Beauty on the Wing: Keats' Ode to a Nightingale

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maiya look into John Keats’s haunting meditation on mortality and art, 'Ode to a Nightingale.' Written during the poet’s final years, this celebrated ode encapsulates the fleeting nature of life and the immortal legacy of beauty.

Joe and Maiya explore how Keats uses the nightingale’s song as a symbol of timeless artistic expression, contrasting it with the poet’s own fears of death and obscurity. They unpack the classical references—Lethe, Bacchus, and Ruth—and examine how Keats’s sensual language and rich imagery evoke both ecstasy and existential despair. With reflections on Romanticism, negative capability, and poetic legacy, this episode reveals the tension between the human desire to endure and the inevitability of being forgotten.

Download exclusive PDFs on 'Ode to a Nightingale,' available to Poetry+ members:

• Full PDF Guide
• Poetry Snapshot PDF
• Poem Printable PDF
  • with meter
  • with rhyme scheme
  • with both meter and rhyme scheme
• John Keats PDF Guide

Tune in and discover:

• Why the nightingale represents artistic immortality
• How Keats’s medical background and personal tragedies shaped the poem
• What the ode reveals about Romanticism’s second generation
• Why the poem’s ambiguous ending epitomizes Keats’s poetic vision

Transcript

Beauty on the Wing: Keats' Ode to a Nightingale (Transcript)
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Joe: [00:00:00] 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 fairy lands forlorn. 

Forlorn!, the very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my soul self. Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well as she's famed to do. Deceiving elf, Adieu. Adieu. Thy plaintive [00:01:00] anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream up the hillside, and now is buried deep in the next valley glades.

Was it a vision or a waking dream fled? Is that music? Do I wake or sleep?

Maiya: Hello and welcome to Beyond The Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. My name is Maiya and I'm here today with my co-host Joe, who so beautifully read the end of the poem. We're going to discuss today Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats. Now, the themes that we're touching on today include the role of animals in poetry, of course, in this case, particularly the role of the Nightingale, mortality and Keats's role as a second wave romantic poet- a very unique position in the poetic canon. Now Joe, would you like to start us off by telling us a little bit about Keats, his background, and kind of how these poems came to be?

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. [00:02:00] So John Keats was born in London in 1795 and died in 1821 at the age of just 25. We're gonna talk more later on in the episode about his legacy and the amount that he managed to achieve in his very short life. As Maiya mentioned, he's part of the second generation of romantic poets, the first generation being exemplified by the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they were producing work when Keats was still a very young child. So he comes of age much later in that tradition, and we'll talk more about that later on. He was educated in London, but suffered a tragic loss at the age of just eight years old when his father died after falling from his horse, he suffered other tragedies.

His brother died of tuberculosis, the disease that one day killed him as well. After initially signing on at Guy's hospital to train as a medical student in 1815, he rejected his medical training to focus on poetry. His first poem was published when he was just 19 years old, before his first collection poems was published in 1817.

Now, a [00:03:00] lot of the work that really defines Keats as a poet, it was written in this very intense period in 1818 and 1819 when he was living in Hampstead, and that includes the poem we're looking at today, Ode to a Nightingale shortly afterwards, suffering from tuberculosis.

He went to Rome for his health to try and recover from tuberculosis, but he died there in 1821. Now he's influenced countless writers in the century since his death, including the likes of William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Elliot, and many more. Of course, all three of those poets. are people we have covered in previous episodes of Beyond The Verse, so I implore you to go and check those episodes out if you haven't listened to them already.

Now, when it comes to Ode to a Nightingale itself, the poem is written in eight stanzas, each with 10 lines. It's written largely in iambic pentameter with a consistent rhyme scheme. And like I said, and as Maiya mentioned, there is so much to get into here. So Maiya, where would you like to start with the poem itself?

Maiya: I think unlike some of our other episodes, it's very important that we focus on the title here First. Ode to a Nightingale is not [00:04:00] just a flippant title. The Nightingale is a key part of this poem. It acts as almost a disruptor to the poem. It's something that brings the poet to a moment of realization about his own mortality. Now, for listeners who may not be aware, the Nightingale is a bird that is very common in the uk. They visually look quite drab there, very small brown birds, but they have a beautiful, beautiful song that they sing during the nighttime. Now this poem is a mediation really on the speaker's mortality . The Nightingale, in many ways represents the legacy of the song, the Legacy of Art, and it makes the poet here reflect on what they are leaving behind. And the reason I call the Nightingale a disruptor is because not only are they singing during the nighttime, which is obviously disrupting a moment of peace, but here they represent to the poet something that reminds them of almost their own failures of the things that they haven't managed to leave behind. And I [00:05:00] really love the way that this poem is framed around that central character. But Joe, in this poem, when we begin, and we talk about the Nightingale song, how do you think initially it makes the poet feel, and how do you think that changes?

