My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.
-- Speaker (Lines 1 – 3)

Importance: These lines open “Ode to a Nightingale” and are significant because they introduce the speaker, announce the emotional pain which will pursue him throughout the poem, and communicate that he is beset by a “drowsy numbness” (1) akin to being drugged. Beginning with a declaration of heartache, the speaker anticipates the intensely subjective nature of the narration that will follow. Moreover, he alerts the reader to the fact his “sense” (2) is in abeyance and so his imagination and emotions will dominate the narrative. Additionally, by naming hemlock as one of the substances that could have cast the speaker into such a stupor, Keats alludes to the death of Socrates, the philosopher who avowed a rational approach to understanding and was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock...