The Nightingale’s Literary Career

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Researching this blog, I stumbled on a quotation from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, which encapsulates the age-long fascination of poets with the elusive bird of the night.

“A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”

From Homer to the present day, the nightingale has achieved such mythic status in literature that its use has become clichéd. In To the Nightingale, Coleridge complains about the bird’s overuse, “How many wretched Bards address thy name.”

The nightingale is a symbol of spring, of night and of love, but in the classical period it was often associated with mourning. Philomela is Greek for nightingale and in Ovid’s version of her myth, Philomela is raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus. He locks her in a cottage and cuts out her tongue to prevent her exposing him but she outwits him by weaving a message on her loom. Her sister liberates her and the two women exact a very grisly revenge on Tereus before escaping by turning into birds. This story held a fascination for writers, finding its way into Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Keats’s Eve of St Agnes, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

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My favourite literary nightingale comes in the famous ‘morning after’ conversation between Romeo and Juliet. It pairs the nightingale, the songbird of the night, with the lark, the songbird of the morning. For me, it’s a brilliant example of Shakespeare’s lyric beauty, simple and powerful.

Juliet “Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.”

Romeo “It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.”

In The Nightingale, Coleridge disputed the classical idea that the nightingale's song is mournful: “In nature there is nothing melancholy.” I beg to differ. I feel that nature evokes a plethora of emotion, including melancholy, though often we humans impose our own mood. But in the particular case of the nightingale, there is one phrase, almost always included in its song, which does sound plaintive. It’s a quiet, piping, melodious phrase of a few notes, either at the same pitch or ascending. To me it sounds like a whistle, inhaled rather than exhaled. It forms a strong contrast with most of the other phrases which are bold and percussive, sometimes insect-like, sometimes evoking sci-fi sound effects. Coleridge manages to convey something of the song:

“'Tis the merry Nightingale

That crowds and hurries, and precipitates

With fast thick warble his delicious notes,

As he were fearful that an April night

Would be too short for him to utter forth

His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul

Of all its music! …

So many nightingales; and far and near,

In wood and thicket, over the wide grove,

They answer and provoke each other's song,

With skirmish and capricious passagings,

And murmurs musical and swift jug jug,

And one low piping sound more sweet than all”…

That last line certainly refers to the sound I find mournful, or at least nostalgic.

No literary tour of the nightingale could fail to mention Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. He contrasts his own bleak mood, fantasising about death, with the apparently joyful song of the nightingale.

“That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

But at the end of the poem, Keats concedes the melancholy tone of the bird.

“Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”

I am indebted to Nightingales in Literature, an essay by Ian Newman, on the University of Notre Dame website.