Nightingales

Nightingales are small passerine birds of the genus Luscinia, best known for their powerful and beautiful song. The common or rufous nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) is the most widely distributed and best known species. Its range partly overlaps with that of the more northerly thrush nightingale (Luscinia luscinia), a closely related species with which hybrids have occurred.

• I have heard the nightingale herself.
  • King Agesilaus II of Sparta, when asked to listen to a man imitate the nightingale. Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus, 21, 5

• Hark! ah, the nightingale—
  The tawny-throated!
  Hark from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
  What triumph! hark!—what pain!
  * * * * * *
  Listen, Eugenia—
  How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
  Again—thou hearest?
  Eternal passion!
  Eternal pain!
  • Matthew Arnold, Philomela (1853), line 32

• For as nightingales do upon glow-worms feed,
  So poets live upon the living light.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene Home

• As it fell upon a day
  In the merry month of May,
  Sitting in a pleasant shade
  Which a grove of myrtles made,
  Beasts did leap, and birds did sing,
  Trees did grow, and plants did spring;
  Every thing did banish moan,
  Save the nightingale alone.
  • Richard Barnfield, "Address to the Nightingale". Poems in Divers Humours (1598)

• It is the hour when from the boughs
  The nightingale's high note is heard;
  It is the hour when lovers' vows
  Seem sweet in every whisper'd word.
  • Lord Byron, Parisina (1816), Stanza 1

•   The holy nightingale
  Winds up his long, long shakes of ecstasy,
  With notes that seem but the protracted sounds
  Of glassy runnels bubbling over rocks.
  • Thomas Campbell, "The Dead Eagle" (c. 1836)

•        Birds of the wilderness!
     Ye woodland choristers of many dyes!
  Wake ye not in the night at my distress,
     Poured forth more deep than all your melodies?
  How can ye sleep beneath the boundless sea
  Of my soul's grief poured forth in melody?
  • Thomas Holley Chivers, "The Dying Nightingale", in Arthur's Magazine (April 1846) p. 177

• "Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
  A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
  In nature there is nothing melancholy.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nightingale (1798), line 13

• 'Tis the merry nightingale
  That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
  With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
  As he were fearful that an April night
  Would be too short for him to utter forth
  His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
  Of all its music!
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nightingale (1798), line 43

• I said to the Nightingale:
    "Hail, all hail!
  Pierce with thy trill the dark,
  Like a glittering music-spark,
    When the earth grows pale and dumb."
  • Dinah Craik, "A Rhyme About Birds". Poems by the Author of John Halifax, Gent. (Leipzig, 1868)

• Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
    The sweetest singer in all the forest choir,
  Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love’s tale:
    Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.
  • Thomas Dekker, "May-song (The Merry Month of May)", Stanza 3. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600) Act 4, scene 5

• Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales might sing.
  • Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) Chapter 19

• Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours,
    Of winter's past or coming void of care,
    Well pleaséd with delights which present are,
  Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers.
  • William Drummond of Hawthornden, "Sonnet: To a Nightingale". Flowers of Sion (1623)

• Vox, philomela, tua cantus edicere cogit,
     Inde tui laudem rustica lingua canit.
  • Your voice, nightingale, compels one to make songs,
    So my poor tongue begins to sing your praise.
  • Eugenius II of Toledo, Vox philomela (Carmen philomelaicum) lines 1–2 (tr. Gerald Brenan, 1951)

• Like a wedding-song all-melting
  Sings the nightingale, the dear one.
  • Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, "Donna Clara". Translated by E. A. Bowring, The Poems of Heine (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861) p. 79

• The nightingale appear'd the first,
    And as her melody she sang,
  The apple into blossom burst,
    To life the grass and violets sprang.
  • Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, "New Spring", No. 9. Translated by E. A. Bowring (1861) p. 169

• Where the nightingale doth sing
  Not a senseless, tranced thing,
  But divine melodious truth.
  • John Keats, "Ode (Bards of Passion and of Mirth)" (1820)

• Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
     No hungry generations tread thee down;
  The voice I hear this passing night was heard
     In ancient days by emperor and clown.
  • John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819)

• Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
  Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
  In the next valley-glades:
  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
  Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
  • John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"

• Soft as Memnon's harp at morning,
  To the inward ear devout,
  Touched by light, with heavenly warning
  Your transporting chords ring out.
  Every leaf in every nook,
  Every wave in every brook,
  Chanting with a solemn voice
  Minds us of our better choice.
  • John Keble, "The Nightingale". The Christian Year (1827)

• To-night, beneath an operatic moon
  I listened to the flattered nightingale,
  Ornate, melodious, impeccable—
  Round notes of fluted silver soft as dew—
  The soul of Tennyson become a bird.
  • Richard Le Gallienne, "The Nightjar". New Poems (1910) p. 87

• To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
  The nightingale is singing from the steep.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Keats". The Masque of Pandora (1875)

• What bird so sings, yet does so wail?
  O, 'tis the ravish'd nightingale—
  Jug, jug, jug, jug—tereu—she cries,
  And still her woes at midnight rise.
  • John Lyly, "The Songs of Birds". Alexander and Campaspe (1584) Act V, scene 1