Joe: Well, it's a really good question, and I think the answer kind of reveals the key to understanding this poem. One of Keats's longstanding preoccupations in his poetry, which is about what we leave behind and what kind of legacy we build for ourselves while we're alive that will exist after we have died.

And initially the speaker appears drawn to the beauty of this bird song, but ultimately, rather than inspiring any kind of positive emotions in them, they end up feeling rather depressed by this because they cannot help but compare their own lack of legacy, their own lack of artistic creation.

With the beauty of this bird song, and Maiya mentioned that death is a really important part of this poem and this sense of the speaker's own mortality. The way in which that is filtered through the image of this Nightingale is completely fascinating and it really plays into some larger ideas about the role [00:06:00] that animals play in literature. And we talked a little bit about this in our episode on William Blake's The Tyger, but it's worth delving into what these creatures can represent and the kind of role they occupy in literature, poetry, and other forms of art more generally.

Because when we talk about an animal by naming its species like the Nightingale or The Tyger, what we're doing there is we're treating each individual animal on two levels. 

We're talking about, on the one hand, a specific creature, one nightingale, but we're also using that creature to represent an entire species. And, this is increasingly important because the speaker cannot differentiate the Nightingale that they are hearing within this poem to the one they might hear the following day or the following year, or indeed one that will be singing long after that speaker's death.

The bird has a kind of immortality, and this is explicitly mentioned in the poem. Keats is not suggesting that that individual Nightingale will live forever, but as long as there are Nightingales singing, the legacy kind of is sustained. And we don't talk about humans that way.

We tend to think of humans much more as [00:07:00] individuals who live and die in a very fixed manner. And it's that juxtaposition between the finite nature of human life and the kind of seemingly infinite nature of animal life that makes the speaker feel so depressed. They are aware of the fact that their own finitude is exemplified by the seemingly endless existence of this bird and its song.

But what do you think about that Maiya?

Maiya: Well, I think it's worth noting for listeners as well that despite this huge presence that Keats has in literature now in poetry and in classrooms across the world, at the time he was facing real criticism and a real dislike of his poetry. Of course there were people that enjoyed it.

He was actively publishing. But throughout his career, he died at 25 years old. He was far too young to actually see a huge amount of the success that would come after his death. And I often find that when I read poems like this, and you are aware of the context behind it, you can almost pick out those moments of uncertainty about his own work.

He was training to be a doctor and [00:08:00] gave up in order to pursue the thing that he really loved that is poetry. And I find that there's a few phrases in this poem that really stand out to me as him, wanting to find that success and being almost a little bit outta reach.

And I think The Nightingale represents that as well, because a huge part of this poem is that it's based on the sound. It's not based on the visual sight of a Nightingale, it's not based on being in a distance. It's purely the sound that makes him initially have this realization. And I love the sense of distance that creates between the speaker and what he's talking around as opposed to about.

Joe: I think that's a brilliant point and it really ties into what Keats is doing here. Because if we think about the fact that you're right within the poem, it's the song of the Nightingale that is being contemplated, that is being thought about.

And yet the poem's title is about the Nightingale itself. Now, if we extrapolate a kind of learning from that, what Keats is saying is that we are the things we create. Our legacy is defined by the things we create. And [00:09:00] again, if we have to view the fact that Keats is a poet creating work in which these contemplations are playing out, he is saying that that is the way that he would like to be remembered.

And it's so important for listeners to understand that Keats is hyper aware of his own legacy within the context. He's hyper aware of his own legacy within his own lifetime. As I mentioned, he died at the age of just 25. We're gonna talk more about the poems, exploration of mortality later on in the episode.

But it's worth just quoting these lines that he wrote in 1820, just months before his death. He said in a letter. I have left no immortal work behind me. Nothing to make my friends proud of my memory, but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things. And if I had had time, I would have made myself remembered.

There's a real tragedy to those lines because there you have a poet who goes to their grave believing that they have failed to create the legacy that they wished to, the legacy that the speak of believes the Nightingale has in this poem. Now, of course, [00:10:00] we know in 2025 that's not true. Here we are talking about this incredible poetic legacy.

But this is not a retrospective thing. this interest in artistic creation, legacy building out one's legacy from their artistic work is not retrospective. This is not subsequent critics. Looking back, Keats was incredibly aware of this while writing these poems.

Maiya: Absolutely, and you can find this in the poem, one of the lines that stands out to me is in the first answer actually, where he's talking about the melody that he's hearing. And he says in some melodious plot of Beechen green, and shadows numberless, sings of summer in full throated.

