Keats utilizes three mythological techniques most frequently.

The first might be called

“mythological sense,” by which I mean the apprehension of mythological allusions acting as a sixth
sense for the narrator as he perceives his surroundings. Often this mythological sense must replace
other senses, such as sight and sound, which Keats restricts. Mythology is important as something
lived and experienced—it gains life solely through its impact on the narrated self. Keats’ second
technique is physical boundedness. Time and again returning to the enclosed forest bower, he
constricts action to the sphere of the narrator’s immediate perception. Here again, mythological
narrative is primarily important in relation to a single soul; the constant encroachment of external
boundaries literally forces the focus of the poem inward. The third technique is his use of embodied
figures, initially anonymous mythological forms. Like the “carved Jupiter,” characters appear first as
objects in the narrator’s sensual experience; their mythological identifications are secondary and
often revealed only after their physical significance has been explored. Together these three
attributes, mythological sense, physical boundedness, and embodied figures, allow Keats to create a
mythology of individual experience, mediating between the individual spirit and the divine. While
Olympian figures carry their original identities, like shadows in Plato’s cave, they present a vision of
something beyond themselves. For Keats that vision is the mythological meaning of the individual
soul.

I. Mythological Sense
In “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), Keats enhances the sensuality of his forest space by limiting sight.
While he uses smell, taste, and touch to describe the world of the poem, again and again he
emphasizes a lack of visibility. He longs to “drink and leave the world unseen,” to fly “on the
viewless wings of Poesy,” and proclaims “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet” (Poems 280;
lines 19, 34, 43). In addition to the import other senses gain in this tradeoff, Keats uses mythological
identification as a sixth sense, replacing explicit sights with mythopoeic associations. By giving
Poesy “viewless wings,” he combines the physical impotence of blindness with the intellectual
power of flight. Poesy is a winged mythological figure, an identity with power that transcends
sensory perception.
Though Keats’ narrator cannot see the nightingale, he addresses it as “light-winged Dryad of the
trees,” again assigning, at least temporarily, a mythological form to the invisible (Poems 279; line
7). The implicit feminine sexuality of the nymph figure adds a sense of sexual longing to the
narrator’s desire for transport. He longs for a draught of wine “tasting of Flora,” here associating the
visual mythological image with taste rather than sight. In this case, however, the mismatched senses
carry a different connotation. In Tooke’s Pantheon, one of the texts Keats studied at the Clarke
school, and written as a Platonic dialogue, Mystagogus claims that Flora was “a famous strumpet
who, by her abominable trade, heaped up a great deal of money,” and funded public games in which
“lewd women came forth and showed tricks naked” (196). In this light, “tasting” Flora implies a
very different meaning, with the same sexual undertones as the Dryad. In addition, the reference to
the “blushful Hippocrene,” a spring near the Muses’ domicile at Mt. Helicon, introduces poetic
inspiration into the landscape of sensual associations (Poems 279; line 16). These allusions allow
the reader to access a pre-existing universe of icons, based on assumed knowledge of mythic forms
with which Keats replaces visual description.
Yet the mythological identities themselves often become eclipsed by Keats’ fancy. It is on “the
viewless wings of poetry,” not the chariot of “Bacchus and his pards,” that the narrator will reach
the nightingale (Poems 280; line 33). Bacchus adds a visual texture to the darkness, as the image of
the wine god surfaces for a moment, but the obliterating power of the narrator’s fancy takes
precedence over the mythological structures. The displacement of Bacchus rejects the more carnal
associations of Dionysian carousal. Where he uses the dryad to emphasize the sexual nature of the
narrator’s desired flight, by replacing Bacchus with a less embodied image he suggests that the
concept of fancy transcends the physical longing represented by the mythological figure.
Keats invokes the image of Diana to a similar end, establishing a carnal world accessible to the
nightingale but very different from his own locale. For the nightingale, “Tender is the night / And
haply the Queen-moon is on her throne / Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays” (Poems  280; lines
35-7). Again, a mythological image of feminine sexuality—both in the particular form of Diana and
the broader associations of the moon as fertility goddess—apply to the nightingale. Keats says of his
own location, “here there is no light” (Poems 280; line 38). For the narrator, the realm of classical
images is subsumed in a visually-limited, dark personal space.