streperous and jaunty bird in the whole kingdom of birds. How John Keats managed to begin his 'Ode to a Nightingale' with 'My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense' is a mystery to anybody acquainted with the actual song. You heat the nightingale silverily shouting: 'What? What? What John? Heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains? Tra-la-la!' The nightingale never made any man in love with easeful death, except by contrast. The contrast between the bright flame of positive, pure, self-aliveness, in the bird, and the uneasy flickering of yearning selflessness, forever yearning for something outside himself which is Kea!
             ts" (D.H. Lawrence, quoted by Inglis, 127).
             Rather than make Keats any more cheerful, however, the ebullient song of the nightingale reminds him of all the happiness other people have in which he can not share: he wishes he could "fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget/ What thou among the leaves hast never known,/ The weariness, the fever, and the fret." Two lines later, there is a patent reference to his brother Tom -- "where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies."
             The nightingale is going to fly singing off into the forest, and Keats wishes he could go with him -- not literally, but he wishes he could get outside himself, outside this pain. At first he considers getting drunk, and then cons
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