For a Nightingale

Revered by poets since antiquity, the Nightingale is especially emblematic of the great Romantic poets; including Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats, have all found inspiration in the bird’s “fiery heart” (Wordsworth). Charlotte Smith, perhaps the most despondent of the Romantic poets on account of her tumultuous biography, portrays the nightingale as a “Poor melancholy bird---that all night long/ Tell'st to the Moon, thy tale of tender woe” a “martyr of disastrous love.” Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” contrasts the despair of mankind, “the weariness, the fever, and the fret,” with the nightingale “pouring forth thy soul abroad/ in such ecstacy.” Keat’s too, in his poem, is poaring forth his soul so that his song “wast not born for death” and that no “hungry generations tread thee down” (i.e. his poetry will live on far after his death). Coleridge shares the same sentiments as Keats in his “The Nightingale” as he too wishes to “share in Nature’s immortality, A venerable thing! and so his song/ Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself Be loved like Nature!” Coleridge’s “Nightingale” alludes to the great John Milton with the line “Most musical, most melancholy" from “Il Penseroso.” More than a century before the great Romanticists, John Milton wrote his own nightingale poem “O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray” where Milton extols his own semblance to the bird: “Whether the Muse, or Love call thee his mate, 
Both them I serve, and of their train am I.”