"Ode to a Nightingale"
By John Keats

Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff of the University of Virginia

Sources

London : Taylor and Hessey, 1820"Ode to a Nightingale" was first published in 1820 in a book entitled Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.Our edition is based on that printing. Page images have been sourced from Google Books

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

Citation

Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale". Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Taylor and Hessey, 1820 , pp. 107-112 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/Keats/keats-nightingale. Accessed: 2025-01-15T05:24:59.212Z

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TEST Audio

107 Ode to a Nightingale. 1. 1My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 2My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, 3Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 4One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk 5'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 6But being too happy in thine happiness, — 7That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, 8In some melodious plot 9Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 10Singest of summer in full-throated ease.