It is in the fourth stanza that notion of wine as a means of getting closer to nature is discarded, instead, it is suggested that the disparity between self and nature can be lessened by imagination and poetry.
Away! Away! For I will fly to thee, .
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, .
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
I feel that the images and ideas expressed are presenting a man that feels stifled and contained attempting to throw off his constrictions and reach a place that he believes to be a freer more truthful state. This state, in the eyes of the Romantic, is represented by nature. This, I feel, is the reason for the fifth stanza of Ode to a Nightingale delving into the speaker's imagination, this is the tool that he chooses to get closer to nature.
The speaker's imagination presents to us, I believe, his picture of the very heart of nature, there is a sense of fertility in the language when he speaks of "flowers" at his feet, a "fruit-tree wild" and the "coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine". It is here that the speaker tells us that he is extremely fond of the idea of dying here and jong nature: "Now more than ever seems it rich to die". I believe that the speaker is calling for the death of the socially constricted self in order for him to dissolve into nature and become a "sod" of earth capable of savouring the nightingale's song forever.
In the seventh stanza we are presented with the powerful image of the Biblical tale of the Israelite Ruth caught in Egypt longing for her home. I feel the speaker is linking Ruths longing for Israel with his own longing for the world of nature. I feel this natural world is not only a place the speaker wishes to go to, but rather, he feels he belongs there, he is exiled in the real world. His feelings of being placed in the incorrect environment are incredibly strong, his journey from the bleakness of the real world into the world of nature is so vivid it causes him to question which is the true reality; "Fled is that music:- Do I wake or sleep".
