![]() John Keats' " Ode to a Nightingale" pictures the nightingale as an idealized poet who has achieved the poetry that Keats longs to write. The nightingale has a long history with symbolic associations ranging from "creativity, the muse, nature's purity, and, in Western spiritual tradition, virtue and goodness." Coleridge and Wordsworth saw the nightingale more as an instance of natural poetic creation: the nightingale became a voice of nature. For some romantic poets, the nightingale even began to take on qualities of the muse. "Our love was new, and then but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays As Philomel in summer's front doth sing, And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:"ĭuring the Romantic era the bird's symbolism changed once more: poets viewed the nightingale not only as a poet in his own right, but as “master of a superior art that could inspire the human poet”. In Sonnet 102 Shakespeare compares his love poetry to the song of the common nightingale (Philomel): Virgil compares the mourning of Orpheus to the “lament of the nightingale”. Aristophanes's The Birds and Callimachus both evoke the bird's song as a form of poetry. Poets chose the nightingale as a symbol because of its creative and seemingly spontaneous song. The common nightingale has also been used as a symbol of poets or their poetry. Because of the violence associated with the myth, the nightingale's song was long interpreted as a lament. Eliot's " The Waste Land" also evokes the common nightingale's song (and the myth of Philomela and Procne). Ovid, too, in his Metamorphoses, includes the most popular version of this myth, imitated and altered by later poets, including Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and George Gascoigne. This myth is the focus of Sophocles' tragedy, Tereus, of which only fragments remain. ![]() Homer evokes the nightingale in the Odyssey, suggesting the myth of Philomela and Procne (one of whom, depending on the myth's version, is turned into a nightingale ). The common nightingale is an important symbol for poets from a variety of ages, and has taken on a number of symbolic connotations. The bird is a host of the acanthocephalan intestinal parasite Apororhynchus silesiacus. The most characteristic feature of the song is a loud whistling crescendo that is absent from the song of its close relative, the thrush nightingale (Luscinia luscinia). Nightingales sing even more loudly in urban or near-urban environments, in order to overcome the background noise. Singing at dawn, during the hour before sunrise, is assumed to be important in defending the bird's territory. Only unpaired males sing regularly at night, and nocturnal song probably serves to attract a mate. This is why its name includes "night" in several languages. Its song is particularly noticeable at night because few other birds are singing. The song is loud, with an impressive range of whistles, trills and gurgles. Early writers assumed the female sang when it is in fact the male. The name has been used for more than 1,000 years, being highly recognisable even in its Old English form nihtegale, which means "night songstress". Behaviour and ecology Ĭommon nightingales are so named because they frequently sing at night as well as during the day. īy contrast, the European breeding population is estimated at between 3.2 and 7 million pairs, giving it green conservation status ( least concern). A survey conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology in 20 recorded some 3,300 territories, with most of these clustered in a few counties in the southeast of England, notably Kent, Essex, Suffolk, and East and West Sussex. Despite local efforts to safeguard its favoured coppice and scrub habitat, numbers fell by 53 percent between 19. In the U.K., the bird is at the northern limit of its range which has contracted in recent years, placing it on the red list for conservation. annual precipitation less than 750 millimetres (30 in).more than 20 days/year on which temperatures exceed 25 ☌ (77 ☏).mean air temperature during the growing season above 14 ☌ (57 ☏). ![]()
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