Though the first-person speaker of “Ode to a Nightingale” is never given a name, age, or gender, most critics understand the speaker to be Keats himself. Keats was said to have composed the “Ode” in a garden while a nightingale sang, just weeks after his brother’s death from tuberculosis. Scholars have connected the lingering sickness which consumed the poet’s real-life brother to the speaker’s knowledge that “youth grows pale, spectre-thin and dies” (26). In this way, the nightingale becomes a symbol of happy ignorance that the poet celebrates.

The speaker alternates between sadness and ecstasy throughout the poem, wishing to quell the former by means of the latter. He draws inspiration from the nightingale’s “full-throated ease” (10) as he tries to beat back his sorrow, longing to forget “What thou among the leaves hast never known” (22). Though he never imagines himself as a bird per...