Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird - the nightingale transcribed to spoken word. When dusk light fell and night occurred, and singing song is overheard.
Many of the greats have alluded to the beauty of the nightingale and the emotional response generated by the sound of their song. Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Virgil, Chaucer and Milton have all told the tale of the nightingale in their works.
One story (which was possibly fabricated) was that when visiting a friend Keats was spellbound by the song of a nearby nightingale. So much so that he sat one morning for three hours writing on scraps of paper until coming away with Ode to a nightingale, one of his six ‘great odes’. Although the word nightingale can only be found in the title and not throughout the body, Keats uses the poem to wax lyrical about the nightingale. How the beauty of its immortal song envelopes him in a drunken-like stupor and whisks him away to the nightingale’s night time world.
A famous poem to note is that of The Owl and the Nightingale, a text dating from either the 12th or 13th century. It is one of the earliest examples in Middle English of debate poetry, a form of poetry which captures the dialogue between two competing individuals, in this case the Owl and the Nightingale. A comedic battle ensues between the two as to which has the most beautiful song, instigated by the ill-behaved nightingale
“Grotesque thing,” she said, “fly away! I feel bad at the sight of you. Certainly I often have to stop singing because of your foul appearance. My heart sinks, and my tongue falters, when you are close to me. I’d rather spit than sing about your awful guggling.”
The nightingale has played the most important part in European literature than any other bird, and can be found in Homer's Odyssey, all the way to the works of T. S. Eliot. Much of Greek and Latin poetry refers to the nightingale’s song as a lament – often in reference to the legend of Philomela, who slew her son.
However later poets instead recognized the song as joyful and even began to take on the identity of the muse such as we have seen from Keats. Charlotte Turner Smith called the nightingale a ‘poet of the woods’. This emotive link between poets and the song of the nightingale can be neatly summed up by Shelley who wrote
“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.”
It would be a dark day indeed if we lost these magical creatures.
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