The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of sexual assault and violence.

Lines 1-39

The poem is divided into five verse paragraphs of varying lengths. In the first paragraph, Lines 1-3 effectively set the scene. It is evening, and darkness has fallen. Line 4 refers to “we,” but the reader must wait until later in the poem to find out who that refers to. The word does, however, establish here that the speaker, who turns out to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself, is not alone.

As they sit on an “old mossy bridge” (Line 4), a stream flows silently below, and the stars are dim. The absence of sound and light sets up the scene in which the human observers can hear the nightingale’s song all the more clearly. The nightingale’s song first appears in Line 12, and immediately Coleridge makes a literary allusion to how nightingales have traditionally been associated with melancholy: “‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird!” (Line 13). Literary man that he is, Coleridge is quoting John Milton’s poem “Il Penseroso” (1645). Here is the line in context:

Sweet bird that shunn’st the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy!

Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among,

I woo to hear thy even-song (Milton, Lines 61-64).

Ironically, in what follows, despite the beauties of Milton, Coleridge will argue in favor of being true to nature rather than to art or literature. He rejects the Miltonic characterization of the bird as a melancholic creature: “A melancholy bird! O idle thought! / In nature there is nothing melancholy” (Lines 14-15). He is direct and emphatic in his assertion, and he elaborates on this idea in the lines that follow. To him, the supposed melancholy of the nightingale’s song is merely a projection of some unhappy “night-wandering man” (Line 16) who suffered from a broken heart or some other reversal in love or fortune (Lines 16-22).

In Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge added a footnote about his quotation from Milton. As a young poet, he was anxious to avoid giving the impression that he was in any way criticizing the great and revered poet from an earlier century:

“This passage in Milton possesses an excellence far superior to that of mere description. It is spoken in the character of the melancholy Man, and has therefore a dramatic propriety. The author makes this remark, to rescue himself from the charge of having alluded with levity to a line in Milton […] (Coleridge 64).

Coleridge then continues the poem by stating that “many a poet” (Line 23) since Milton have followed his characterization of the nightingale’s song as melancholy, but they would have done better to get out in nature and enjoy all that it had to offer—rather than thinking too much about their poetry and their aspirations for “fame” (Line 30). Becoming more in tune with nature, they would “make all Nature lovelier” (Line 33); they would find their fame in “Nature’s immortality” (Line 31), and their verse would be celebrated and loved for it.

In Lines 34-39, however, Coleridge says this is not going to happen. Young lovers—those who know poetry and its traditional symbolism, that is—will spend what’s left of their youth—“the deepening twilights of the spring” (Line 36)—indoors, in theaters and dance halls rather than in nature, and will continue to sigh and lament over love and regard the nightingale’s song as mournful. The reference to “Philomela’s pity-pleading strains” (Line 39) alludes to classical mythology and the origin of the notion that the nightingale’s song is melancholy. In the epic Latin narrative poem Metamorphoses (8 CE) by Ovid, the beautiful Philomela is pursued by King Tereus, who is married to Philomela’s sister, Procne. Tereus rapes Philomela and cuts out her tongue so that she cannot tell her story. Later, as Philomela and her sister flee from Tereus’s vengeful anger, the gods turn Philomela into a nightingale—hence her melancholy song.

Lines 40-49

Coleridge now turns to his two companions—“My Friend, and thou, our Sister!” (Line 40), widely considered to be William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy—who remain silent auditors or listeners throughout the poem. He knows they all agree about nature: Nothing in it is melancholy; nature is all love and joy, and they are able to share in it. Thus, the nightingale, far from being melancholy, is “the merry Nightingale” (Line 43) that warbles “his delicious notes” (Line 45).

This view of nature is all of a piece with what Wordsworth and Coleridge must have discussed together many times over in their walks and talks. It is apparent in their poetry of this period, including Coleridge’s conversation poems, such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), in which the speaker recalls being “struck with deep joy” (Coleridge, Line 39) in the contemplation of the beauty of nature. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” written only about three months after Coleridge wrote “The Nightingale,” Wordsworth writes in deep appreciation of the connection he feels toward nature, noting that nature always leads “from joy to joy” (Wordsworth, Line 128).

