This poem follows a pattern Jack Stillinger sees in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” many Romantic poems: 1. Poet has a problem. 2. Poet reflects on problem in 1. a kind of imaginative, transcendent reverie. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 3. Poet returns from it but My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, somehow changed. Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains In short, there is a kind of One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: mental departure and a ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, return, suggesting some But being too happy in thine happiness,— insight has been gained. That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Here the poet begins in pain Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, and envious of the bird, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. not unlike Shelley in “Ode to a Skylark.”

Note: unlike Wordsworth, the later Romantics liked to include classical allusions. The poem has suicidal and ideas and “deathy” imagery throughout. Those parts are underlined. Beethoven thought of 2. suicide and said, “only art held me back.” O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Being burried is a Tasting of Flora and the country green, reoccurring image. Being Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! underground is in stark O for a beaker full of the warm South, contrast with the bird that Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, rises above. With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; “Fading” is a key repeated That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, word in the poem. And with thee fade away into the forest dim: The poem shows Romantic interest in altered states of consciousness; in stanza 1, a “dull opiate” is mentioned; here wine is referred to with classical allusions. 3. This is a powerful stanza, sad and Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget moving in its What thou among the leaves hast never known, description of the The weariness, the fever, and the fret pain the speaker Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; wishes to leave Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, behind. Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow “Keats’s brother And leaden-eyed despairs, Tom, wasted by Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, tuberculosis, had Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. died the preceding winter.” We’ve seen reference to Bacchus (the Roman name for the Greek god Dionysus) in “Kubla Khan” and 4. “Ode to the West Wind.” Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, Here, we see a shift— But on the viewless wings of Poesy, away from alcohol- Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: inspired vision and Already with thee! tender is the night, instead to pure poetic And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, vision itself. Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Keats already feels Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown with the bird, as he Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. imagines himself rising into the dark sky.

Tender Is the Night was used as a title for a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Keats is known for being one of the most sensual of poets, meaning he writes with a lot of sensory descriptions: 5. everyone includes imagery, but Keats I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, includes a lot of the Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, sense of touch, taste, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet smell, and sound— Wherewith the seasonable month endows especially here. The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Remember, the Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; underlined parts signal And mid-May’s eldest child, the “deathy” images and The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, phrases that appear The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. throughout the poem, even when death is not explicitly being discussed (it’s like the mindset of the speaker being hinted at through his descriptions). Here’s where the speaker appears most suicidal, but at the end of the stanza he begins to arrive at a realization, one like 6. Shelley’s in “Ode to a Skylark”: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Even if the bird seems to Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, transcend the problems of To take into the air my quiet breath; the world (just as the Now more than ever seems it rich to die, speaker is looking for such To cease upon the midnight with no pain, an escape), the bird is While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad nothing like him and could In such an ecstasy! care less if he died. Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. A “sod” is a British term for an idiot (among other things). He would be an idiot to die. A “sod” is also a piece of turf, again hinting at the “deathy” underground imagery of the poem. The speaker begins to see a wider picture here, and he no longer appears so alone. 7. He thinks of other Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! people over time, No hungry generations tread thee down; lonely people, who The voice I hear this passing night was heard must have felt like him In ancient days by emperor and clown: hearing the bird’s Perhaps the self-same song that found a path song: ancient Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, emperors and clowns, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; Ruth (from the Bible), The same that oft-times hath and sailors upon rough Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam seas. Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. At times, everyone feels sad with longing, and recognizing this common thread in humanity marks a shift away from the seduction of death. Wordsworth can only hold onto glimpses of immortality and Coleridge is only allowed a little taste of paradise; here, too, the poetic vision is fleeting. The poet’s own words like a bell 8. wake him from his reverie, and he suggests his imagination Forlorn! the very word is like a bell (linked to his suicidal thoughts) To toll me back from thee to my sole self! can no longer cheat or deceive Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well him. As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades There is a reversal in the main Past the near meadows, over the still stream, pattern of imagery, too. The Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep bird’s song, which prompted In the next valley-glades: the speaker’s suicidal Was it a vision, or a waking dream? thoughts, is now distant from Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? the speaker—the song is faded, buried deep in the next valley.

Adieu!—it is as if the speaker says farewell to death, farewell to thoughts of fading away and being buried.