The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem

The conversation poem is mostly associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although William Wordsworth also wrote poems, such as “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), that follow a similar format, as did John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In addition to “The Nightingale,” Coleridge wrote seven other conversation poems: “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” (1796), “The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), “Frost at Midnight” (1798), “Fears in Solitude” (1798), “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), and “To William Wordsworth” (1807).

These poems are written in blank verse, and the speaker adopts a relaxed, informal tone as he addresses another person, who can be either present or absent. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” for example, is addressed to Coleridge’s friend Charles Lamb; “Frost at Midnight” is in part addressed to his baby son, Hartley. In “The Nightingale,” Coleridge addresses two auditors, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as the three of them walk together.

At the beginning of a conversation poem, the speaker describes the physical setting—a tranquil place in nature, usually, as in “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” in which he describes his idyllic country cottage. Then the speaker’s mind goes inward, and he begins a meditation on a particular topic that is connected in some way to the scene before him. In “Frost at Midnight,” for example, as he sits before his wood fire, he notices something fluttering in the grate, which leads him to recall incidents from his schooldays.

As the conversation poem develops, the speaker explores his thoughts and feelings about something that is problematic or unresolved in his mind. In “Fears in Solitude,” for example, he reflects on the apparent possibility of an invasion of England by France. As a result of the meditation, the speaker may achieve a new insight about himself and his situation or about life as a whole; he may solve a problem that has been vexing him. The conversation poem has a circular structure; toward the end it rounds back to where it began, but there has been a change. The speaker has gained fresh understanding, and he feels more serene and optimistic, with greater peace of mind.

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) resembles the pattern of the conversation poem, although it ends with a question rather than an affirmation. Interestingly, Keats met Coleridge for the first time on April 11, 1819, at Highgate, London, where the elder statesman of England’s literary life and the young poet walked together for two hours. Keats wrote to his brother four days later that they had discussed, among many other topics, nightingales and poetry. Nightingales were soon on Keats’s mind, because on April 30, he made his first draft of “Ode to a Nightingale,” one of the most famous of all English Romantic poems.

In the ode, Keats for the most part follows what might be called the Coleridgean rather than the Ovidian or Miltonic model in regard to the song of the bird. (In “The Nightingale,” Coleridge alludes to works by the Roman poet Ovid and Paradise Lost author John Milton that characterize the nightingale as melancholy.) Keats’s speaker addresses the nightingale directly, showing a rich appreciation of “thine happiness” (Keats, Line 6) as the bird “Singest of summer in full-throated ease” (Keats, Line 10). However, a melancholy note is also present in the way the speaker, who is struggling with the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” (Keats, Line 23) of human life, hears the song. This is because he knows that he can never attain the same joy and ecstasy of the “immortal bird” (Keats, Line 61). Thus, at the end of the poem, the nightingale’s song is referred to as “thy plaintive anthem” (Keats, Line 75).