Ease. And ease is the word that I really want to focus in on here because there is almost a jealousy because Joe and I, we don't often get to talk on the podcast about the labor that is creation, the labor that is writing, the labor that is making a work that is deemed great. You know, so many poets that we discuss, of course they've built a legacy for themselves in the years and years that they've spent publishing. But [00:11:00] that doesn't just come out of nowhere. That comes after years of hard work, much of the time. So the word ease here really impresses on me that. Keats didn't find the act of writing easy. He loved it. He loved the principle, as Joe just mentioned, but he found labor in it. And he's jealous of the fact that the Nightingale has this immersive, expansive song that will last through decades and centuries.

And to him seems immortal, but he can't create the same thing. And I find that a really powerful message because of course it neglects the fact that the Nightingale song has been formed over thousands and thousands of years. It was not born out of nothing. It was not that individual Nightingale who created that singular song. It's a way of communication that . Keats would never be able to understand anyway. So immediately you have this disconnect. You have this unfair comparison. 

Joe: I think it's an absolutely brilliant point, and I love that idea of this individual, this [00:12:00] person who wants to create, I mean, as you said, Maiya, he gave up his career as a doctor, which was far more secure and would've no doubt been far more lucrative 'cause he had this burning urge to write and to create this idea that that guy is jealous of Birdsong because he's not competing with the individual Nightingale he's competing with.

As you say, everything that that bird song has grown to represent over the centuries in millennia. And I'm really put in mind of another poem we've discussed on the podcast by one of Kitty's contemporaries, Percy Shelley. We talked about Ozymandias and the way in which art in that poem is the only way to circumvent the passage of time.

Artists can't delay or avoid their own mortal death. And yet if they are lucky and if they create, their work can exist beyond their own lifetimes and it can create a version of themselves that persists because as long as their art is still respected and celebrated, they are still respected and celebrated and their legacy survives.

But on the point about being jealous of the bird [00:13:00] song, and I just wanna bring this back to the critical place of animals in literature. 'cause it's a really fascinating kind of small section of literary criticism, but it's definitely worth exploring.

And I'd like to quote, I think friend of the podcast Professor Sir Jonathan Bate in his wonderful book, romantic Ecology, which is first published in 1991, which is very specifically concerned with the portrayal of nature and animals in the works of the romantic poets. So if anybody upon listening to this podcast or other episodes of Beyond The Verse kind of really wants to do a deep dive into the romantic poets, that would be a, brilliant book that we recommend.

And he says that in poetry, the song of a Bird is never simply the song of a bird, but an echo of all birds that have sung before. And it's that notion that the individual poet is somehow competing with an immortal presence, a kind of timeless presence that makes that poet and that speaker feel so small and insignificant.

You know, it's not fighting fair. And I think that. Jonathan Bate's book is a wonderful place to start and for anyone who's, instance to Jonathan Bate more broadly, he actually wrote The Forward to Kristie [00:14:00] Frederick-Daugherty's Wonderful Collection, invisible Strings when 113 poets respond to the songs of Taylor Swift and Maiya and I interviewed Christie and talked about Jonathan Bate’s introduction and the other poems in that collection in December.

So if anyone hasn't listened to that episode yet, I really suggest you go and check that out 'cause it was a really fascinating conversation that brings together really interesting contemporary poetry and looks at how it ties into not only the works of Taylor Swift, but also the literary canon much more broadly.

Just going back to the Nightingale specifically, one thing we haven't touched upon yet is the fact that it is a migratory bird. It is not in the uk all of the year. 

It's only in the UK some months of the year. Normally between about April and September. The rest of the time it is in North Africa. Now, the reason this is important is because that means the bird and its song becomes associated with a particular time of year, normally April time. So you're thinking about sort of mid-spring.

Now, the reason that's important is 'cause we have to think about what spring represents more broadly. It's about regeneration, it's about growth, it's about new life. And the idea that this bird is related, therefore, to all of those emotions and all [00:15:00] of those themes and ideas becomes really significant in the poem more broadly.

Because if you associate the bird with regeneration, with new life, with progress, and also with something immortal, there's a real juxtaposition there. Because if something is immortal, it doesn't need to be reborn or regrown. So there's a tension innate within the symbolism of the bird, but also we view seasons as a way of plotting the passage of time.

Now, Keats had a finite amount of time on the earth. He couldn't have known that he only had. Two or three more years left when he wrote this poem, but he knew because he was surrounded by illness and disease and death as a medical student, but also because his brother died of tuberculosis before he did, and he suffered with ill health himself.

He knew that his time on earth was finite. And so the fact that this poem is rooted in things that exist beyond his finite life, the immortal nature of the bird, the constant relentless passage of time emphasized by the association with Spring and New Seasons really serves as a kind of cruel reminder that his time is running out and that urgency is [00:16:00] palpable in the poem.

What do you think about that?

