At one point in John Keats' life as a romantic poet, all his disappointments started catching up with him. Keats contracted tuberculosis after finally finishing his hard work at medical school. He had contracted the fatal disease from his brother Tom, who died from it. Keats then fell in love with a young woman who would never return his love at all. During the late stages of his terrible illness, Keats' poetry becomes more morose, filled with fear and with references to the permanence of his art and signs of death. Helen Vendler, critiquing Keats poetry, writes in her essay:
             There are lesser and better ways of entering into the existence of other beings. Keats had already explored one mode, which precluded all memory of the world left behind, in his meditation in Nightingale on lyric as pure, spontaneous, nonrepresentational melodious evocative of rich sensations. (390)
             Keats discusses escaping reality through the use of imagination and the senses. John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a romantic ode of eight stanzas discussing his need to be free from the realities of his life.
             The first and second stanzas show Keats' inner soul dying from depression as his body dies from the tuberculosis. He is realizing his disappointments that lie heavily upon his heart. Keats states, "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk" (1-2). The reality is that Keats is dying from his disappointing life and has few good things to anticipate for the remainder of his life. In art and nature Keats finds his only comfort when he writes, "Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!" (13-14). Keats has drifted away from reality and starts describing his desire for a taste of life or art, symbolized by a drink of wine: "O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth..., That I might drink, and leave the world...