At the poems beginning the narrator hears and participates by listening to the bird's song; however with heart-aching and mind-numbed the intensity is too great to conceive of the song or its happiness, without pain or perhaps it is the pain of the happiness that is too intense for the narrator; either way the happiness is associated directly with pain. The narrator, with senses both deadened and reeling with pleasure and ensuing pain, feels the need to retreat "far away" and "forget" what he knows and can't have. Although the narrator longs for the music that Lawrence suggests the bird intones, the narration suggests, as does Lawrence, that the yearning for something outside himself is a present conflict of the text. The last stanza of the poem begins with, "Forlorn! The very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!"(71-72) These lines illustrate the yearning for a self that is more than a mortal, or perhaps more than a narrator if D.H. Lawrence is right, and with the bell's toll has been said to release the speaker from the longing for the bird's song.
Given these obvious oppositions intrinsic with the poem, contrasts between pleasure and pain, knowledge and forgetfulness, self and selflessness, and life and death; it follows that conflicts are as obvious in within the text. The narrator says that the music is fled, perhaps the music he remembers from Southern summer life, but the fleeting music might just as easily be directed towards the nightingale as he "Singest of summer in full-throated ease."(10), which contrasts with the narration consisting of the slighting difficulties of forgetting, loss, pain, and envy of the previous lines. If the final statement of line 80 is concerned with the sadly envious song of the nightingale, then the following question has one answer; if the buried music was a testament to the beauty of inspirational music that can chariot the narrator away, the question, "Do I wake or sleep?"(80), might have an altogether different answer.