Maiya: I couldn't agree more, and I actually had never considered until you were detailing the seasons piece that by extension you also have to consider when The Nightingale is no longer in the uk and the seasons that that covers. Because I think if you were approaching this in a very metaphorical way, the presence of the Nightingale during those spring months provides the immortality. But then when it's gone in the winter, it reminds me of the Persephone myth of course, because you have this moment of brightness and song and melody and happiness and all of that is then taken away in winter it's removed and perhaps I never really considered that this poem was maybe less concerned with the present moment and more concerned with the impending moment, the moment of death.

However, for Keats, when he's drinking wine, which he compares in a very similar way, it has an end, you drink a bottle and then it's done. You have to throw the bottle away. I really love that you have this very mortal experience of drinking [00:17:00] something that is said to be inspiring and to loosen you up and get you thinking creatively. But it has an end point as compared to, again, this Greek myth where there is eternity to consider. So again, I think it just plays into this real sense of dual time as you were talking about. Joe,

Joe: I think the reference to wine is a really complex one. Much more complex, I think, than it initially appears. And I, think you've done a brilliant job of explaining some of that. But just to continue, we get a mention later on in this poem of Bacchus. Now Bacchus is the Roman name for the Greek God, Dionysus, the God of wine.

So again, we're rooted in the classical tradition here and we're rooted on this subject of wine Now again, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, Bacchus did not only represent wine, but he also was the God of madness, the God of insanity. And it's not a massive stretch to see why the Greeks and Romans would've assigned wine and madness to the same God, right?

When people drink, they are not themselves. They act in a manner that is different to the way they would normally act. But what we get in this poem is a really nihilistic desire from the [00:18:00] speaker. They want to embrace oblivion. Earlier on in the poem, we get another reference to Greek mythology with the river Lethe.

Now, the river Lethe is one of the rivers and Greek mythology that flows into the underworld, and it is the river of oblivion. Supposedly, if you set foot in this river, your mind is wiped of all your earthly memories. So there is this real desire, whether symbolically in the form of the river Lethe, or whether kind of literally in the form of a bottle of wine to drink yourself into oblivion, to forget to turn away from memories of Your mortal life, and it's a really depressing outlook. And despite the beauty that is present in this poem, there are really beautiful descriptions, not only of the song, but of the heath that surrounds the speaker. There is an utterly bleak outlook at its core. 

There is a feeling of worthlessness. There is a feeling that the speaker will never create the legacy that they want to create for themselves. And there is a willingness to embrace nihilism, embrace emptiness, embrace forgetfulness in order to escape this feeling of, depression. It's a really powerful poem.

Maiya: It really makes me think of, you [00:19:00] know, that kind of old saying, sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees in this poem. I fear it's almost the opposite and I would like to direct listeners particularly to some of the latest stanzas and I'll just read it for the benefit, explaining what I'm going to. He talks about the queen moon on her throne. He says 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 embalmed darkness, guess each sweet wherewith the seasonable month endows, the grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild. He is not just discussing his fear of mortality. He's not just looking at the present moment. He's telling the reader very explicitly that all he can think about. Is this moment of death. All he can consider at the time, he can't consider the sweetness of the present moment. He can't consider [00:20:00] the pleasantries of an every day. And of course a huge part of this is probably the suffering that he's gone through and the loss of family members. But of course, when we talk about a poem that is written, as Joe said very beautifully, there's a lot of beauty present in this poem. It is immediately juxtaposed with this real sense of heaviness. He's saying, despite the flowers that are there, I cannot see them. He is choosing to be purposefully blind. 

joe_1_03-16-2025_153318: Now, by happy coincidence, our 25th episode of Beyond The Verse, which we did on Sylvia Plath's poetry, also coincided with the day in which we analysed our 5000th poem on PoemAnalysis.com. Yes, 5000 poems. So, what I would suggest to any listeners, who want to explore more about poetry, who are enjoying the podcast, is go to PoemAnalysis.com, sign up for a Poetry+ membership, which will give you access to all of the materials that accompany those 5, [00:21:00] 000 analysed poems. We've talked about this in previous episodes of the podcast, but just to quickly run through some of the member benefits, we have a weekly newsletter, written by yours truly, in which we go through key poetic news, book recommendations, and much more.

We have bespoke resources available to Poetry+ members, including a PDF learning library on which has more than 300 PDFs on all kind of elements of poetry, including individual poets, form, symbols and imagery within poetry, and lots more.

Not to mention the fact that you can access tons of bonus materials that are on those articles I mentioned, more than 5, 000 articles on different poems that are exclusively available to Poetry+ members.

For those of you who are enjoying the podcast and can't wait for us to get to 5, 000 episodes, you can go and read about 5, 000 poems right now at PoemAnalysis.com. 

Joe: Before the break, Maiya was talking a little bit about the presentation of mortality in this poem, and I would like to continue on that thread by just looking at a couple of lines [00:22:00] from later on in the poem And they read as follows, Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird, no Hungry Generations tread thee down.

And I think this is so interesting to me because this is a direct address to this bird, which they specify is immortal. And we've already talked about what that means and why this bird is associated with immortality, even though Keats is not suggesting that that individual Nightingale will live forever.

It's about the symbolism of what the bird represents. But the thing I find fascinating about this is, and this is the case for a lot of the presentation of animals and literature, is that writers address and describe animals. only because they reflect back on what that says about human characters.

And I think that's what's going on here because by saying Thou wast not born for death, the implication is that the speaker themselves was, and that juxtaposition or what we would associate with juxtaposition of being born and dying is really fascinating because in theory, at the moment you're born, nobody's thinking about death, right?

It's about new life, and it's about vitality and it's about youth. [00:23:00] Things that we associate as being incredibly far away from death and old age and all of those things. And yet the moment you are born, because we are mortal and 'cause we are finite, and because our individuality, in contrast to animals makes that mortality all the more explicit, the countdown has effectively begun.

at the moment of birth, your death becomes an inevitability. Your death becomes something that will happen one day, and it's that tension that he, strikes upon. But by doing it, not by thinking about his own mortality, but by juxtaposing the inevitability of his death against the bird, the bird becomes a kind of mirror into which the speaker can look and see himself.

And this is a fascinating thing. And any listeners interested in knowing more about these ideas, I really implore you to read one of the, great kind of philosophical and literary texts on this subject, which is John Berger's. Why Look at Animals, which is first published in 1980, in which he effectively points out that when animals are portrayed in art and literature, effectively what we do is we look at them in order to look at ourselves.

They become either a mirror to view ourselves in, or a window to look through, in order to look at [00:24:00] people who resemble ourselves. And it's That tension between the immortality of the burden, the mortality of the speaker that comes through really strongly in these lines.

Maiya: to jump off the point that Joe was making about the bird being a mirror to the human psyche, I think there is an absolute proof in the closing lines of the penultimate stanza and the opening line of the final stanza we get the impression that the speaker is gradually moving away from their sense of self. I said to Joe before this podcast that I couldn't quite theorize where the concrete center of this poem was.

It felt a little bit abstract to me, and I think what I realize is that as you move through this poem, the speaker kind of loses the sense of time we've been talking about. They are so focused on the bird song and focused on the things that that represents and the things that that makes them reflect on, that they begin to sit outside of time. And in these lines that I mentioned, you have a moment in which there is an imposition. As I said, the Nightingale at first is an imposition on the mundanity of human life, but here it is a Bell Keats [00:25:00] rights. Forlorn, the very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my soul self. Adieu And here the bell is a human imposition on this dream-like mystical world that we've been slowly pulled into through the Bird song. And of course this is a poem. We don't hear the bird song, but the way in which Keats has described it, we think around the bird song. Even just reading this poem, You can begin to imagine that melody, and I love the way here, that Keats really, in that final stanza, pulls you back to the present instantly. That imposition is another reminder of his singular mortality of the fact that he is not able to escape time in the same way that a song, a piece of art can, and as Joe mentioned earlier, it's a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy because of course, Keats has become incredibly famous.

His work is revered across the globe, and yet he never would've known that. And he left and he departed the world thinking that [00:26:00] he would never achieve that. And I, find this tolling of the bell is really a recurrent symbol throughout a lot of literature to either remind an individual that their time is nearly up or the tolling of a clock. You have these noises that represent much greater themes. a bell is one a clock ticking is one.

And it really just plays into, again, this sense of limited time versus the expansive world that is created outside of time. 

Joe: I think that was wonderful, and actually, as, luck would have it, I've actually been making a series of PDFs on different symbols and poetry for the PDF Learning Library, which is available to all Poetry+ subscribers, and I was writing PDFs on clocks in poetry and on bells in poetry just last week.

So if any listeners would like to go and explore those symbols or any other symbols, I think we've got more than two dozen PDFs on symbols in the PDF learning library now, alongside hundreds of other PDFs on poets movements, aspects of form, et cetera. Then Poetry+ subscribers can get access to all of those right now at PoemAnalysis.com.

But you are absolutely right that we use [00:27:00] clocks and we use bells in poetry as ways to impose order and regulatory time on the experience of time. And those two things are really different. We spoke about this in our episode on T.S. Elliot's the Wasteland, and I talked about the concept of Bergsonian time and I think to quickly summarize this idea of  Bergsonian time effectively, it's the idea that our internal perception of time is different to the way in which time is measured by clocks in seconds and hours and days, et cetera.

