In his poem Ode to a Nightingale John Keats understands the bird, or its song, as immortal. The nightingale’s song is, crucially, a shining example of beauty in nature, and contrasts with the poet’s mortal attempt to realize beauty in his verse. It is this falling short of natural beauty that I too feel when I try to depict nature; or more precisely, when I am trying each time to point to a beauty that in fact only exists in nature, and not in my art. I am bound to fail in this sense. Capturing nature is a forlorn exercise.
The nightingale, as Keats writes, flies off:
“Adieu, adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades…”
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