in 1819 John Keats wrote six odes, which are now some of his most famous poems, including “To Autumn” which I discussed many years ago. Another is “Ode to a Nightingale” which was composed in May. Thankfully the original manuscripts have been preserved so we can take a look.

The Poem

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness—
That thou, light-wingéd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvéd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim—

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?

The Manuscript

The two-page double-sided manuscript of “Ode to a Nightingale” has been made available online by Marilee Hanson.

Hanson, Marilee. “John Keats Original Manuscripts Of Poetry & Letters” https://englishhistory.net/keats/manuscripts/, February 10, 2015

Composition

Hanson relates that Keats’ friend Charles Brown recollected the composition of the ode almost twenty years later:

‘In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house.  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-tree, 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 these 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 stanzas on so many scraps.  With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a poem which has been the delight of everyone.’

The discrepancy is that the poem is actually written on two scraps of paper. It’s possible that Brown was actually recalling the composition of “On Indolence,” whose original manuscript is lost, or that the “Nightingale” manuscript above is a later copy. However, Hanson notes that this seems unlikely as you can see a false start to the poem upside down on the second page.

Publication

“Ode to a Nightingale” was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts in July 1820. It has been anthologized countless times since then.

This evocative illustration (1899) was included in A Day with Keats: With numerous coloured illustrations by May Clarissa Gillington Byron and illustrations by W. J. Neatby. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913.

Musical Settings

Part of “Nightingale” was first set to music in a cantata called The Swan and the Skylark by Arthur Thomas, orchestrated by Charles Villiers Stanford and performed in 1894. Since then the poem has been the subject of other cantatas, choral symphonies, art songs, and various musical ensembles. You can take a look on Wikipedia if you are interested… I am going to leave you with Benedict Cumberbatch reciting “Ode to a Nightingale.”