High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written in May 1819 in either the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, or, as according to Keats` friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats House, Hampstead, London. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near his home in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird`s song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem that describes Keats`s journey into the state of Negative Capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats`s earlier poems, and it explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats.