Please describe the meaning of the following lines from "Ode to a Nightingale."I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense...

Clearly it is always important to look at such quotes from
poems in context rather than taking them out of the poem as a whole and trying to work
out a meaning that may not relate to the original poem. These lines come from the fifth
stanza and describe the immediate setting of the speaker and point towards the richness
of nature at this point in the year and also indicate the darkness of night that the
speaker is in. Note the way that the stanza begins with an assertion that the dark is so
strong that the speaker is unable to identify the flowers at his feet or the blossoms
around him. He is left in "embalmed darkness" to guess at each scent from what he can
smell. The impact of this darkness is to create a very rich image based on scent, as,
due to the inability of his eyes to pierce the darkness, the speaker must rely on his
nose to guess the source of each smell that the "seasonable month" has "endowed."
Clearly, the speaker is in a very beautiful part of nature, surrounded by flowers and
blossoms, giving "the grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild" their own beautiful
scent.

However, these lines also include an example of
synesthesia as the speaker tries to "see" the incense hanging on the trees and stands in
perfumed darkness. Both descriptions in these lines place next to each other the sense
of sight in terms of the sense of smell.