Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats — Ode to a Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.

John Keats wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" in 1819, reportedly composing much of it in a single morning after hearing a nightingale singing near his home. This opening stanza sets up the poem's central tension between the numbing weight of mortal life and the bird's seemingly untouched, timeless song.