It appears on two half-sheets and has 'an uncancelled rejected beginning.

The only surviving draft of the ode, in Keats' handwriting, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his 'Ode to a Nightingale', a poem which has been the delight of every one. The writing was not well legible and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. In the spring of 1818 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats' friend Charles Brown recollected, 17 years later, how Keats wrote this ode. His own brother Tom, dying of consumption at this time, lingers on in 'Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies' (26). During his training as a medical practitioner, Keats saw drugs like opium (3) and wine (11) deaden the pain of feverishly ill men, the aged shaking from palsy, and the consumptive young (23-26). Yet it is Keats who does so, in May 1819, not the living reader, not some character in a dramatic monologue manipulated by a poet who stays outside his created world.

True enough, Keats leaves his 'sole self' (72) to join with the nightingale in verse that briefly realizes, in human language, the ageless beauty of its unintelligible song. 'Ode to a Nightingale' depicts one such experience. Keats' letters show that he certainly believed the poet possessed 'negative capability,' the self-nullifying power to enter other things and speak as and for them.

Ambiguity, irony, and even implication have no place here, but biography does. The 'I' who speaks eight times in this perfect eight-stanza lyric is Keats himself, not a surrogate persona. Between the first three words of 'Ode to a Nightingale,' 'My heart aches,' and its last, 'sleep,' John Keats describes a brief personal escape from an existence whose suffering he can no longer endure.

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