This ode was
written in May 1819 and first published in the Annals of the Fine Arts in July
1819. Interestingly, in both the original draft and in its first publication,
it is titled ‘Ode to the Nightingale’. The title was altered by Keats’s
publishers. Twenty years after the poet’s death, Joseph Severn painted the
famous portrait ‘Keats listening to a nightingale on Hampstead Heath’.
Critics
generally agree that Nightingale was the second of the five ‘great odes’ of
1819 and its themes are reflected in its ‘twin’ ode, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
Keats’s friend and roommate, Charles Brown, described the composition of this
beautiful work as follows:
‘In the
spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a
tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from
the breakfast-table to the grass plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two
or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of
paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On
inquiry, I found these scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic
feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and
it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance
I succeeded, and this was his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a poem which has been the
delight of everyone.’
Brown’s
account was dismissed as ‘pure delusion’ by Charles Wentworth Dilke, the
co-owner of Wentworth Place who visited Brown and Keats regularly. After
reading the above account in Milnes’s 1848 biography of Keats, Dilke noted in
the margin, ‘We do not usually thrust waste paper behind books’.
It should be
noted that Brown wrote his account almost twenty years after the event. Some
critics believe he may have confused the compositions of ‘Ode on Indolence’ and
‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The original manuscript of ‘Indolence’ is lost and the
order of its stanzas remains doubtful (note Brown’s memory of arranging
stanzas.)
The
manuscript is actually on two sheets of paper, not ‘four or five’ as Brown
recalled, and the stanzas are in relative order. But the work was written
hastily on scrap paper. It is clear that Keats did not anticipate writing such
a lengthy poem when he took just two sheets of paper into the garden, – and he
did not dare interrupt his writing to fetch more later.
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