...the poet attain the "full-throated ease" of the bird? ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE (John Keats, 1795-1821) My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense,...through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness, — That thou, light winged Dryad2 of the trees, ' Lethe-wards: towards Lethe, river...

...the great odes. The best known is the passage that sets the strangely pained yet detached tone of the "Ode to a Nightingale": My heart aches, and a drowsy...drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. This passage has been related to an anecdote in one of Cooper's lectures, concerning an "extraordinary...

...five iambuses and thus of ten syllables. Poet John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale is an example: 'My heart/ aches and/ a drow/sy numb/ness pains My sense/ as though/ of hem/lock I/ had drunk' -ible For words ending in -ible (as distinct from those ending in -able) see -able. idiom Collectively,...

..."drowsy numbness" that so hauntingly opens Ode to a Nightingale, making the poet feel as though he had "emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk" (1-4), captures the ambivalence of a pain-killer that could either suspend consciousness or end it....

..."Maxwell seems a bit down today." Others summon a rich imagistic world, such as that of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale": My heart aches, and a drowsy...drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. Here the descent to the mythical river gives a physical correlate to the narcotic state of the narrator:...

...sensibilities. Nor should we forget the sensibilities that may be reawakened. When John Keats wrote: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk he had open before him Horace's fourteenth Epode: Why a soft numbness drenches all my inmost senses...

...out of their bodies: drugs and alcohol. He feels strange right away as he listens to the bird: "as if of hemlock I had drunk, / or emptied some dull opiate to the drains." He considers the use of alcohol to lift him up and out of his body in ecstasy—wine might help him...

...Keats and the Mirror of Art,12 Jones's John Keats's Dream of Truth" and Barnard's John Keats.14 1 My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock15 1 had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains16 One minute past,17 and Lethe-wards18...

...gown, pulled the pillow under her neck and fixed Clare Mitchner with a steely eye and intoned: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense,...drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. " "Aunt Julia," exclaimed Sarah admiringly, "why, that's Keats." "I am not," said Julia complacently,...

...introduced to a speaker whose equivocal state of consciousness at first appears to have no cause: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense,...to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.18 Keats here depicts a characteristic mood, balanced precariously on the boundary between consciousness...