(See also annotated words underneath the poem for further insight into these terms.) Poem 32), connecting his poem to the supernatural and mythological worlds. 7), and makes further references to the Greek god Bacchus (l. Keats also compares the nightingale to a “Dryad of the trees” (l. This bird flies around, and lands in a tree, forever singing its sad song, and connecting the reader as well as Keats to the ideas of immortality. The superficial scope of the poem is the nightingale, which represents both nature and death. With regards to the Romantic period, Keats applies the common themes of nature, a higher power, and the supernatural. Tuberculosis was a devastating affliction at this time period, affecting people across the globe. The reference to youth dying is clearly in relation to Thomas and his premature death, with the preceding lines describing his illness. Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,/Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (ll. “The weariness, the fever, and the fret/. It is a significant event in the life of Keats, and therefore relevant to the use of references to the disease in the poem as well as the theme of death, as this poem was written just six months after his passing. In addition to being inspired by the actual song of the nightingale, on December 1, 1818, Keats’ brother Thomas died of tuberculosis. This title was later altered to replace “the” with “a”.
When this one of five “great odes” was composed and published in July 1819, it originally bore the title “Ode to the Nightingale,” as shown in the image of Keats’s handwriting above. Though the accuracy of Brown’s account has been contested, the condition of the original manuscripts shows that Keats likely wrote this ode in a single sitting in May 1819, and began to run out of paper in the process, struggling to squeeze this lengthy work onto the front and back sides of only two sheets of paper. “Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in 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 had composed the poem on a few scraps of paper. Keats’s friend Charles Brown, whom he was living with in Hampstead, England at the time, wrote that:
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