Ode To A Nightingale Critical Analysis Essay

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down;” This passage, from John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”, is one of the most recognizable lines from all of his work. John Keats is arguably one of the most significant romantic poets in the history of British literature. Keats was famous for his heavily romantic style of poetry and was known for thought provoking themes of transcendence, mortality and impermanence. Perhaps his best display of this is in his strong theme of mortality in “Ode to a Nightingale” where he depicts a soft view of death due to the guaranteed beauty that the bird provides for generations to come. One of the strongest themes of this poem is the mortality of man and the guarantee that all men to pass from this world. Keats fixates on the idea that a member of a species lasts a comparatively fractional amount of time as the species it belongs to. He suggests that long after he is dead and the nightingale in the forest is dead, that the forests will still echo with songs from nightingales, whose species will live on long past his own life. These dismal realities cause Keats to view the world as painful and bleak, where happiness can only be found in temporary doses; as we see when the nightingale’s beautiful songs that lifts his somber heart. He suggests that having such a sweet, short

He uses a songbird signing in the dead of night to symbolize the benumbing effect of poetry on the world. Through poetry, Keats escapes from his worldly problems in a more significant way than escaping through drugs or alcohol. The immortality he lusts for is found in his poems, which like the bird’s songs, will live long after he dies. This poem has proved to be one of his most significant works and has cast his name for literary