Explication of John Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale"

John Keats, an English Romantic poet, is known for his odes that center around the Romantic ideals about nature. In this poem, "Ode to a Nightingale" the nightingale itself is a symbol of the continuity or immortality of Nature as contrasted with the utter mortality of man. Nature is always changing and yet forever the same.

In the beginning of the poem, the narrator sits listening to the song of the nightingale. He realizes as he listens that the bird is immortal as opposed to the mortal life of human beings. "Her where men Sit and hear each other groan, where Palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, where youth grows pale, and specter-thin and dies" (III 25). In contrast, as the narrator tells the reader in Stanza 7, the nightingale has been singing the same songs for generation upon generation. The use of the word generation suggests the passage of human time and the cycle of life and death. He has sung so much throughout history that he has become immortal. The very same song was heard by emperor and clown, by Ruth (a figure from the Old Testament) and by fairies. All of these people have heard the very same singing as the narrator is hearing right now, and some of these people have achieved an immortality of their own, something close to the nightingale. In this, he addresses the immortality of nature's cycle of change.

The narrator then begins to wish he could follow the bird and experience his own bit of immortality. At first, he thinks he needs drink to do that. When he realizes that he does not, he imagines himself flying away to join the bird. He tries to free himself from the pain of our world by associating with the immortality of the nightingale. Gradually, his reverie leads him to thoughts of death where he realizes that the song will be nonexistent then. The bird's song then becomes a "requiem" or song for the dead. By flying away with the bird, he metaphorically has some epiphanies about his own mortality.