summary of nightingales by robert
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It was a dark and stormy night… just kidding,
It's a dark and quiet night, and the speaker welcomes his friend and her sister to join him on a bridge overlooking a green bit of nature, where they begin chatting about the night sky.
A nightingale interrupts their chat with its melancholy song. But wait, says the speaker. Who decided that it sounds melancholy? Nature is never melancholy, he argues. It all just depends on the mood of the person who is listening.
In fact, he goes on to say, everyone would benefit from spending more time in nature, really experiencing it, rather than projecting their current feelings onto it. He then recounts a story about a pretty grove where a maiden makes nightly visits to listen to the birds. In a fairy-tale-esque twist, he says that, every time the moon comes out, the grove turns into a chorus of songs.
At the end of the night, the speaker bids everyone (including the nightingale) farewell, but not before reminiscing how his son came to associate nature, and especially the night sky, with joy. He hopes that his son will always enjoy the night sky, even if most people seem to associate night with gloom and doom in the same way they associate the nightingale's song with sorrow.
Shmoop - We Speak Student
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale Summary
SHMOOP PREMIUM
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE SUMMARY
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The poem begins as the speaker starts to feel disoriented from listening to the song of the nightingale, as if he had just drunken something really, really strong. He feels bittersweet happiness at the thought of the nightingale's carefree life.
The speaker wishes he had a special wine distilled directly from the earth. He wants to drink such a wine and fade into the forest with the nightingale. He wants to escape the worries and concerns of life, age, and time.
He uses poetry to join the nightingale's nighttime world, deep in the dark forest where hardly any moonlight can reach. He can't see any of the flowers or plants around him, but he can smell them. He thinks it wouldn't be so bad to die at night in the forest, with no one around except the nightingale singing.
But the nightingale can't die. The nightingale must be immortal, because so many different kinds of generations of people have heard its song throughout history, everyone from clowns and emperors to Biblical characters to people in fantasy stories.
The speaker's vision is interrupted when the nightingale flies away and leaves him alone. He feels abandoned and disappointed that his imagination is not strong enough to create its own reality. He is left confused and bewildered, not knowing the difference between reality and dreams.