" Thy streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul / can e"er return." (38-40) The town is so empty and still that he describes it as "desolate" (40). His emphasis on the lonely, sorrowful, and miserable aspects of this imaginary place gives the reader some idea of how full of loneliness, sorrow, and misery the speaker himself is. He seems to relate more to this nonexistent empty village than to the image that he can actually see in front of him. He foreshadows his feelings of pain and despair in the real world prior to this in the third stanza, where he uses the literary tactic of repetition. The word "happy" appears several times describing numerous elements of the scene: " happy, happy boughs!" (21), " happy melodist" (23), "More happy love! more happy, happy love!" (25). This word is also repeated in "Ode to a Nightingale" when the speaker says to the bird, " not through the envy of thy happy lot, / But being too happy in thine happiness" (5-6). The fact that Keats" has a lack of varying and more accurate words has a purpose. By stressing the word he shows that the speaker has difficulty relating to the joyful and lighthearted, and therefore cannot find more expressive words or the desire to elaborate more fully. He feels the intense pain of living in a cruel and unforgiving world. Keats continues with this idea of reality in his other poem.
In "Ode to a Nightingale" Keats comments further on the sorrow and pain in the world and also the beauty that can be found behind the cruelty. The speaker in this second poem begins by expressing the need to escape from reality by numbing the pain with alcohol, "that [he] might drink, and leave the world unseen" (19). He then speaks to the nightingale. He says that it is, "[singing] of summer in full-throated ease," (10) and that he wants to, " forget / What [the nightingale] among the leaves hast never known," (21-22).
