In the first stanza of the ode Keats introduces the nightingale, who he claims to be “too happy in thine happiness,” and in response to the melody he is struck by sentiments of both pain and joy. He declares that although his heart aches he is overcome by a drowsy numbness. How can a person ache, but be numb at the same time? While this may sound ridiculous, it strikes within the reader a true sense of just how much pain Keats is experiencing at the sound of the nightingales voice. It causes him such pain that he cannot fully handle the experience of it and a sense of overwhelming numbness has taken over. Keats is describing how pleasure can be so intense that paradoxically it can both numb and cause pain. It is as if Keats knows he can never be like the nightingale, and be free from the stresses of life. Like Scott says, “The poet seeks to leave behind the weariness, the fever, and the fret of a world of mortals, who are slaves of time and subservient to pain, aging, and death,” (139) just as Keats tries to get lost in the voice of the nightingale. The nightingale symbolizes Keats ideas of true joy and an ideal he knows will be impossible to reach.

As Keats delves further into his desires to live free of pain in his joy verses pain structured reality his descriptions become more fantastical and imaginative. He uses a kind of paradox again as he describes different types of wine with which he hopes will take him away from the realities of the earth, yet each wine he describes comes from a distinctive region and each is heavily representative of the earth. He paints beautiful descriptions of what each wine reminds him of yet he wishes that he “might drink and leave the world unseen.” How can he desire such earthly beauties like: “deep delved earth, country green, warm south, and forest dims” and at the same time wish to never see these things again?

As the poem progresses to the third stanza Keats uses the nightingale's innocent and happy life to show just how corrupt the world can be. Even the effects of wine cannot pull him from his awareness of the real world; here in this stanza Keats truly realizes that he can never escape “leaden-eye despairs”. He speaks to the nightingale of his desires and his wish to “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou among the leaves hast never known.” In stanza four “the poet suddenly cries out "Away! Away! For I will fly to thee." He turns to fantasy again; he rejects wine in line two, and in line three he announces he is going to use "the viewless wings of Poesy" to join a fantasy bird" (Scott 140). This idea of relying on “poesy” to escape the world is different from the descriptions of wine in stanza two. Instead of wishing to escape through the numbing powers of wine, Keats now asserts that the only true way to experience happiness is through ones own mind. Keats seems to be saying that by using ones imagination is the key to happiness and a way to escape the harsh realities that he is facing. In opposition to the beauty of numbness that he had earlier stated, Keats now degrades those feelings of wishing to escape by saying “the dull brain perplexes and retards.” With this line Keats takes his own advice and plunges into line after line of fantasy driven descriptions as he lets his imagination run wild. It seems that at this moment he has successfully grasped the kind of true happiness felt by the nightingale, but Keats cannot escape reality for long as he remembers once again “but here there is no light.”

From here on the ode takes on a very dark tone, as Keats realizes more and more that he can never achieve true happiness. He describes his inability to see the changing of the seasons and the beauties of nature that come with them. It is as if he has seen too much of the harsh realities of life to enjoy the simple pleasures of nature. It is interesting that even though Keats says he cannot see, he is able to vividly describe the changing of the seasons. It is as if at one time, before the realities of the world had numbed him, he was able to see and now he is only describing what he remembers. How can a person who cannot see make a description as vivid as: "The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine"?

In the next stanza Keats begins to pull himself away from the nightingale and focuses more heavily on their differences. He voices his thoughts on death and how he has longed for it often. He uses the nightingale as opposition to his feelings saying that he wishes "To cease upon the midnight with no pain, while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy!" This statement truly sets Keats apart from the nightingale as he sets himself up against it in direct opposition. He uses paradox and says that it would be "rich to die," showing the reader that for him death would be pleasurable. "Keats yearns to die, a state which he imagines as only joyful, as pain-free, and to merge with the bird's song" (Hoagwood 459). Towards the end of the stanza Keats seems to realize that death is not just a release from pain, but more of an inability to feel. The inability to feel the nightingale's ecstasy. He realizes that if he were to die, the nightingale would keep right on going with her song, it wouldn't matter, "Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain." It is interesting how Keats uses similar words to give contrasting descriptions for both the nightingale and death. He says that the nightingale "sang with full throated ease" and then describes death as "easeful".

Keats moves from his awareness of his own mortality in the preceding stanza to the perception of the bird's immortality" (Hoagwood 461). While it is obvious that the bird will someday die, it is the symbol of ideal and unmixed joy that Keats believes will never die. "The poet contrasts the bird's immortality, and continuing joyful song, with the condition of human beings, "hungry generations"" (Scott 441). Keats seems to envy the bird's naive outlook on its life. Unlike human beings, who know that they will die, the bird has no understanding of death. Stanza seven begins in the present tense, but Keats goes on to describe the nightingale's singing in the past. This makes the nightingale seem more mythological and symbolic as it represents the feeling of joy and how it has always been and always will be. Different realities are described as Keats looks at the nightingale in the past. All three realities describe situations where pain and feelings of being forlorn are present. "These descriptions hint at the pain the poet recognized in the beginning of the poem and is trying to escape" (Scott 442).

