Point of View

“Ode to a Nightingale” is told from a first-person point of view through an unnamed speaker, and the subjective nature of this telling is one of the main features of the poem. Beginning with an account of an aching heart and a mind that feels drugged, the speaker reports from his emotions and poetic imagination rather than from what he sees. Indeed, because it is so dark in the forest, the speaker “cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs” (42) and must imagine the contents of the forest around him. Nor does he ever see the nightingale, the nominal subject and addressee of the poem, nor does he show it to the reader. In the end he questions whether the experience recounted in the poem was part of objective reality at all or merely a “vision, or...