A bird sings in the darkness of a Hampstead garden, and a young man beneath a plum tree feels himself dissolving toward it, drawn by a music from beyond the mortal world. John Keats composed this ode in a single morning in 1819, at twenty-three, already sensing the illness that would kill him within two years. The poem moves through longing to a vision of death as easeful, then pulls back, uncertain whether what it has known was vision or waking dream. Its eight stanzas enact the arc of Romantic desire: the yearning to escape the self, the brief ecstasy of union, and the return to the sole self that cannot follow where the nightingale flies. Few poems have so perfectly made music from the knowledge that beauty and grief are one.