Notes on the Ode to a Nightingale.

In the early months of 1819 Keats was living with his friend Brown at Hampstead (Wentworth Place). In April a nightingale built her nest in the garden, and Brown writes: ‘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 plum, 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 inquiry, 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 stanza on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his Ode to a Nightingale.’

PAGE 107. l. 4. Lethe. Cf. Lamia, i. 81, note.

l. 7. Dryad. Cf. Lamia, i. 5, note.

PAGE 108. l. 13. Flora, the goddess of flowers.

l. 14. sunburnt mirth. An instance of Keats’s power of concentration. The people are not mentioned at all, yet this phrase conjures up a picture of merry, laughing, sunburnt peasants, as surely as could a long and elaborate description.

l. 15. the warm South. As if the wine brought all this with it.

l. 16. Hippocrene, the spring of the Muses on Mount Helicon.

l. 23. The weariness . . . fret. Cf. ‘The fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world’ in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, which Keats well knew.

PAGE 109. l. 26. Where youth . . . dies. See Introduction to the Odes, p. 230.

l. 29. Beauty . . . eyes. Cf. Ode on Melancholy, ‘Beauty that must die.’

l. 32. Not . . . pards. Not wine, but poetry, shall give him release from the cares of this world. Keats is again obviously thinking of Titian’s picture (Cf. Lamia, i. 58, note).

l. 40. Notice the balmy softness which is given to this line by the use of long vowels and liquid consonants.

PAGE 110. ll. 41 seq. The dark, warm, sweet atmosphere seems to enfold us. It would be hard to find a more fragrant passage.

l. 50. The murmurous . . . eves. We seem to hear them. Tennyson, inspired by Keats, with more self-conscious art, uses somewhat similar effects, e.g.:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

The Princess, vii.

l. 51. Darkling. Cf. The Eve of St. Agnes, l. 355, note.

l. 61. Thou . . . Bird. Because, so far as we are concerned, the nightingale we heard years ago is the same as the one we hear to-night. The next lines make it clear that this is what Keats means.

l. 64. clown, peasant.

l. 67. alien corn. Transference of the adjective from person to surroundings. Cf. Eve of St. Agnes, l. 16; Hyperion, iii. 9.

ll. 69-70. magic . . . forlorn. Perhaps inspired by a picture of Claude’s, ‘The Enchanted Castle,’ of which Keats had written before in a poetical epistle to his friend Reynolds--‘The windows [look] as if latch’d by Fays and Elves.’

PAGE 112. l. 72. Toll. To him it has a deeply melancholy sound, and it strikes the death-blow to his illusion.

l. 75. plaintive. It did not sound sad to Keats at first, but as it dies away it takes colour from his own melancholy and sounds pathetic to him. Cf. Ode on Melancholy: he finds both bliss and pain in the contemplation of beauty.

ll. 76-8. Past . . . glades. The whole country speeds past our eyes in these three lines.