Death and Loss

The central theme of “Ode to a Nightingale” revolves around the speaker’s attempts to escape from his knowledge that, in life, everything dies. The carefree beauty of the nightingale, who “singest of summer in full-throated ease”(10), initially represents the flight from the sad, human consciousness of death which the bird “hast never known” (22). For the speaker, preoccupied with the spectacle of youth that becomes “pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (26), existence is fraught with sorrow. The bird’s song represents for the speaker the lack of awareness about this reality and he tries to follow the bird in metaphorical flight from pain. In the end, however, what these attempts produce is a specifically human song of loss, mirrored in the bird’s own “plaintive anthem” (75) as it takes off in flight.

The poem begins with the speaker’s declaration that his “heart aches” (1) and...