Ode to a Nightingale
A drowsy numbness pains the speaker as he listens to a bird singing of summer in full-throated ease, and he asks for a beaker of vintage cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth so that he can leave a world where men sit and hear each other groan, where youth grows pale and dies. He goes instead on the viewless wings of Poesy into a darkness where he cannot see the flowers at his feet and must name them by scent, and there finds himself half in love with easeful Death while the same voice carries back to emperor and clown and to Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. Written at Hampstead in the spring of 1819 and printed that year in the Annals of the Fine Arts, the central document of the English Romantic ode.
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Lineage
- alludes to ↑ The Book of Ruth
- ↓ The Darkling Thrush
Attributes
Closest analogues
- 71% · 12 shared
- 65% · 10 shared
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- 62% · 9 shared