Ode to a Nightingale

The poem is an ode, a celebratory lyric poem addressed to something, in this case, a nightingale. Conventionally, the ode is formal in tone and regular in structure. It regards its subject with reverence and celebration. In ancient Greece and Rome, odes were public poems performed to the accompaniment of music. They typically celebrated victories and public figures. Romantic poets like Keats took the ode form and used it to pay homage to Romantic ideals such as the relationship between self, nature, and art. In the process, they made the ode a deeply personal form, as can be seen in “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Though “Ode to a Nightingale” follows a regular stanzaic structure and an ABABCDECDE rhyme scheme, its tone and mood deviates from that of a traditional ode. For one, the poem is rhapsodic in tone, where the speaker loses himself in admiring the nightingale. In doing so, the distinction between the speaker and his subject grows blurred. In the end, the poet’s ode is as much to the nightingale as it is to the human condition.