So sometimes if you are in a situation that you don't want to be in, you know you're waiting for bad news. In a doctor's surgery, for example, a minute can feel like an hour, whereas other times, the old phrase time flies and you're having fun hours can slip by as though they were mere minutes.

The experience that we have of time is different to the way that time is actually measured externally, and these lines brilliantly examine the way in which human measurable time imposes on the internal. Maiya's absolutely right, the sound of those bells drags the speaker roughly back to their own body, forces them to contend [00:28:00] with the finite nature of time and the fact that it is ticking away.

But the bells have a secondary association that's relevant for this poem because unlike clocks, they not only measure time, of course, in Christian countries, bells would be told upon the hour historically, which in a time before clocks and watches were readily available, was a really important way of measuring time.

But bells unlike clocks also have an association with death 'cause. Funeral bells, the funeral toll was played to mark the moments in which people had died in the moments in which their funerals were happening. The fact that a symbol of the passage of time, which is concurrently a symbol of death, is used to drag the speaker back to their own body, exemplifies everything that's going on in this poem.

The speaker's desire to experience the world as the immortal bird does, creating legacies, creating things that transcend the passage of time is brutally exposed by a symbol, the bell, which represents the fact that the speaker cannot escape the strict parameters of time and will die. [00:29:00] It's a brilliant couple of lines that really functions as a microcosm of the internal struggle within this entire poem.

Maiya: . Well, I find it really interesting in this poem that, I've mentioned it quite a few times, that Keats either thinking around a theme or thinking around the bird. Of course, a Nightingale doesn't just sing because it feels like it. There is a sense of internal time. Of course, they sing during the night. They also will have their own patterns of sleeping and awakening and migrating. These all happen in cycles. These are ways of measuring time, but they're just not human. I find it really fascinating that Keats could have found companionship. I want to say in the Nightingale, he could have found similarity, but instead he finds difference. And this is where the human factor comes in. Because I think, generally as humans, we, consider ourselves a superior species. We track time, we talk, we have communication. We have so many things that we consider to be ultimate way of doing these things. We have so many ways and methods of [00:30:00] existing, of tracking time that we consider those to be the only way in many cases and also the ultimate way. But I find it really fascinating that, a huge piece that Joe and I when we talk about the romantic poets is that they are so often situated within nature and they use nature to mediate their own feelings. And here choosing a Nightingale that arguably has an entirely opposite reaction, if you were to pick up on the fact that they're migratory birds, if you were to pick up on the fact that they have their own body clock, Keats could have taken all of these elements, but instead he finds the difference.

He creates a difference between the human and the animal. And I'm sure there's something more to say there, but I find it really interesting that the Nightingale expresses his solitude even more. And it's a choice here. I, absolutely think it's a choice, but I'd love to know if you, agree or not, Joe,

Joe: I think it's a fascinating point, Maiya, and I do agree, and I just wanna return to this point that we made much earlier in the episode about this idea of the fact that Keats almost as jealous of this Nightingale. [00:31:00] And that might seem like a really strange thing to grasp for listeners, but I just wanna expand slightly more on that because.

At the center of this poem and at the center of many of Keats's poems and his letters, as we mentioned earlier on, is a desire to create something that will last, to create a legacy that will transcend his own mortal life. He obviously believed at the time of death he hadn't achieved that he was wrong.

He absolutely has achieved that legacy. But let's delve a little bit more into what that actually means, because in order to create a legacy as an artist, what that effectively means is you have to differentiate yourself from your contemporaries. The vast majority of people who lived at the same time as Keats, who were born the same year who lived in the same towns, we don't know their names or their names, certainly are not immediately available to us in the way that Keats's, is.

A legacy therefore is very much tied to an individual. The individual artist creates and it is that genius that is remembered. There's almost a sense of resentment against the bird. 'cause as we've mentioned, the bird is both an individual example of a species, but also representative of the species as a whole.

I think [00:32:00] part of the motivation for differentiating the speaker from the bird and separating it is because that's what the artist is trying to do with everybody around them.

They are trying to create separation, not just in a kind of cursory way that, poets are associated with being lonely individuals, but in the sense that that's what making a legacy means. You have to create space. Not literal space, but kind of symbolic space between yourself and others, because otherwise there's no reason that you'll be remembered and they won't be, to create a legacy is by its very definition to reject those around you and differentiate yourself from them.

And I think that's what we're seeing in this poem, this sense that the speaker feels divorced from the reality of the Nightingale is part of the symbolic separation from the poet and those around him.

But Maiya, I know you wanna talk about the ending of this poem and why that might be significant.

