The English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) penned his classic “Ode to a Nightingale” in the summer of 1819 during a creative outpouring that produced four other well-known odes. In the poem, the speaker muses on the mystery of death during an imagined conversation with a nightingale. “Ode to a Nightingale” is replete with allusions to the world of Greek mythology, a tradition that supplied Keats’s imagination with countless images, locales, figures, and metaphors.

Skills: analysis, drawing inferences from text, close reading, identifying the relationship between words

About This Document

The Owl Eyes Allusions activity gives students an opportunity to practice identifying and analyzing allusions. Allusions broaden the scope of a text and imbue passages of the text with deeper meaning by subtly drawing on literature, history, science, geography, philosophy, mythology, or other cultural sources. The main components of this activity include the following:

• A contextualized paragraph of the text
• A handout defining “allusion” with examples from classic works
• A list of tips for spotting allusions
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• An example answer

In completing this activity, students will be able to identify, analyze, and interpret allusions, thereby accessing deeper meanings within the text.