• Sweet bird that shunn'st the noise of folly,
  Most musical, most melancholy!
  Thee, chauntress, oft, the woods among,
  I woo, to hear thy even-song.
  • John Milton, Il Penseroso (1631) line 61

• O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
  Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still;
  Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill
  While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.
  • John Milton, "Sonnet: To the Nightingale". Poems (1645, '73)

• Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day
  First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill,
  Portend success in love.
  • John Milton, "Sonnet: To the Nightingale"

• —————As the wakeful bird
  Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
  Tunes her nocturnal note.
• John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674) Book III

• Yon nightingale, whose strain so sweetly flows,
  Mourning her ravish'd young or much-loved mate,
  A soothing charm o'er all the valleys throws
  And skies, with notes well tuned to her sad state.
  • Petrarch, "Sonnet XLIII: To Laura in Death" [Quel rosignuol che sì soave piagne]. Translated by Thomas Campbell and others, Sonnets, Triumps, and Other Poems (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1859) p. 268

• Have ye seen the ethereal blue
  Gently shedding silvery dew,
  Spangling o’er the silent green,
  While the nightingale, unseen,
  To the moon and stars, full bright,
  Lonesome chants the hymn of night?
  • Ambrose Philips, "The Happy Swain", Stanza 2. The Sports of the Muses; or, A Minute's Mirth for any Hour of the Day, vol. 1 (London: M. Cooper, 1752) pp. 15-16

• The sunrise wakes the lark to sing,
  The moonrise wakes the nightingale.
  Come, darkness, moonrise, everything
  That is so silent, sweet, and pale:
  Come, so ye wake the nightingale.
  • Christina G. Rossetti, "Bird Raptures"

• Hark! that's the nightingale,
  Telling the self-same tale
  Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
  So echoes answered when her song was sung
  In the first wooded vale.
  • Christina G. Rossetti, "Twilight Calm", Stanza 7

• Ἦρος ἄγγελος ἰμερόφωνος ἀήδων.
  • The angel of spring, the mellow-throated nightingale.
  • Sappho, Fragment 39. Reported in Hoyt's (1922) p. 558
    • Compare, Jonson, The Sad Shepherd (1641) Act II, Scene vi:

      I grant the linnet, lark, and bullfinch sing,
      But best the dear good angel of the spring,
      The nightingale.

• O Nightingale,
  Cease from thy enamoured tale.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Scenes from the 'Magico Prodigioso' of Calderon", Scene 3. Posthumous Poems (1824)

• One nightingale in an interfluous wood
  Satiate the hungry dark with melody.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Woodman and the Nightingale"

• The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
  When every goose is cackling, would be thought
  No better a musician than the wren.
  How many things by season season'd are
  To their right praise, and true perfection!
  • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s) Act V, scene 1, line 104

• Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
  It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
  That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear;
  Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree:
  Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597) Act III, scene 5, line 1

• 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 her pipe in growth of riper days.
  • William Shakespeare, Sonnet 102, lines 5-8

• The nightingale as soon as April bringeth
    Unto her rested sense a perfect waking,
  While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth,
    Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making.
  And mournfully bewailing,
    Her throat in tunes expresseth
    What grief her breast oppresseth.
  • Sir Philip Sidney, "Song (O Philomela Fair)". The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, 10th ed. (1655) p. 521

• Where beneath the ivy shade,
  In the dew-besprinkled glade,
  Many a love-lorn nightingale,
  Warbles sweet her plaintive tale.
  • Sophocles, Œdipus Coloneus. Translation by Thomas Francklin (1753)

• Lend me your song, ye Nightingales! O, pour
  The mazy-running soul of melody
  Into my varied verse.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Spring (1728), line 574

• En la huerta nasce la rosa:
  quiérome ir allá
  por mirar al ruiseñor cómo cantavá.
  • The rose looks out in the valley,
    And thither will I go,
    To the rosy vale, where the nightingale
    Sings his song of woe.
  • Gil Vicente, "The Nightingale", as translated by John Bowring in Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), p. 316

• Under der linden
  An der heide,
  Dâ unser zweier bette was,
  Dâ muget ir vinden
  Schône beide
  Gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
  Vor dem walde in einem tal,
  Tandaradei,
  Schône sanc diu nahtegal.
  • —Under the linden,
    On the meadow,
    Where our bed arranged was,
    There now you may find e'en
    In the shadow
    Broken flowers and crushed grass.
    —Near the woods, down in the vale,
    Tandaradi!
    Sweetly sang the nightingale.
  • Walter von der Vogelweide, "Under the Linden", translated by A. E. Kroeger, The Minnesinger of Germany (1873) p. 130

• Last night the nightingale woke me,
  Last night, when all was still.
  It sang in the golden moonlight,
  From out the woodland hill.
  • Christian Winther, Sehnsucht. Translation used by Marzials in his song, Last Night

• Philomela · Procne
• John Legg, "Natural History of the Nightingale", in The Lady's Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion &c. vol. 10 (1779) pp. 402-405; 528-531