Maiya: Absolutely. Joe and I were talking about this before the podcast, and we mentioned it at the start Keats is a second generation romantic poet, and one of the things that differentiates him is a [00:33:00] lack of resolution in his poems. And this is never more clear than in Ode to a Nightingale because of course we have this journey that the speaker goes on. However, the end lines are, was it a vision or a waking dream fled? Is that music? Do I wake or sleep? We are left with an absolute uncertainty as to where the speaker is going, where the story is moving forward, if the story is moving forward. And I find that that really sits at odds to your expectation of where this poem is going to go. Of course, Joe and I have dwelled quite heavily on mortality, death, finality, but being left with something that really doesn't have a closure, doesn't even have a sense of, well, I'm okay with death.

I'm okay with my mortal life, or I'm unhappy with it and I'm not sure what to do with it, and I'm left with this strong feeling of a lack of closure. You instead have this very. I hesitate to say the word flimsy, but a flimsy argument as to whether, maybe this was all just a dream and I don't actually [00:34:00] feel like this, and I'm not really sure whether I'm upset or not. I find that what that does for the rest of the poem is really add to this dream-like state. Of course, the poet directly asks us, is this a waking dream?

Do I wake or sleep? But we have this really beautiful language, we have mythology woven into this poem throughout, and it creates this real abstracted sense that. creativity exists outside of time. I think it further adds to this exploration of art and legacy that we've been talking about through this episode because of course, if you write a poem and someone happens to save it, whether you are famous or not, it can be discovered in 10 years, a hundred years, a thousand years if it's preserved in the correct way. And I really love that Keats is very successfully able to capture that feeling of kind of artistic uncertainty. I would call it the sense that as a poet, as an artist, I'm sure you know when you've created a good [00:35:00] piece for you, but all art is subjective.

you can find something absolutely deeply moving and the person next to you can hate it. So, when we talk about subjectivity and how art creates impact and legacy, I feel that the question Keats is leaving us with here at the end is more for the reader to interpret what they take from his piece.

Is this a waking feeling? Is this something that you latch onto? Is this something that you can understand or is this perhaps just a sleep-addled mind?

Is this the ravings of someone who is maybe half drunk, half asleep, not really sure of their certain surroundings and. I think that's a really interesting way to leave a poem, really, because so often we're told that with stories, you need a resolution, you need a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And this doesn't really have any of those. But Joe, how do you find that this leaves you as a reader and what would you like readers to take from this?

Joe: Well, it's a really good question. I think for [00:36:00] me, the ending of this poem. If I could just sort of zoom out slightly, it really touches on one of the things that you and I have spoken about on the podcast in the past, which is the difficulty of approaching a poet through a certain lens. And when we think about Keats, and we've already mentioned it in this episode, we think about Keats as one of the romantic poets.

Okay? And we're gonna talk a little bit about what that means to end this episode. And I think this is one of those moments that kind of forces us to look at these movements in a much more fragmentary manner than their name might suggest. Because when we talk about literary movements, there is so much variation in what that means.

You know, does that mean that this was a group of contemporaries in age? Does that mean that there was a group of people who were in the same location? Does it mean that it was a group of people who all ascribed to a set of written and codified beliefs? The answer to those three questions is sometimes, but sometimes not.

In the case of romantic poetry, we're talking about poets who didn't necessarily live in the same places, weren't the same age, didn't necessarily agree on everything. I mean, just to illustrate this point, as we mentioned at the [00:37:00] top of the episode, Keats is part of the second generation of romantic poets alongside the likes of Lord Byron, alongside the likes of Percy Shelley.

And they are following in the footsteps of the first generation of romantic poets, kind of exemplified by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. the two men that I've just mentioned, Coleridge and Wordsworth co-published their great joint publication, lyrical Ballads in 1798. When Keats was three years old, and yet we think of them retroactively as being in this singular coherence literary movement.

It's not like that. Keats was a lot younger. we're talking 20 or 25 years younger than those guys. Of course, his outlook on the world was different 'cause the world was different. But also because he came of age in a literary landscape that contained those early romantic poets. And so they are part of his poetic formation in a way that, of course, Wordsworth was not part of his own, for example.

And this is one of the really interesting ways in which the romantic tradition does kind of splinter slightly, because I think the final lines of this poem that [00:38:00] Maiya's just read are an example of Keats's belief in the concept of negative capability, which is the concept that he himself coined in a letter in 1817, just a couple of years before this poem was written.

Effectively, the belief in negative capability is the ability. For poets to embrace uncertainty, embrace paradox, accept doubt and contradiction without needing to resolve these questions without moral resolution. And this really sets Keats apart from those earlier romantic poets I've mentioned.

You know, Coleridge Wordsworth, their poetry is often about exploring spiritual truths, what nature can tell us about the reality of the world around us. Whereas Keats's poetry and typified by these closing lines is all about accepting the fact that those truths may not exist, or if they do exist, they may be beyond our ability to comprehend.

And I think just to close out this episode, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this as well, Maiya, but I think it's really important to remember that there are real limitations to viewing.

