Ode to a Nightingale

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats, one of his 1819 odes. It was written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London, or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.^[1]

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem which describes Keats' journey into the state of negative capability. The tone rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and, instead, explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly relevant to Keats. The nightingale described experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, it is capable of living through its song, a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life, as Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—a "sod" over which the nightingale sings.

Many critics favor "Ode to a Nightingale" for its themes but some believe that it is structurally flawed because the poem sometimes strays from its main idea.