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Melissa Waugh
Dr. Hartstein
English 250
25-10-08
A Comparison of the Antithetical and Parallels in “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To a Sky-Lark”
The speakers in John Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) and Percy Bysshe Shelly’s poem “To a Sky-Lark” (1820) each exhibit differences in tone, thought, emotion, and bird. Each poem has a purpose; one presents the audience with a feeling of melancholy and the other grants the audience a sense of heavenly joy. Essentially each bird builds the poem up to the speaker craving to be heard, desiring that his voice be admired to the extent of the bird he speaks about. Each speaker feels as if the bird they have written about is immortal. In essence the speaker of each poem feels as if in a dream.