Human Limitation in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

“Ode to a Nightingale” begins with an exasperated expression of human limitation: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/my sense…” The speaker wishes he could “dissolve” and become as pure as the innocent and beautiful nightingale, yet is repeatedly restricted by the transience of life and the particularly cruel tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”.) The fact that numbness, a lack of feeling, “pains” the speaker evokes a yearning for lasting connection that came to define the Romantic period. A lack of feeling, it appears, is more painful than any physical anguish.

As in the artwork of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the speaker speaks in envy of the eternity of beauty of the nightingale’s song, saying “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! … The voice I hear this passing night was heard/In ancient days by emperor and clown.” The invocations of both death and the “passing night” place the nightingale and its song in direct contrast with humanity and its fleeting mortality.

The human mind is limited by a lack of “light,/Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown/through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”

However, whereas the concerns expressed in the questions “Grecian Urn” merely go unanswered, in “Nightingale” the speaker actually embraces this humanity. He rejects “Bacchus and his pards,” instead choosing to transcend his mortality through the “viewless wings of Posey.” And although the word “forlorn” is a cold reminder of man’s limitations, the song of the nightingale — representation of eternity and beauty and “truth” — remains just in the “next valley-glades” seemingly attainable upon an inevitable but “easeful” death.