The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem

“Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

This is one of Coleridge’s most celebrated conversation poems. The speaker sits in his cottage at night while his infant son (this is Hartley, also featured in “The Nightingale”) sleeps by his side. Coleridge thinks back to when he was at school in London, not enjoying having to study and instead dreaming of his village birthplace and early home. It fills his heart with tenderness to look at his baby. He anticipates that the boy will be educated by roaming in nature, “by lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain” (Lines 56-57), rather than being confined in a city, as Coleridge had been. Hartley will learn deeply of nature, understood as the language of God. He will experience the sweetness of a life lived in communion with nature.

“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1797)

This is another conversation poem that illustrates the poet’s love of nature. Following an accident, the speaker has to remain in his garden while his friends walk in the countryside. He compensates for the loss by observing and appreciating his immediate environment and concludes, “Henceforth I shall know / That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure; / No plot so narrow, be but Nature there” (Lines 61-63).

“Philomela” by Mathew Arnold (1853)

In “The Nightingale,” Coleridge states that poets should no longer present the nightingale’s song as melancholy, although he also knows that they will continue to do so (“twill not be so” [Line 34]). Sure enough, writing 50 years later, English Victorian poet Matthew Arnold evokes the story of Philomela, and her deep pain carries over into the nightingale’s song. The speaker asks in Line 9, “[W]ill it never heal?” Arnold references a different version of the myth, in which it is Philomela’s sister, Procne, rather than Philomela herself whose tongue is cut out by Tereus.