I had to read Keate’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” a few times before I started to grasp the symbolic meaning portrayed by the nightingale. Originally I thought the speaker felt a sense of animosity and hostility toward the nightingale and its joyful singing. The first few lines of the poem, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…” portray the speaker in a disturbed state of mind. He seems to be in a depressed and unstable mindset, a state in which he seeks escape and refuge.
As I read the poem I began to realize that the speaker admired the bird, and longed to immerse himself in the same kind of carefree state of happiness that the nightingale experiences. The speaker wants to leave the world of sickness and suffering and join the bird in the freedom of flight. He wants to escape to a world of ecstasy, immune of pain and misery. This notion is illustrated when he says “Away! Away! For I will fly to thee/Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/But on the viewless wings of Pesy…” The speaker hopes to attain the same condition of elation as the nightingale through his use of poetry.
I came to realize that the nightingale symbolizes eternity and carefree optimism. The brightness and positive spirit of the nightingale shines through even in the darkness of the night. I believe the choice of a nightingale as the central figure of the poem was strategic by Keates. He could have chosen any bird to be the focus of the poem. Instead he chose the nightingale, a bird that sings cheerful solitude into the blackness and obscurity of the night. By choosing the nightingale I think Keates conveyed a theme of hope and persistence. In the poem’s opening the speaker is depressed and unhappy with the state of his life. Despite this gloom, the song of the nightingale gives him hope to fight through his struggles to one day reach a state of bliss and oblivion the nightingale seems to radiate.