Ode to a nightingale themes

He tries to avoid pain though his imagination, at first you may see the bird a reality but as you go though the poem you can see that it is more than that, it’s symbolic. Although he does not say directly in the poem you can interoperate it in many different ways such as joy, art or poetry. During stanza two Keats escapes his pain by imagining ‘country green’ and longing for wine ‘O, for a draught of vintage’. In the first and second stanza’s he mentions drugs, poison and alcohol which are all ways people use to cope with pain and suffering, Keats himself used opiates. In stanza three he returns to reality and discusses death, old age and mortality of beauty. Youth ‘grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,’ and ‘beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’. Stanza four starts ‘Away! … I will fly to thee’ he does this on the ‘wings of poesy’ (poetry) you can see that poetry is Keats escape of pain. Keats uses contrasting phases to try and confuse the reader into not knowing what is real and what isn’t. ‘fast-fading violets … the coming muskrose’.

Death and immortality, ‘I have half been in love with easeful death’, he discusses it like the solution for pain, ‘it ever seems it rich to die’. At the beginning of the poem the nighiningale’s song is a happy song and yet here it is referred to as a ‘high requiem’. ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!’ By calling the bird immortal it shows us that the bird is symbolic. The human race is described as ‘Hungry generations’.  It make us seem impersonal and unimportant.

Many of John Keats family died from tuberculosis, this poem is probably his way of working out his problems because it is personal it makes the poem very vivid and relatable to the readers.