In the last stanza Keats fully awakens from his daydream as the haunting realities of his life make it impossible for him to imagine anymore. He is brought back to reality by the harsh bell of realization that he is forlorn. In his realization he becomes angry with the nightingale calling it a "fancy elf". He knows that the bird has tricked him into believing in a joy filled reality that can never be. Once Keats realizes this the bird ceases to be a symbol and returns to a normal bird as Keats returns to his forlorn reality. The nightingale's song becomes a "plaintive anthem" instead of a joyous melody because Keats can now see through it and knows that what the bird sings of can never be true. He describes the nightingale's voice as being "buried deep" as if to suggest that what it represented is now dead and buried because he can no longer escape with it to a joy filled world. "With the last two lines, the poet wonders whether he has had a true insight or experienced a vision or whether he has been daydreaming" (Hoagwood 461). He seems to be questioning the realness of the experience because he knows that what he experienced is impossible. He says "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?"

In the end the reader is left with a sense that Keats really didn't gain any pleasure from listening to the nightingale sing. All of the beauties that it brought only reminded him of a life he could never have. For every joyous thought that the nightingale roused in him, there was an opposing thought of misery that came with it. He couldn't truly enjoy the nightingale's melody because he realized that the carefree life that it lead was what he truly wanted but knew he could never have. In the conclusion of the poem Keats comes to accept that he can never experience the true joy of the nightingale and that his dream can never come true.

The romantic poets wrote a revolution, believing their work to be like theology. They believed their work created a new covenant between the mind and the body and brought them closer to God. One prominent romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, claimed poets to be interpreters of the spirit of the age, and poetry to be human racial antennae that sensed what was going to happen. Through an examination of the works of several poets, the state of society during the romantic period can be observed.

John Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale” is a study in the significance of nature in romantic poetry, as well as the painful condition of mortality. Keats writes to the nightingale perched outside of his window, considering the sensual stimulus of the world around him-the song of the nightingale, the nearby forests and rivers, the beauty of night. He envies the bird, writing, “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” Keats wishes to escape the constraints of human consciousness and time, to fly away with the nightingale into nature. He finds, however, that his only possibility of flying away is in poetry. By the end of the poem, he is deflated, and falls back to being human in the line, “Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well.” This poem emphasizes the wistful, idealized state of mind in which many people during the 18th and 19th centuries dwelt. They wished to return to a state of belief, rather than reason. The science of the Enlightenment weighed on society, and those of a more aesthetic manner felt oppressed.

William Blake, a poet and illustrator, was a more naïve romantic than most. He believed that the natural state of man was that of happiness, not sin, and that the happiness a man possesses naturally is destroyed by society. Blake's poetry centers on the idea that, after innocence is lost, poetic meditation provides compensation, as well as containing the central theme of childhood divinity. He theorized that grown men can reclaim this divinity through poetical metaphysics, and centered his belief structure on that of 18th century German idealism, the basis of which stated that reality is in ideas rather than things, that imagination intuits a higher reality, and that a man's body is the physical aspect of his soul. In his poem, “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” Blake tells rationalists that they are wasting their time in lives dictated by logic and knowledge. He uses multiple religious symbols, including the collection of sand on a beach, which represent the collection of people for God's judgment, as well as being a loose reference to the Jewish flight from the Egyptians. Blake's use of religion in poetry traces back to his belief in childhood divinity, in this case stating that the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake is unnecessary and vain-an unholy characteristic. This poem holds values of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction led by poets and romantics against the Age of Enlightenment. Thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized deductive reason, whereas romanticism was grounded in intuition.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ascribed to the same German idealism as Blake, and believed that the imagination is an instrument of God. In his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge tells the story of a sailor who violates the sanctity of nature. The man kills an albatross and is punished for this action against holy nature. The descriptions of nature within the poem are vivid: “The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide : Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.” This tale of the vengeance of nature is a warning to the scientists of the Enlightenment and the inventors of the Industrial Revolution-nature is the beginning and the end, and actions against it will result in your own downfall.

Charles Baudelaire was a different sort of romantic. Baudelaire was angry about his cause and those who opposed it. He was viewed as the original bohemian, the slum-dwelling romantic, who pitted himself against an insensitive, hypocritical society. Later on, he became the model for French symbolist poets and the poet-god of the Beat Generation. His poem, “Anywhere Out of the World” is a discussion between the poet and his soul. He offers up possible locales which should please his soul entirely, but his soul remains silent, suggesting that there is no location in which it would be comfortable. Finally, his soul responds, crying, “'No matter where! No matter where! As long as it's out of the world!'” In this, Baudelaire is stating that there is nowhere at which a man's soul can find peace-all of the world is a prison, and the soul will be oppressed by any and every environment. This applies to the power struggles that took place during the romantic period. The reconstruction of the French government, post-revolution, was shaky, and the works of romantics helped to inspire the January Uprising of 1863. Lithuanian and Polish men refused to submit to the Russian oppression they faced, and rebelled. Thousands died, and 128 men were personally hanged by Mikhail Muravyov, a Russian imperial statesman. After the Uprising, about 70,000 persons were imprisoned and removed from Poland. These and many other conflicts caused the romantics to believe that a poetic revolution was necessary immediately, and so they wrote some of the most influential poetry produced to date.

