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Historical Context in Ode to a Nightingale

Historical Context Examples in Ode to a Nightingale:

Ode to a Nightingale

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"Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow...."   (Ode to a Nightingale)

In this stanza, Keats ruminates on the tragedies of mortality, a theme he explores deeply in his [Ode on a Grecian Urn] (https://www.owleyes.org/text/ode-grecian-urn). In that ode, Keats offers scenes painted on an urn. The ode’s central scene depicts a “fair youth” chasing his beloved. The passion of the chase, the fairness of the youth, and the beauty of the beloved are all frozen for eternity. In this third stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker faces the transient reality of youth and love. Once again, realism tempers idealism.

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"My heart aches,..."   (Ode to a Nightingale)

According to Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown, Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” in a single day in the spring of 1819. As Keats sat in the garden of Wentworth Place, his lodging in London, he noticed a nightingale’s nest in the upper boughs of a plum tree. The poem is one of the five well-known odes he wrote in 1819.

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