The nightingale is a ‘deceiving elf’: unearthly and also distorting the reality or truth of the world around us. The poem is not Wordsworth’s encounter with the daffodils, where the poet is inspired and buoyed by nature alone the nightingale’s power is in transforming the poet’s mental state altogether, like a drug or a strong wine, and taking him away from the rather humdrum world that surrounds him. For running throughout ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a desire to leave behind the real world, even the world of nature as it is, for a world of ‘fancy’ or ‘fairy’. Yet it is not quite so simple as all that. This is partly, of course, what makes ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ clearly a Romantic poem: it is the individual coming into contact with the natural world, and finding kinship with it. It’s worth recalling that there is a longstanding tradition whereby the song of the nightingale is likened to the ‘song’ of the poet: in this sense, then, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ can be analysed as an encounter between two ‘singers’ or ‘poets’, one from the world of nature and one from the world of human society.
In summary, did he really leave behind the real world for an enchanted world with the nightingale? The nightingale’s song recedes, and the poet is left wondering whether it was all a dream. In the final stanza, Keats picks up on the last word of the penultimate stanza – ‘forlorn’ – and so we return to the beginning of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, with Keats’s ‘heart aches’, just as the word ‘forlorn’ recalls Keats to himself, and to reality.