This is a brief outline of the poem. Use this as a guide.
- Stz 1: focus on the nightingale - sings with "full-throated ease"/poet-speaker awakens into consciousness. Gives too much of himself to the bird's song
- Stz 2: poet-speaker doesn't want to think - resists wakeful consciousness--wants to remove himself from the world through wine (not numbing like hemlock or opiates) and the beauty of nature
- Stz 3: fret and fever of life is undesirable
- Stz 4: poet-speaker invokes the "viewless wings of Poesy," not poison, opiates, or wine - these would only numb him or produces 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?