Ode to a Nightingale

Written in a single day in the spring of 1819, this poem came to Keats after he heard a nightingale singing near his home in Hampstead, though accounts differ on the exact spot where he sat. The speaker is drawn by the bird's song, which seems to belong to a world untouched by suffering, and he longs to leave behind the fever and weariness of ordinary life. Yet the poem keeps returning to the thought that such joy is bound up with the knowledge of death, and that the nightingale, unlike people, can keep singing its song forever. It belongs to the group of odes Keats wrote that year, and it moves between delight and grief through its rich imagery of nature and its meditation on transience.