Wordsworth and Keats: For the birds.
Wordsworth and Keats both wrote poems about birds, and both imbue their birds with a mystical nature, but where Keats sees the bird as a representation of a better life, Wordsworth sees it as a mysterious presence that represents the disembodied spirit of nature.
In Wordsworth’s “To the Cuckoo” he never sees his cuckoo and had long since stopped looking for it, so the bird had become a spirit that represents the rest of nature, and like the daffodils it transcends itself. In an “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats speaks to the nightingale as the representation of his desire for happiness — Keats feels a “numbing pain” because he is so happy that the bird is happy that it begins to work on him like a drug. He sees the nightengale, at first, as the essence of summer and the chance of a new life.
