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Full of the true , the blushful Hippocrene ,
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With beaded bubbles winking at the brim ,
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And purple @-@ stainèd mouth ;
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That I might drink , and leave the world unseen ,
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And with thee fade away into the forest dim : 20
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Fade far away , dissolve , and quite forget
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What thou among the leaves hast never known ,
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The weariness , the fever , and the fret
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Here , where men sit and hear each other groan ;
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Where palsy shakes a few , sad , last grey hairs , 25
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Where youth grows pale , and spectre @-@ thin , and dies ;
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Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
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And leaden @-@ eyed despairs ;
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Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes ,
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Or new Love pine at them beyond to @-@ morrow . 30
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Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee ,
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Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards ,
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But on the viewless wings of Poesy ,
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Though the dull brain perplexes and retards :
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Already with thee ! tender is the night , 35
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And haply the Queen @-@ Moon is on her throne ,
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Cluster 'd around by all her starry Fays
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But here there is no light ,
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Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
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Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways . 40
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I cannot see what flowers are at my feet ,
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Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs ,
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But , in embalmèd darkness , guess each sweet
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Wherewith the seasonable month endows
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The grass , the thicket , and the fruit @-@ tree wild ; 45
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White hawthorn , and the pastoral eglantine ;
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Fast @-@ fading violets cover 'd up in leaves ;
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And mid @-@ May 's eldest child ,
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The coming musk @-@ rose , full of dewy wine ,
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The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves . 50
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Darkling I listen ; and , for many a time
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I have been half in love with easeful Death ,
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Call 'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme ,
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To take into the air my quiet breath ;
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Now more than ever seems it rich to die , 55
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To cease upon the midnight with no pain ,
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While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
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In such an ecstasy !
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Still wouldst thou sing , and I have ears in vain —
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To thy high requiem become a sod . 60
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Thou wast not born for death , immortal Bird !
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No hungry generations tread thee down ;
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The voice I hear this passing night was heard
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In ancient days by emperor and clown :
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Perhaps the self @-@ same song that found a path 65
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Through the sad heart of Ruth , when , sick for home ,
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She stood in tears amid the alien corn ;
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The same that ofttimes hath
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Charm 'd magic casements , opening on the foam
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Of perilous seas , in faery lands forlorn . 70
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Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell
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To toll me back from thee to my sole self !
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Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well
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As she is famed to do , deceiving elf .
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Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
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Past the near meadows , over the still stream ,
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Up the hill @-@ side ; and now ' tis buried deep
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In the next valley @-@ glades :
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Was it a vision , or a waking dream ?
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Fled is that music : — do I wake or sleep ? 80
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= = Themes = =
