Ode to a Nightingale

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense." The ode begins already half in love with oblivion, a young man in a Hampstead garden listening to a bird he cannot see. John Keats set the whole thing down in a single morning, at twenty-three, the tuberculosis that would kill him within two years already in his chest. He follows the song out of his own body, past the fever and the fret of the world, toward a death he can almost call easeful, then onward to the bird itself, not born for death, the same voice that once found a path through the sad heart of Ruth as she stood weeping amid the alien corn. Then the word forlorn tolls him back to his sole self, the music fades into the next valley, and he is left unable to say whether he has woken or is still dreaming. To have heard it at all, this ode knows, was already to begin losing it.