5, 6, 7 different poets only through the lens of the things they share, [00:39:00] because sometimes it means that we kind of blunt the edges of those poets as individuals. So only thinking about Keats as a member of the romantic tradition misses the ways in which Keats is riling against some of the works of other people within that romantic tradition.

Am I onto something there? What do you think?

Maiya: I definitely think you're onto something and ultimately it's a really tough question because what you're really asking is, is it worth when you explore a single poet Keats, in this instance, to explore them through one lens and ignore everything else around them?

And in many ways a framing such as a movement or a time or a place can give you so many context clues to unpack a poem. But of course, if you only focus on the big picture stuff, you're gonna miss those small elements. And if you only focus on the content of the poem, you're going to miss maybe a greater context.

There is always ways to read a poem that are unexpected and offer you a slightly different perspective than maybe you are generally taught, or average perspective, or one that is, widely discussed. I'm sure we talked about this in [00:40:00] our T. S. Eliot episode on The Wasteland.

The Wasteland was a manifesto. If listeners haven't checked out that episode, Joe and I went more in depth on what a modernist manifesto really looked like when coming from T. S. Eliot, when it was really separating from the expected literature of the time. And I think as readers, as people who are interested in dissecting poetry, what you really don't want to do is full victim to simply following one path for every poet you look at.

I think absolutely movements are really great ways to get your teeth into a poem. it gives the context of other poets who have written around that time. It gives context of time and place and what is important to people at that singular moment. But in this instance, as Joe said. 20, 25 years between these people, they are writing from completely different moments. and of course human interest is constantly evolving. The things that are important to Keats, were probably not important [00:41:00] to Wordsworth. whether that's family or illness or love. Everyone has a motivating factor. So in a slightly roundabout way of answering your question, Joe, I think what's important to find in a poem is the motivation is the reason much of the time that can be associated with the movement.

It can be associated with the reason the poem was written. It could be something as simple as fearing death. It could be something as explosive and huge and dynamic as a World war. our opening three episodes for the second season of Beyond The Verse, we talked about three different war poets, but they came from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the war. We used all three poets as a lens to explore the war, and we got seriously different results from doing that.

as I said, roundabout way of answering your question, I think the important thing is to find the motivation. And however you get there is, of course, it's not the wrong way, but it's getting to that point. 

Joe: No, I don't think there's anything roundabout at all about that explanation. I think [00:42:00] it is complicated and I think to oversimplify it would be to do a disservice to how complicated it is. And just as you were talking there and reflecting on the episode, the thing that

I really take away from this per our discussion, is quite how deeply woven Keats's work is into the literary landscape beyond the romantic poets. I mean, the sheer number of our own episodes that we've referenced in today's, I think is testament to that. you know, we've done episodes on other romantic poets.

We've done an episode on a Wordsworth poem in episode on Shelley's Ozymandias. But the sheer number of people who were not direct contemporaries of his, that I think this poem in this episode resonate with, whether it's The Tyger in William Blake's poem, whether it's, William Butler, Yeats' Vultures and Birds.

the discussion that we've had about the Nightingale is really resonant for his portrayal of birds. In the second coming, the influence of the romantic tradition on the likes of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, whether they're supporting that tradition or kind of exposing the ways in which the World War shattered it, the.

Discussion about Bergsonian time that we had in T. S. [00:43:00] Eliot's, the Wasteland, and hopefully listeners, especially longstanding listeners Beyond The Verse are really getting a sense of how interwoven the literary landscape is and how ultimately poets are constantly in dialogue with the works of others.

And for any listeners for whom this might be the first episode of Beyond The Verse you've heard, first of all, you're very welcome and we are very glad you're here. But do go back and listen to those other episodes that we've mentioned because. The more you understand this poem, the better you'll understand others.

And the more you understand those ones, the better you'll understand the ones that we cover in next week's episode and the one after that. This is a consistent conversation, and whether this is the first episode you've listened to or the 26th, we're very glad to have you, and we really hope you're getting a sense of the richness of the literary landscape.

Now, looking forward to next week's episode, and its very apt that we've been talking about the importance of poetic movements. We're gonna be doing something a little bit different in next week's episode because we're gonna be looking not just at a single poet, but we're going to be looking at a movement in itself because we are gonna be talking about the metaphysical movement.

This [00:44:00] really complex and fascinating relationship between a series of English writers in and around the 17th century, including the likes of John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, and others.

Now, none of those poets are people we've covered on the podcast before, and we're gonna be looking at them as individuals, but crucially, the way in which their work intersects with one another and became known as the Metaphysical Movement, I, for one, cannot wait for that episode, cannot wait for that discussion.

And for now, it's goodbye from me.

Maiya: And goodbye from me and the team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. See you next time.