• Yes, i have heard the nightingale.
        As in dark woods I wandered,
        And dreamed and pondered,
        A voice passed by all fire
        And passion and desire;
        I rather felt than heard
        The song of that lone bird:
    Yes, I have heard the nightingale.

    Yes, I have heard the nightingale.
        I heard it, and I followed;...

  •    [Written in the spring of 1819, when suffering from physical depression, the precursor of his death, which happened soon after]

    MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
      My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
    Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
      One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
    ’T is not through envy of thy happy lot,...

  • O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
      Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still,
      Thou with fresh hopes the lover’s heart dost fill,
    While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.
    Thy liquid notes, that close the eye of day,
      First heard before the shallow cuckoo’s bill,
      Portend success in love. Oh, if Jove’s will
    Have linked...

  • From “Music’s Duel”
    NOW westward Sol had spent the richest beams
    Of noon’s high glory, when, hard by the streams
    Of Tiber, on the scene of a green plat,
    Under protection of an oak, there sat
    A sweet lute’s-master, in whose gentle airs
    He lost the day’s heat and his own hot cares.
      Close in the covert of the leaves there stood
    A...