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The poem's reliance on the process of sleeping is common to Keats's poems, and "Ode to a Nightingale" shares many of the same themes as Keats' Sleep and Poetry and Eve of St. Agnes. This further separates the image of the nightingale's song from its closest comparative image, the urn as represented in "Ode on a Grecian Urn".
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 ...
The poem revolves around a heated argument between the owl and the nightingale, observed by an unnamed narrator. Initially, the nightingale is seen perched on a branch adorned with blossoms, while the owl sits on an ivy-covered bough above.
The earliest known text is a Broadside ballad titled "The nightingale's song: or The soldier's rare musick, and maid's recreation" published between 1689 and 1709 by W Onley of London, in the Bodleian Ballad Collection. [9] This text has a pious moral at the end which both later publishers and traditional singers dispensed with. [10] [11]
In discussing The Nightingale, Ashton writes 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."
F. W. Bateson emphasized in 1966 the poem's ability to capture truth: "The Ode to a Nightingale had ended with the explicit admission that the 'fancy' is a 'cheat,' and the Grecian Urn concludes with a similar repudiation. But this time it is a positive instead of a negative conclusion.
The third quatrain continues the metaphor of the nightingale and seasonal imagery to further stress that the poet's silence is not because their love is less pleasant. The nightingale is used as a metaphor to explain that just because he does not flatter the Fair Youth, does not mean that he loves less.
The title comes from the Breton word for "nightingale" (eostig), a symbolic figure in the poem. [1] It is the eighth poem in the collection known as the Lais of Marie de France, and the poem is only found in the manuscript known as Harley 978 (also called manuscript H). [1]