“Ode to the Nightingale” by John Keats and “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold were written at different times by very different men; yet their conclusions about the human condition are strikingly similar. A second-generation Romantic, Keats's language is lush and expressive, strongly focused on the poet as an individual; while Arnold, Victorian by era and attitude, writes using simple language and focuses on the world in a broader context. While Keats is a young man, grappling with the knowledge that he will soon die; Arnold is a newly married man, by all accounts healthy and with a long life ahead of him. Yet despite their differences in era and age, both Keats and Arnold write with equally dark emotional imagery, jarring emotional contrast, and a consistent exploration of the effects the natural sounds around them have on their minds and emotions to demonstrate that suffering is as incomprehensible a part of the human experience as it is inevitable. Both "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Dover Beach" include at least one emotionally dark image in each stanza; in “Ode to a Nightingale” there is often more than one. From beginning to end the reader faces physical darkness and decay, images of dark places and beloved bastions of the imagination corrupted, with “shadows innumerable” (Keats 9) and “dark forest[s]” (20); “[f]arying violets” (47) and “abandoned fairy lands” (70). Furthermore, emotional suffering pervades the atmosphere of the poem, from Keats's allusion to Socrates' death by hemlock in line 2, to his summary of human experience in the third stanza, an experience of "[t]he weariness, fever and agitation". /Here, where men sit and hear each other groan” (23-24). Keats also makes it clear that the realm of the mind... at the center of the card... ack, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls and Claire Waters. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007. 785. Print.Arnold, Matthew. “The study of poetry”. Poetry and criticism by Matthew Arnold. Ed. A. Dwight Culler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961. 306. Print."forlorn, adj. and n." The Oxford English Dictionary online. November 2013. Oxford University Press. 17 November 2013. < http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/73413?redirectedFrom=forlorn#eid >.Keats, John. "Hymn to the Nightingale." The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume B. Ed. Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, and Claire Waters . Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007. 441-42. Press.