"Ode to a Nightingale"

Keats in his "Ode to a Nightingale" reacts to the happiness brought to him by the song of the nightingale. Keats focuses directly on his own feelings and on the way the song of the nightingale has alleviated certain emotions and concerns he has been experiencing:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains (1-3).

Keats shows here how the song of the nightingale actually brings him to life, generating the poetic spirit in him and causing him to put his thoughts down on paper. The imagery he selects furthers the sense of contemplation and self-analysis on the part of the poet and creates a contrast between the song of the nightingale, a song of life, and the

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