In the sixth stanza, the author says, "many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death," and that he has "become a sod" to the addressee's "high requiem," while in the first stanza, he says, "My heart aches ... as though of hemlock I had drunk," and wonders at the addressee's ability to sing "with full-throated ease.
This poem's first line is echoed at the beginning of Wilfred Owen's poem "Exposure," and its sixth and seventh stanzas are quoted during Paul Hogan's dirge in Act II of A Moon for the Misbegotten. The author evokes several synesthetic images, such as "Tasting of flora" and his inability to see "what soft incense hangs upon the boughs." He refers to the Biblical Ruth "amid the fields of alien corn" and contrasts "Bacchus and his pards" with "the viewless wings of Poesy." In the sixth stanza, the author says, "many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death," and that he has "become a sod" to the addressee's "high requiem," while in the first stanza, he says, "My heart aches ... as though of hemlock I had drunk," and wonders at the addressee's ability to sing "with full-throated ease." FTP, name this John Keats poem in which the speaker claims, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"
This poem's first line is echoed at the beginning of Wilfred Owen's poem "Exposure," and its sixth and seventh stanzas are quoted during Paul Hogan's dirge in Act II of A Moon for the Misbegotten.
"Ode to a Nightingale"