Ode to a Nightingale

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Overview

Ode to a Nightingale is a poem by John Keats written in spring 1819 and published that summer. In eight stanzas the speaker, drowsy and in pain, hears a nightingale singing and tries to escape into its world, first through wine, then through poetry. He discovers that imagination can lift him only for a moment, and the poem ends with the question whether he has been awake or dreaming. It is a central text of English Romanticism and a clear treatment of beauty, mortality and the limits of escape. It is brief, so it rewards slow, repeated reading.

Context

Keats was in his early twenties, living in Hampstead, London. His brother Tom had died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and Keats himself was already showing signs of ill health; he died in Rome in 1821 aged twenty-five. He wrote the 1819 odes in a short period of great productivity. A friend, Charles Brown, later said the poem was written in a single morning under a tree in the garden.