Questions for "Ode to a Nightingale"

Below you will find the questions I posed in class today for the group work on Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." If you are assigned to post for this week, you can use the group discussion as a jumping off point for your post. If we get posts from each group, this week's blog post will amount to an eco-critical reading of the whole poem. (If no one in your group was assigned to post this week, I will give extra credit to anyone who posts.) You can also apply the "big picture" questions to Keats' "To Autumn" or Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."

The big questions:

How does the poem suggest we understand the relationship between human beings and the natural world? What does external nature help us understand about the conditions of our existence, and more specifically, our mortality? How and why does nature provoke this realization?

You can approach this question by analyzing individual stanzas of "Ode to a Nightingale": 

1. What relationship does Keats posit between the bird and the poet in this section of the poem? (be specific: which words are important? Why?)

2. Does Keats feel connected to or divided from the bird? Why?

3. What does the poet want from the bird or see in the bird in this stanza? What does it make him long for, imagine, or realize?