This synaesthesia leads the reader to touch the scent. In the fifth stanza he cannot see what ‘soft incense hangs upon the boughs’. The last three lines stress darkness and the gloomy colours of mundane existence. He joins the nightingale where the trees let no light in except for when the wind moves their branches. This is a eulogy to poetry and its ability to take the reader to the spiritual realm of imagination. However he won’t do this through substance he pondered about in the first two stanzas, but through ‘the viewless wings of poesy’. He decides to ‘fly’ to the nightingale’s realm. This stanza is also a typical example of Keats’s obsession with illness and death. It’s much better to belong to a dream than to this painful truth.
This sombre stanza induces a feeling of a disappointing reality. Here ‘youth grows pale’ and ‘beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’. ‘The weariness, the fever, and the fret’ are a reality that the nightingale doesn’t know. From the comfort of the dreamy second stanza, the third plunges the reader into the sad reality and banality of life. ‘Dance, and provencal song, and sunburnt mirth’. The theme of nature together with a joyful atmosphere is also evident. This stanza evokes a lot of appeal to the sense of taste, ‘tasting of flora and county green’. The second stanza opens with a plea ‘for a drought of vintage’ through which he can fulfill his plea to ‘fade away’. Through this synaesthesia he creates a vivid picture of one of his classic bowers. He imagines the bird’s home as ‘some melodious plot of beechen green’. The stanza comes to an end in a joyful mood as opposed the heavy start of the poem. It’s ‘being too happy’ in the nightingale’s happiness that’s causing the malaise. This heavy mood is paradoxically denounced in the same stanza. His ‘heart aches’ and a drowsy numbness pains’ his sense. In the first stanza the poet is having clear symptoms of an extreme sadness. He is at a loss of how to feel happy for witnessing the bird’s ‘high requiem’, or sad for not being part of its world.
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