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" Ode to a Nightingale " describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature . In the words of Richard Fogle , " The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual : inclusive terms which , however , contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain ... |
The nightingale 's song within the poem is connected to the art of music in a way that the urn in " Ode on a Grecian Urn " is connected to the art of sculpture . As such , the nightingale would represent an enchanting presence and , unlike the urn , is directly connected to nature . As natural music , the song is for ... |
Like Percy Bysshe Shelley ’ s " To a Skylark " , Keats ’ s narrator listens to a bird song , but listening to the song within “ Ode to a Nightingale ” is almost painful and similar to death . The narrator seeks to be with the nightingale and abandons his sense of vision in order to embrace the sound in an attempt to s... |
Midway through the poem , there is a split between the two actions of the poem : the first attempts to identify with the nightingale and its song , and the second discusses the convergence of the past with the future while experiencing the present . This second theme is reminiscent of Keats 's view of human progressio... |
Responding to this emphasis on pleasure , Albert Guerard , Jr. argues that the poem contains a " longing not for art but a free reverie of any kind . The form of the poem is that of progression by association , so that the movement of feeling is at the mercy of words evoked by chance , such words as fade and forlorn ,... |
With this theme of a loss of pleasure and inevitable death , the poem , according to Claude Finney , describes " the inadequacy of the romantic escape from the world of reality to the world of ideal beauty " . Earl Wasserman essentially agrees with Finney , but he extended his summation of the poem to incorporate the ... |
= = Keats 's reception = =
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Contemporary critics of Keats enjoyed the poem , and it was heavily quoted in their reviews . An anonymous review of Keats 's poetry that ran in the August and October 1820 Scots Magazine stated : " Amongst the minor poems we prefer the ' Ode to the Nightingale . ' Indeed , we are inclined to prefer it beyond every ot... |
John Scott , in an anonymous review for the September 1820 edition of The London Magazine , argued for the greatness of Keats 's poetry as exemplified by poems including " Ode to a Nightingale " :
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The injustice which has been done to our author 's works , in estimating their poetical merit , rendered us doubly anxious , on opening his last volume , to find it likely to seize fast hold of general sympathy , and thus turn an overwhelming power against the paltry traducers of talent , more eminently promising in m... |
In a review for the 21 January 1835 London Journal , Hunt claimed that while Keats wrote the poem , " The poet had then his mortal illness upon him , and knew it . Never was the voice of death sweeter . " David Moir , in 1851 , used The Even of St Agnes to claim , " We have here a specimen of descriptive power luxurio... |
At the end of the 19th century , Robert Bridges 's analysis of the poem became a dominant view and would influence later interpretations of the poem . Bridges , in 1895 , declared that the poem was the best of Keats 's odes but he thought that the poem contained too much artificial language . In particular , he emphas... |
= = = 20th @-@ century criticism = = =
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At the beginning of the 20th century , Rudyard Kipling referred to lines 69 and 70 , alongside three lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's Kubla Khan , when he claimed of poetry : " In all the millions permitted there are no more than five — five little lines — of which one can say , ' These are the magic . These are ... |
Bridge 's view of " Ode to a Nightingale " was taken up by H. W. Garrod in his 1926 analysis of Keats 's poems . Like Albert Gerard would argue later in 1944 , Garrod believed that the problem within Keats 's poem was his emphasis on the rhythm and the language instead of the main ideas of the poem . When describing t... |
Richard Fogle responded to the critical attack on Keats 's emphasis on rhyme and language put forth by Garrod , Gerard , and others in 1953 . His argument was similar to Brooks : that the poem was thematically coherent and that there is a poet within the poem that is different from Keats the writer of the poem . As su... |
= = = Later critical responses = = =
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Although the poem was defended by a few critics , E. C. Pettet returned to the argument that the poem lacked a structure and emphasized the word " forlorn " as evidence of his view . In his 1957 work , Pettet did praise the poem as he declared , " The Ode to a Nightingale has a special interest in that most of us woul... |
From the late 1960s onward , many of the Yale School of critics describe the poem as a reworking of John Milton 's poetic diction , but they argued that poem revealed that Keats lacked the ability of Milton as a poet . The critics , Harold Bloom ( 1965 ) , Leslie Brisman ( 1973 ) , Paul Fry ( 1980 ) , John Hollander (... |
Focusing on the quality of the poem , Stuart Sperry , argued in 1973 , " ' Ode to a Nightingale ' is the supreme expression in all Keats 's poetry of the impulse to imaginative escape that flies in the face of the knowledge of human limitation , the impulse fully expressed in ' Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee . '... |
In a review of contemporary criticism of " Ode to a Nightingale " in 1998 , James O 'Rouke claimed that " To judge from the volume , the variety , and the polemical force of the modern critical responses engendered , there have been few moments in English poetic history as baffling as Keats 's repetition of the word '... |
= = In fiction = =
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F. Scott Fitzgerald took the title of his novel Tender is the Night from the 35th line of the ode .
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According to Ildikó de Papp Carrington , Keats ' wording , " when , sick for home , / She stood in tears amid the alien corn " , seems to be echoed in by Alice Munro 's Save the Reaper ( 1998 ) , the end of which reads : " Eve would lie down [ ... ] with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which m... |
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