‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is one of Keats’ most famous poems. Along with ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘To Autumn’, it is one in a series of six odes that Keats wrote in 1819. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ consists of eight ten-line stanzas with the rhyming scheme ababcdecde. It is mostly written in iambic pentameter (five stressed and five unstressed beats), aside from the eighth line of each stanza, which is written in trimeter (three stressed and three unstressed beats). An ode is always addressed to someone or something. In this ode, Keats is addressing a nightingale.
The speaker begins by describing how he is feeling in sensuous detail. He tells us that his ‘heart aches’, which is a simple but effective way of telling us that he is feeling emotional, and also reveals that he feels drowsy, almost as if he has been drugged: ‘a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’. He tells us that this disorienting sensation is due to the seductive powers of the nightingale’s melodic song. He is not envious of the nightingale’s happiness, instead, the nightingale’s happiness has made him happy: ‘‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,/ But being too happy in thine happiness’. He compares the nightingale to a nymph (a spirit of nature) living deep in the green forest and singing a song that is synonymous with summer: ‘That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,/ In some melodious plot/ Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,/ Singest of summer in full-throated ease.’ The sibilance of the last two lines of this stanza emphasise the gentle harmony of the nightingale’s existence.