The effects of romanticism exist to this day. A movement called “post-romanticism” began in 2005, with painters and poets producing work that echoes their romantic predecessors. Even mainstream, contemporary poetry throws back to the natural themes embraced by the romantics. The influence is heavy; the genealogy of romantic poetry roots back to the first poem, and, so it seems, will stretch so far as the last.

Perhaps the most famous couple for everyone. The story is based on an Italian tale that became famous for William Shakespeare tragedy (about 1595).

Two families are one against the other: Montecchi (Montagues Romeo's family) and Capuleti (Capulets Juliet's family).

Story is staged in Verona an Italian city: the two youngs want to marry but it is impossible for their families relationship, so a secret marriage is arranged.

Everything is well until Romeo is challenged in a duel by Tybalt (a Juliet's cousin). Romeo refuses the duel with Tybalt because they are in the same family now, so the best Romeo's friend Mercutio is involved in the duel instead of Romeo and he is mortally wounded.

Romeo is exiled from Verona, Juliet is desperate and goes to Friar Lawrence. He gives her a drug to put her into a death-like coma for forty-two hours. Everyone thinks Juliet is dead but a messenger from Friar should advise Romeo about the trick. The messenger does not meet Romeo and so Romeo kill himself with poison thinking in Juliet's death.

Juliet wakes up, and discovers the tragedy so decide to kill herself with her lover's sword and reach his lover forever.

[Francesco Hayez: The Kiss]

Paolo and Francesca

Another famous couple is Paolo and Francesca make famous by the Dante's masterpiece “Divine Comedy”.

It is a true story: Francesca is married with Gianciotto Malatesta an awful person, but she has Gianciotto's brother, Paolo, as lover. The love between them grows when they read together a book (according to Dante) about Lancelot and Guinevere (see below).

When the two lovers are discovered they are killed by Gianciotto.

[Joseph Anton Koch: Paolo and Francesca discoverd by Gianciotto]

[Anselm Feuerbach, Paolo and Francesca]

Lancelot and Guinevere

Lancelot is one of King Arthur's knight (Round Table), Guinevere is King Arthur's wife and famous for her love affair with Lancelot (according to Chrétien de Troyes: Lancelot, the King of the Cart).

Guinevere is kidnapped by Meleagant (son of King Gorre). She is brought to a mysterious and dangerous land where no one can escape live. Many knights are ready to rescue Guinever, among them a mysterious knight that is Lancelot.

During the journey Lancelot must face many difficulties, among these the “Sword Bridge” build as a sharp blade hanging on deep and dangerous waters.

Lancelot with the help of a magic ring arrives in Gorre and sets free Guinevere that grateful to Lancelot fall in love with him.

[Dante Gabriel Rossetti Arthur's Tomb - The Last Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere]

Do you think another couple should be included in the top five?

Post a comment and I will very pleased of your contribution.

The "Lenz" referred to by Livvie is the main character of an unfinished novella by the German writer Georg Buchner (1813-1837), whose literary output consisted of only four works prior to his death from typhus aged 23. "Lenz", allegedly written in 1836, was inspired by an episode in the life of the playwright and poet Jakob Lenz (1751-1792), a member of the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) school of German writers. It centres on his attempts in early 1778 to find a cure to his mental illness with the help of the Protestant pastor and social reformer, Jean-Frederic Oberlin, in a small village of the Vosges mountains. Lenz was himself the son of a Pietist Protestant minister. The cure was unsuccessful and Lenz spent the remaining years of his life as an impoverished drifter.

Born into an ethnic German family in Sesswegen in the former Livonia, now Cesvaine, Latvia, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz went on to become a literary innovator much admired by his fellow Sturm und Drang artists, but largely ignored during his lifetime. After a life marked by bouts of mental illness and a chronic inability to find steady employment, he was found dead in a Moscow street aged only 41. His was the ultimate short life of the failed artist that was once held me in such thrall, but which today as the Christian I am I find more saddening than fascinating. I never did get round to reading "Lenz". Sorry, Livvie...

I went and talked to Livvie. I said to her: "You're one of the nicest girls I've ever known". "Oh, you say nice things to everyone - I'm sorry; I'm just possessive. I'm frightened of my feelings." "I love being nice, It really makes me happy. Sometimes, on the other hand, I feel as if I'm just putting One foot in front of the other". "You should read "Lenz". I'm sure you'd identify With the main character." When will somebody get me: There (the solar plexus)? As Livvie said... there (the solar plexus)?

You Should Read Lenz