According to a familiar anecdote, one spring morning Keats slipped out into a Hampstead garden, settled himself beneath a plum tree where a nightingale had lately built her nest, and began to write. Upon returning indoors a few hours later he discreetly thrust several scraps of paper behind some books; it was only when his housemate Charles Brown enquiringly retrieved those scraps and, with Keats’s help, rearranged them, that they took on the shape of what would become one of Keats’s most famous works: the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Jack Stillinger claims that Brown’s memory was playing him false, however, and that it was not the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ which was composed in this way, but rather the ‘Ode on Indolence’. Whether true or not, Brown’s story is suggestive on two counts. First, for what it tells us about the structural integrity of the odes – that one of them could come into being through the shuffling and reshuffling of scraps of paper is perhaps at odds with the idea of unity and formal achievement for which the odes are rightly celebrated. Second, the furtive way in which Keats is said to have stolen in and secreted away his papers ascribes a kind of shiftiness to his compositional practice. That shiftiness, I wish to suggest, offers a useful way of characterising the ‘Ode on Indolence’, with its structural and chronological instability as well as its slipperiness of wordplay and ambiguity. Drawing attention to these qualities presents a more unsettling and artfully evasive, at times even devious, side of Negative Capability at work in Keats’s odes.