Ode To A Nightingale Diction

With "Ode to a Nightingale," the speaker in the poem begins with an in-depth exploration of the mortality of human life. In this ode, the briefness of life and the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal continuation of the smooth music of the nightingale. Hearing the song of the bird, the speaker longs to run away from his usual life in the human world and join the magical nightingale. His first thought is to reach the bird's state through alcohol consumption, but as the poem goes on he longs to transport out of himself more than anything else. He gradually reaches a point after meditating however, where he realizes that life is indeed transient, and rejects being intoxicated chronically. Through use of his diction, imagery, and
What he wants more than anything at this point is to escape the worries and concerns of life, and yearns to be free like the nightingale that he hears in the background outdoors. Therefore, the tone in the beginning is somewhat escapist, and he seems to want to avoid his current existence. He equates the bird to a somewhat mystical creature by the diction he uses, and refers to it as “the light-winged Dryad of the trees”(line 7). The reader gets the mental image of a tiny, mythological creature singing out in the dark forest where hardly any moonlight can reach, and still manages to sound happy as it “singest of summer in full throated ease” (line 10). He is not able to see any of the flowers, plants, or animals around him, but he can smell them, which leads him to think that it might not actually be so sad to die at night. He thinks that the only creature that might actually notice would be the nightingale. He actually thinks it would be a rich experience to die, "to cease upon the midnight with no pain"(line 56) while the bird would continue to sing regardless of whether or not he was still around. The speaker even confesses, he has been "halfin love with easeful Death"(line52), comparing the nightingale with the perfect form for expressing the human