The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem
The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in April 1798. Originally included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, which he published with William Wordsworth, the poem disputes the traditional idea that nightingales are connected to the idea of melancholy. Instead, the nightingale represents to Coleridge the experience of nature. Midway through the poem, the narrator stops discussing the nightingale in order to describe a mysterious female and a gothic scene. After the narrator is returned to his original train of thought by the nightingale's song, he recalls a moment when he took his crying son out to see the Moon, which immediately filled the child with joy. Critics have found the poem either decent with little complaint or as one of his better poems containing beautiful lines.
Background
The Nightingale was written in April 1798 during the same time Coleridge wrote Fears in Solitude. During this time, Great Britain was at war with France, and the French were planning to invade Britain. News of the planned French invasion led to a wave of alarm spreading through Britain. During April, Coleridge traveled to his childhood home at Ottery and then went to visit William and Dorothy Wordsworth. It was during this time that Coleridge wrote "Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion".The poem was included in a joint publication with William Wordsworth called Lyrical Ballads, which first appeared in 1798. Originally, Coleridge intended to place Lewti, or the Circassian Love-chaunt in the collection. The Nightingale was published in seven other editions but was altered little.
Poem
The poem begins with Milton's line in Il Penseroso about nightingales and then corrects it:The poem introduces Philomela, a character from Greek legend that suffered and whose name was later connected to the nightingale:
The poem introduces a female character that is Gothic and Romantic:
Eventually, the poem discusses Hartley, Coleridge's child. After the child started crying, the narrator takes him out into the night for the poem's conclusion:
Themes
The nightingale is used as an image to begin a topic that was directed towards William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge's friends. The nightingale was used as a sign of melancholy because of its relationship to the legend of Philomela, a rape victim. Although Coleridge corrects the idea of nightingale as melancholic, the poem relies on the tradition and gothic descriptions to guide the poem. Eventually, the nightingale is what brings the narrator back to his topic after diverging from it in a manner similar to John Keats's use in Ode to a Nightingale.Unlike tradition, the nightingales represented an experience that Coleridge had with his friends, the Wordsworths. During the moment within the poem, a female is described that seems to be a combination of Dorothy and the title character of Christabel. There is no mention of Coleridge's wife, Sara, which separates The Nightingale from the other Conversation Poems. The poem does mention their child, Hartley, and an incident in which he saw the moon one night. The scene allows the narrator to return to the domestic and to nature.
After discussing Philomela, the poem lists a series of places that are a possible combination of real places with gothic descriptions. These places include Alfoxden, Enmore Castle, Nether Stowey Castle, and Stogursey Castle along with the grove possibly being connected to Holford Glen or Enmore. The gothic elements of the poem connect it to many of his other works, including Ancient Mariner, "Ballad of the Dark Ladie", Fears in Solitude, France: An Ode, Frost at Midnight, "Three Graves", and "Wanderings of Cain".
Critical response
In statements regarding Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's friend Robert Southey described The Nightingale as "tolerable".In the 20th-century, George Watson writes, "'The Nightingale' has a scattered air, as if it had been written with an altogether exceptional indifference to design and scale." Following this, Geoffrey Yarlott claims, "In The Nightingale, where the metaphysic is played down it is greatly to the improvement of the poem, and there the mature conversational tone duplicates almost perfectly the shifting flow of natural speech and feeling."
Richard Holmes, when referring to Lyrical Ballads, states: "Yet this final, unsatisfactory mixture did allow a significant third element to enter the collection at a later stage: the intimate, blank verse nature meditations which produced two of the finest individual poems — Coleridge's 'The Nightingale' and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'." Rosemary Ashton argues that, "Bantering though this is, and, however, beautiful the final lines about Hartley are, 'The Nightingale' is as a whole a less successful poem than the other conversation poems. It has rather a blank at the centre, just where the others pivot on a significant controlling idea."