Listening to the Nightingale

Abstract

IGHTINGALES appear so often in English and European poems that their associations of sweetness and romance have sunk to the level of banality; because of this, attempts are rarely made to see any further relevance in the use of the bird. But the fact that more modern poets have found their stimulus in reality, like Keats,' or in classical antiquity, like Arnold or Eliot, should not conceal the existence of a common, traditional use of the nightingale as a symbol, popular throughout the Middle Ages and well into the seventeenth century. A knowledge of this tradition helps us to understand many poems, and gives an especially fresh realization of the skill displayed by the poet of The Owl and the Nightingale. Probably the most striking fact about the poetic use of nightingales is its sudden popularity, a tradition seemingly created out of nowhere. During the Dark Ages there are a few rhetorical references ;2 then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, poets all over Europe are stimulated to use it as a theme, and with a strange unanimity in the handling of it that suggests some source more fixed than merely personal reaction. An English poet of the Harley Lyrics writes a description of spring to begin his love poem: