ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE, by John Keats

The poet writes about the cruelty of live due to the fact that all people, finally, must die.

The author shows that he is fed up of living. He feels that he would like being a nightingale. He has envy of him because a nightingale has no problem as human beings have, due to that the nightingale does not suffer the decadence that time provokes in people, the tiredness and the pain that all body feel when a person has a certain age. The poet criticizes these problems throughout the third stanza.

He would be disposed to leave a lot of things of his life such as the sun, the laughs and also his mind in order to enter the darkness with the nightingale and then, he would try to forget the hell that old people live because they lose their physical beauty and feel pain. There is nothing worse for him than death.

The author perceives nature as something very pretty because if he is in nature it is due to he can get away from death.

At the end, the poet seems to have found his goal, but finally this sensation disappears and he realizes that all has been an illusion and he doubts about what happened. The author seems to have lost the notion of time.

The poem is divided in eight stanzas and each one has ten verses. Its rhyme is ab ab cde cde.

The poem is written in first person, because the poet tells the readers his opinions about life and his feelings in that moment. It makes that people feel nearer to him like he was a friend, and worried about his deep problems “My heart aches”(verse 1), “My sense”(verse 2), “That I might drink”(verse 19), “Do I wake or sleep”(verse 80).

Sometimes, he uses the second person. Apparently, it seems that he is referring to a sweetheart person or to the reader, but really, he refers to a nightingale “And with thee fade away into the forest dim”(verse 20), What thou among the leaves hast never known”(verse 22), “Still wouldst thou sing”(verse 59).

Moreover, the poem is written in the present but he refers to some actions in the past, related to the present such as “I have been half in love with easeful Death” (verse 52), “In ancient days”(verse 64).

The poet uses some rhetorical figures: a comparison “In such an ecstasy”, an anaphor “Where palsy…””Where youth…””Where but…”, a rhetoric question “Do I wake or sleep” that this question provokes the doubt in the author himself and in the reader, because we do not know if this situation is a dream or if it is something provoked by his desire of moving away of the reality or even by some drug that he has drunk, as he says at the beginning.

My first sensation was that the poet was telling his pain to have lost his love. For this, the poet wanted to finish with his life, taking a poison in order to meet with her and see her again and forever. I thought that he was saying what he was feeling during his last moments. And finally, he did not know if he was alive or not.

The meaning of the poem is ambiguous because the poet is speaking about the desire of a man to go to the darkness with a nightingale, but really the poet wants to say that he does not like this world because nobody is immortal, as the nightingale. You cannot do anything to avoid the death.

I think that the poet is very desperate looking for a solution to solve his fear to die. He tries to tell the readers this desperation, but in a delicate way, without showing the terror about the inevitable end of the life.