Annotation: Ruth, Keats' Ode to a Nightingale
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
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| Naomi entreating Ruth and Oprah to return to the land of Moab, by William Blake |
Naomi and her family emigrated to the land of Moab in hopes of a better life but one by one her family dies and only her daughters-in-law Ruth and Oprah are left. She decides to back home to Bethlehem and releases them from any obligation to stay with her but Ruth replies:
Wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.
In Bethlehem she's among a different mind-set and people with a different religion; she's a foreigner and to support herself, and Naomi, works in the fields of Boaz. And it's this loneliness that Keats alludes to.
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