenus and all the satyrs’.
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
viewless invisible.
haply perhaps.
fays fairies.
embalmed darkness The night is full of the scent of plants.
the seasonable month May.
The coming musk-rose usually flowers in June.
Darkling in darkness.
Ode to a Nightingale | John Keats
1465
Ode on a Grecian Urn | John Keats
1466
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.
60
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:20
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;21
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
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8
Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hillside, and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music – do I wake or sleep?
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80
Ode on a Grecian Urn (composed c.May 1819)1
From Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
1
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,2
Sylvan historian,3 who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme –
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
5
Notes
20
clown peasant.
Through the…corn Ruth was forced, by famine, to leave home
and labour in the fields of her kinsman, Boaz (Ruth 2:1–2).
21
Ode on a Grecian Urn
The inspiration for this poem came from a variety of
sources, including the Townley Vase at the British Museum
1
and the Elgin Marbles (reproduced in Woof and Hebron,
John Keats (Grasmere, 1995), pp. 128–30). See also headnote,
p. 1392.
2
foster-child of silence and slow time The potter who made the
vase is dead, leaving it to be fostered by time and silence.
3
Sylvan historian The vase is a historian because it tells a
story; ‘sylvan’ refers to the pastoral scenes it depicts.
To Autumn (composed c.19 September 1819)1
From Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd,2 and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.
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2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless3 on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies,4 while thy hook5
Spares the next swath6 and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner7 thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
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3
Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows,8 borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn,
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
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Notes
To Autumn
1
For commentary on the poem see headnote, p. 1394.
2
gourd melon.
3
careless without care.
4
Drowsed…poppies poppies are associated with sleep.
5
hook blade for reaping corn.
swath width of corn cut by a scythe.
7
gleaner one who gathers stray ears of corn missed by the
reapers.
8
sallows willows.
6
To Autumn | John Keats
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