Regarding Consciousness: Keats Is Fully Awake
             John Keats's, "Ode to a Nightingale," is a poem in which the author is continually drifting between reality and fantasy. The fantasy is so strongly fueled by a persona that seeks to escape solitude and the weariness of reality, that in the end he questions, "-Do I wake or sleep?" (80). Yet by asking these questions, the author gives away the answer, for these are questions that can be asked only upon reflection. Thus, the event he ponders upon, his flight with the nightingale is already passed, and he sits in thoughtful consciousness.
             The imagery in the first two stanzas that the author creates is beautiful and almost serene, belying the speaker's need for escape and his yearning for death. Words, such as "drowsy numbness," "hemlock," and "dull opiate" serve to reinforce the speaker's call for "a draught of vintage..." and the want of loss of consciousness through intoxication. This need to lose consciousness transitions easily to the need for death in stanza two, where the speaker describes how wine is "cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth," drawing images of vaults and burials for the reader.
             However, this state of wishful thinking is interrupted by the speakers own unwilling thoughts towards the very reality he wants to escape. In stanza three, the speaker recalls all the cruelties and banalities of life where even the nightingale's song of "...summer in full-throated ease" could not drown out the groans of his fellow man. The speaker continually drifts between these two places, unable to release the bonds of an existent reality to fully enjoy his imagined one. The beauty and wonders of his imaginative flight with the nightingale is continuously grounded by the awareness of his own frail mortality. This awareness in turn, again becomes the speaker's desire for death, a plea that is woven into the beauty of his imaginative flight, with phrases such as, "But here there is no...