Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is…

The question ends “Ode to a Nightingale”, in its eighth and last stanza. Through the poem Keats has followed the bird’s song away from a world “where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”, and has called it an “immortal Bird”. The word “forlorn” tolls him back “to my sole self”; fancy, he admits, “cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do”. The “plaintive anthem” fades over the meadows, up the hillside, into “the next valley-glades”, and the poem closes on its two questions.

Keats wrote the ode in May 1819 at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, where his friend Charles Brown later recalled finding him under a plum tree in the garden, scraps of the poem in his hand. His brother Tom had died of tuberculosis the previous December, and Keats would die of it in Rome less than two years later. It appeared in a magazine that July and in his volume of 1820.

The last line is quoted whenever an experience seems too intense to be trusted.

Ode to a Nightingale, last lines, 1819

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work