In Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats and Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats, the image of the bird is used by both poets in an attempt to achieve immortality through it making use of artistic elements. Both describe birds as wanting to be free from the burden of the material world. In A Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes a poet as “a nightingale, who sits in the darkness and sings to cheer his loneliness with sweet sounds; his listeners are like men entranced by the melody of an invisible musician, who feels moved and sweetened, but knows not whence or why” (qtd. by Khan, 78). In his poem, Keats seeks a way to join the joyful world of the nightingale and leave his dark and frustrating world, while Yeats seeks a way to become a golden bird with eternal youth. Therefore, as sensitive poets, they refuse to accept that they belong to this narrow world of harsh realities, but a world in which they will no longer feel alone with their songs, far from those who are unable to understand their artistic qualities.At at the beginning of the Ode to the Nightingale, although it seems that the pain the poet feels refers to "poisining", it becomes more evident that he immediately rejoices with the splendid, lively song of the nightingale when he explains that he is not jealous of the song of the nightingale happiness: «It is not from envy of your happy fate, / But from being too happy in your happiness» (5, 6). The poet struggles to enter the artistic and spiritual world of the bird that he thinks is "country green" (13). With “a sip of the harvest” (11), he thinks of a magnificent world full of "Provençal songs" (14) and "dances" with the sun, which transport him to a joyful place...... medium paper ......cial birds that sang” (qtd. of Dume 405). Influenced by the fascination of what he had read in the past, Yeats apparently finds the solution to escape from his mortal and deteriorating world by transforming himself into a golden artificial bird in Byzantium, but at the end of Keats's poem, the lack of certainty excites attention when the poet noticing that the bird is flying prompts the question of whether it is awake or sleeping, which also resembles Edgar Allen Poe's question in the last lines of his poem “Is all we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (23-24) Like Poe, who asks him if he is far from reality with the words “a dream within a dream,” Keats is not or does not want to be sure of reality because he does not want to be part of the harsh reality of the world to which he unfortunately has to return after the nightingale has left him.