John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem of both despair and strength. It was written less than a year after the death of the poet's beloved brother Tom from a long, wasting bout with tuberculosis. Keats himself was not in good health either (he would die of tuberculosis himself less than two years later) and he had almost sole care of his brother in Tom's last days. In addition, the orphaned Keats suffered from acute financial worries, his finances being tied up by the trustee of the family will who considered Keats a wastrel. This plunged the poet into a demeaning cycle of borrowing from and taking up residence with supportive literary friends. Keats scholar Fred Inglis adds that "Anxiety over money disrupted [K

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in British Poetry and Prose. Houghton Mifflin Co., NY, 1951.

In this story the sea represents nightmare and insanity, and the bird, because its nest is back on land, is an assurance that the sane, ordered, known world is not as far away as it seems. Why, precisely, the Ancient Mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow is never really explained. Possibly Virginia Radley's explanation -- that it was a careless, immature act -- makes the most sense in the context of the rest of the poem. She says, "Throughout the account given by the old mariner, the Wedding Guest [has been] hostile here to the things that matter, that is, to the "really real" experiences of the Mariner . . . [When he unthinkingly shoots the Albatross], the act of the Mariner merges in its insensitivity with the initial attitude of the Wedding Guest" (Radley, 58).

ts" (D.H. Lawrence, quoted by Inglis, 127).

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Bidney adds that "Every reader of Mariner feels the unresolved tension between the explicit transcendent message of cosmic love and the punishing prophetic burden of the driven wanderer who is forced to preach it, the difficulty of separating divine revelation from cruel fate, heavenly truth from purgatorial reality . . .The cosmic love moral, as we may call it-- He prayeth well, who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast./ He prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us,/ He made and loveth all (Coleridge 612-17) -- is crucial to the poem's enduring fascination, which lies precisely in the tension between the Mariner's moment of transcendence and the immense, absurdly disproportionate price he has to pay for it. Such paradoxes afflict and bless and puzzle all of us. " (Bidney, p. 389).

What is the real sin here? It is revealed most clearly by its reversal -- the Mariner's blessing "unaware" of the water-snakes in Part IV. Everything begins to turn around for the Mariner at this point, and the poem suggests that the Mariner has at last recognized the beauty and the value of all living things. Earlier in the poem, he carelessly shot the albatross, and was repulsed by the "slimy" creatures of the becalmed sea; now he looks around at the bodies of his fallen shipmates and realizes how beautiful they were, and is likewise entranced by the beauty of the water snakes -- "blue, glossy green, and velvet black,/ They coiled and swam; and every track/ Was a flash of golden fire" (Coleridge, 280). Martin Bidney, in an article in Papers on Language

Some common words found in the essay are:
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