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Describe the background of the poem "Ode to the Nightingale."

John Keats, English Romantic poet, had a remarkably short career; his greatest odes were written not long before his death at age twenty-five. Keats had lived at Hampstead, a rural area just north of London, when he wrote "Ode to a Nightingale."


Because Keats had been looking after his brother, Tom, who was sick with tuberculosis, he had been thinking about the transient nature of life.  That train of thought, coupled with the bucolic setting in which he'd lived and heard bird songs, combined to produce the conceit of the song of the nightingale, in which Keats observes a sort of immortality.  Though the bird would pass away, its beautiful song would endure in the natural world.  


Odes are addressed to a particular subject, and Keats' poem is meant to celebrate the bird whose song will remain immortal, a contrast to the lives of men.

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