Ode to a Nightingale My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,—

Thou art not the branch to bear - but the fruit, That pleads in innocence of pangs and grief. When thou art gone, still glows a darkling hue, And I sink down and moan that I can’t follow,

And thou delight’st in the sweet thrill of the breeze, In thy minor key, a sobbing bough that goes Through the warm dusk and outstretched shoulders trees; From you the world does perish and flows Waiting for thy sound to quell the night, And the soft whispered hush to never go out. — Ode to a Nightingale

• John Keats