This is a brief outline of the poem. Use this as a guide. [See Shelley's A Defense of Poetry, p 872 ("Poet is a nightingale"); Greek mythology: Philomela and Procene]
- Stz 1: focus on the nightingale (hidden) - sings with "full-throated ease"/poet-speaker awakens into consciousness. Gives too much of himself to the bird's song--loss of consciousness (to think).
- Stz 2: poet-speaker, however, pulls back. He doesn't want to think - resists wakeful consciousness. He wants to remove himself from the world through wine (less numbing than hemlock or opiates) but sensuous nature delays him.
- Stz 3: fret and fever of life is undesirable: to think is "to be full of sorrow."
- Stz 4: Rather than escapism, the poet-speaker invokes the "viewless wings of Poesy," not poison, opiates, or wine - these would only numb him or produce a loss of vision
- Stz 5: pastoral landscape - movement towards "death" - can't see - loss of the body - rely on senses
- Stz 6: Life-in-death - form a union with the bird - become unbodied - sensual bliss and beauty. Or literal death - since death at this ecstatic moment would be bliss - height of experience.
- Stz 7: Bird's song is immortal--exists through time--link to imagination. Life-in-death would mean a loss of consciousness needed for writing/composition; he is mortal. Literal death would prevent the poet-speaker from joining/hearing the bird.
- Stz 8: Bird flies away. Speaker-poet returns to consciousness. Moment of composition is not the moment of inspiration or creative imagination. Is the vision genuine? Just a dream? Can it be recorded - composed after the fact?