Lines 50-70

In these lines, Coleridge describes a grove where the nightingales gather. This too must have been part of the group’s walk, and perhaps the main reason for it. The “castle huge” (Line 51) may be a more grand, imaginative version of Dodington Hall, which was located in a secluded place in the village of Dodington, where the three companions were likely walking. The nightingales fill the wood with their song, and Coleridge captures it in onomatopoeic words (i.e., words that sound like what is being described):

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— (Lines 58-62).

Over the centuries, “jug jug” had become the expression used to convey part of the nightingale’s song. It appears to have been used first by Elizabethan dramatist John Lyly, in his play Campaspe (1584), in which Philomela is fleeing from Tereus: “Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu! she cries / And still her woes at midnight rise” (Lyly 5.1.68-69). In more modern times, T. S. Eliot uses the expression in The Waste Land (1922) as he invokes the classical story:

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears (Eliot, Lines 77-83).

Lines 71-88

The “most gentle Maid” (Line 71) may be Coleridge’s imaginative creation, or he might have had Dorothy in mind, since he knew her well and admired her. Either way, introducing such a figure provides him with another opportunity to describe the nightingales’ song. He also suggests that she resembles a nun, “a Lady vowed and dedicate” (Line 74), in the sense that a nun is dedicated to a spiritual life, to “something more than Nature” (Line 75). The comparison to a nun is apt only up to a certain point because, for this Maid, a dedication to nature in its loveliness is enough; it does not have to be directed to some higher spiritual level, because, as Coleridge puts it in “The Eolian Harp,” nature embodies “the one Life within us and abroad” (Coleridge, Line 27).

Because of this indissoluble link between the human mind, spirit, and nature, it would not be amiss to call the Maid a worshipper of nature. This was a term that Wordsworth used of himself in “Tintern Abbey”: “I, so long / A worshipper of Nature, hither came / Unwearied in that service” (Wordsworth, Line 155). Thus, as the Maid observes and listens to the beauty of the nightingales’ song, the wholeness of life, in its seamless unity, flows through her. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that she does not walk but rather “glides through the pathways” (Line 76), so elevated are her thoughts and her experience.

In his second lengthy description of the nightingales’ song (Lines 78-88), Coleridge employs the simile—a type of metaphor that directly compares two unlike things, typically using “like” or “as”—of the Eolian (or Aeolian) harp. After the moon emerges from behind a cloud, the bird song strikes up again in full splendor, “As if some sudden gale had swept at once / A hundred airy harps!” (Lines 83-84). The Eolian harp was a stringed instrument that was placed in an open window and sounded when it caught the breeze. In the Romantic era, the Eolian harp was a popular metaphor for the movement of the spirit as it animated nature, or of the inspired poet who was receptive to the finer impulses of nature and spirit. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) is but one example.

Lines 89-112

In a friendly, conversational tone, Coleridge bids his companions farewell, but before they go, he cannot resist telling a little anecdote that reinforces the notion of nature as love and joy and adds something more to it—nature’s healing power. The “dear babe” (Line 93) is Coleridge’s son Hartley, who was born in September 1796 and would have been about 19 months old when Coleridge wrote “The Nightingale.” Although Hartley cannot yet talk, he has a kind of innate wisdom that Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and William Blake believed that children possessed.

Hartley, Coleridge says, has a habit of putting his hand to his ear, asking the adults to listen to the nightingale’s song; he is already sensing the wonder of nature. He even recognizes the “evening-star” (Line 100)—that is, Venus. Coleridge then recalls an incident in which Hartley woke up crying from a dream, and his father quickly took him outside into their garden. The child looked at the moon and immediately quietened down and laughed “most silently” (Line 105). Coleridge, the fond father, fervently hopes that Hartley will grow up appreciating the nightingale’s song and that he will associate it, and the night, with joy.

These final lines have their origin in a real-life incident. Coleridge wrote the following in his notebook that spring:

Hartley fell down & hurt himself—I caught him up crying & screaming—& ran out of doors with him—The Moon caught his eye—he ceased crying immediately—& his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight! (Seamus Perry, ed. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection. Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 8).