Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” is among my precious poems.

This topic sentence is hardly startling: the slimmest selection of enduring English verse includes these eight ten-line stanzas. Fitzgerald found a title here – Tender is the Night. Certain of its phrases have been worn trite by overuse (“the viewless wings of Poesy,” “half in love with easeful death”). To proclaim one’s admiration is like praising the Hallelujah Chorus or Mona Lisa – tell me something I don’t know!

Taste is shaped as much by social pressure as independent judgment. We like being liked for what we like. In retirement, I’m happy to report, this hankering for approval abates. One’s not climbing anymore or hoping to; many of those whose gratulation one craved have gone. In my dreams I’m embraced by old professors, proud – finally! – of their product.

I return to Keats’ poems regularly. In Rome I visited his grave three times; also the room where he died. His death saddens me as his fellow poets’, whom we now label Romantic, do not. Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge I respect but don’t miss; of Keats – and his twin in music, Schubert – I feel robbed.

Why this affection?

Music is part of it. Keats, like Schubert, was blessed by a jaw-dropping gift for melody. No poet composes more limpidly, with a searing sweetness that’s not saccharine. Words fail me here, but who has not felt the wonder of a loveliness that stabs – and we can never forget – in a sunset, perhaps, or the softness of a newborn’s skin. For a word-worker, who strives to herd syllables into sweetness, such effortless genius both enthralls and appalls. Why can’t I do that, one can’t help grumbling.

Beneath the sensual throbs an even more seductive pain. We love those who trust us with their truth. Sadness and confusion aren’t easy to confess. Men, especially, are expected to be stalwart, certain, unfazed. The speaker in this poem is a hot mess. His heart aches – he’s sobbing, paralyzed – suicide tempts. Yet, at the same time, he’s suffused with an ecstatic satisfaction at this nightingale’s warble that makes him feel he will live forever. He is mortal – and immortal, damned and saved at once. His condition defies reason yet is more real than any idea. And we know what he’s talking about. Because we have been here too, if only fleetingly – in the throes of love, perhaps, or desolation of loss. And we know these instants of intensity were when we were most alive.

Listen!

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMy heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk

… and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs…

… for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die…

We want to hug poor Johnny he’s so sad.

Yet he’s been rescued – by beauty – which never dies.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown

By making we make life worth living. And yes it’s a fantasy, our salvation, one which saves us from our facts.

Hallelujah.

Amen.