After reading the above account in Milnes’s 1848 biography of Keats, Dilke noted in the margin, ‘We do not usually thrust waste paper behind books’. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a poem which has been the delight of everyone.’īrown’s account was dismissed as ‘pure delusion’ by Charles Wentworth Dilke, the co-owner of Wentworth Place who visited Brown and Keats regularly. The writing was not well legible and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. On inquiry, I found these 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 a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. ‘In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats’s friend and roommate, Charles Brown, described the composition of this beautiful work as follows: When viewing it, you can almost imagine him lost in concentration in the garden at Wentworth Place. This is the most remarkable manuscript at the site, I think, for it perfectly captures the effort and enthusiasm of Keats at the exact moment of poetic creation. Ode to a Nightingale: PAGE ONE – PAGE TWO – PAGE THREE – PAGE FOUR ‘What Printing presses yield we think good store.īut what is writ by hand we reverence more:…’ crop from the original manuscript of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in John Keats’s handwriting The images are large for reasons of clarity so they may take a few moments to load. We can literally see how he thought out a poem, how he corrected and changed it along the way, etc It’s a collection of the original manuscript images of Keats’s poetry and letters.įor Keats’s admirers, viewing the manuscripts brings us a bit closer to the poet.

Ode to a nightingale