There are lesser and better ways of entering into the existence of other beings. Keats had already explored one mode, which precluded all memory of the world left behind, in his meditation in Nightingale on lyric as pure, spontaneous, nonrepresentational melodious evocative of rich sensations. (390)

Keats discusses escaping reality through the use of imagination and the senses. John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a romantic ode of eight stanzas discussing his need to be free from the realities of his life.

The first and second stanzas show Keats' inner soul dying from depression as his body dies from the tuberculosis. He is realizing his disap

Bloom also agrees that Keats believes his life is over, and he has nothing to live for, yet he does have a small glimmer of hope down inside which comes out when he talks about nature, his desire for a taste of life, and escaping with the nightingale. Martha Hale Shackford also mentions this subject of desire:

Keats calls the bird immortal because the song of the nightingale has not changed for hundreds of years, and it never will change: "The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown" (64-65). Keats is saying that everyone may listen to the beautiful sounds of the nightingale, no matter if he is rich or poor, healthy or sick. The sounds are definitely ancient and just have not changed over the years. The bird's song is still the same as it was in ancient days. The people who have already died ("long dead") can hear the songs in their eternal sleep and share the "ecstasy" of the nightingale because now they can do the things they had always wanted. Allen Tate believes the nightingale is a symbol in itself:

Vendler, Helen, in her The Odes of John Keats, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1983, pp. 330. Rpt. in Nineteenth- Century Literature Criticism, Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Emily B. Tennyson, Vol. 8, Detroit: Gale Research Inc., pp.386-392

Bloom, Harold, " Introduction" and "John Keats," in his The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, 1981. Reprint by Faber and Faber, 1991, pp. xiii-xv, 354-427. Rpt. in Nineteenth- Century Literature Criticism, Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Emily B. Tennyson, Vol. 8, Detroit: Gale Research Inc., pp. 376-379

And yet, he welcomes this dangerous vertigo, for the next stanza of the poem seeks to prolong his condition by his wish for drunkenness, for 'a beaker full of the warm south.' The slackening intensity from poison to narcotic to wine is itself a return to an ordinary wakeful consciousness, a sense of the usual reality from which Keats here would 'fade away into the forest dim,' to join the nightingale in its invisibility and enclosed joy; to leave behind the world of mutability, where every increase in consciousness is an increase in sorrow. (376)

In the sixth stanza, Keats openly discusses suicide. The reality of his life comes back to him and he considers taking the easy way out of his horrible, mortal life. Keats writes, "I have been half in love with easeful death" (52), confirming his seriousness about taking his life. Later he even says to the nightingale:

Keats explains here that he is trying to let everyone who reads his odes or poems know about how bad his life was and why he thoug

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Approximate Word count = 1778
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)