A Few Words of Introduction:
Of late, the time required by my day job has left me with so little to dedicate to newsletters that an open invitation to my friends and colleagues has gone out in the hope that the respite provided by expected guests will afford me the time to not discontinue them entirely. So, as you can well imagine, I was delighted when Imola Unger replied to my invitation.
No stranger to the strange land that constitutes the geography of the site, she has often contributed help and thoughts. Texts insightful, thought-provoking, impeccably researched, grammatically irreproachable, and always delivered with illustrations and captions. A perfect guest.
(Guest writers always find the welcome mat out. I leave a light on as well, sometimes there’s even coffee.)
And, as you’ll see, like the nightingale, Imola has a voice distinctly her own.
When I first thought of writing a piece on nightingales, I was listening to this playing live outside my window. I realize that perhaps “velvet” is the wrong word to use: aside from the pleasant, smooth association, it has an almost adhesive, heavy quality to it. Nothing could be further from the effortless trill of the nightingale: bubbling like a forest stream, scented as the air in May, as full of light as the night around it is devoid of it. It was an elated, inexplicably peaceful sensation.
It was not a particularly pleasant time in my life and it was soothing to let that airy song fill my senses. I was reminded of the story of the Chinese emperor from whose bedside Death itself had departed upon hearing the song of the nightingale. Hans Christian Andersen, was it? I seemed to recall night-colored illustrations by none other than Edmund Dulac. And didn’t it make an appearance in numerous other narratives, all somewhat dark and painfully sweet? I quickly began to list in my mind the stories where the nocturnal bird lets its trills be heard—and consequently, fates change, within the beat of a wing.
The Nightingale
The nightingale is an insectivorous alar biped. Furthermore, it’s a migratory, nocturnal oviparous passerine. Now you have a pretty good idea where to place it but here are some photos of it anyway, just in case.
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Its plumage is an understated, unremarkable brownish gray. Its singing, however, is extraordinary and inimitable, even inconceivable to the human mind. So much so that in the history of mankind, countless stories emerged explaining what this simple little creature owes its phenomenal voice to. The explanatory myths, however, have been consistently wrong in one aspect: they all attribute the sweet song to the throat of a female bird, whereas it is the males whose mating song delights us so. The female nightingales are silent.
“One legend about the origin of this bird features a fickle shepherdess who keeps postponing her wedding date. Her fiancé, driven to distress and sleeplessness by her inconsistency, magically turns her into a nightingale and curses her with the same insomnia her delays have caused him.”1
It is remarkable that transforming into a nightingale is meant as punishment in this story, and it is not the only one, either. It makes one wonder what seems so miserable about the bird’s condition as to make it so highly undesirable for humans, but aside from its “insomniac” nature (which does indeed constitute some of the worst suffering for most of us humans), nothing comes to mind.
The nightingale’s seeming inability to sleep gave rise to superstitions. It was thought that if someone drank a potion with the eyes of a nightingale hidden in it, “[they] would soon die of sleeplessness.”2 It was also believed that by eating its heart, one would inherit its magical artistic powers, envied by many a poet and musician (though I’m sure that some people would dispute whether their talent is a blessing or a curse). In ancient Greek, they went so far as to make the words for “poet(ry)” and “nightingale” interchangeable (aedon)3.
The nightingale has indeed tickled human fancy since Greek times. One of the earliest appearances of the bird is a tale in Hesiod’s poem “Works and Days.” The fable was later picked up by Aesop again, and it bore the title “The Hawk and the Nightingale,” but it also lived on in La Fontaine’s “The Kite and the Nightingale.” The story is very simple: a nightingale is seized by a predator bird, and when it cries out in terror, the capturer responds:
“Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or else let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.”
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Like Andersen’s story referenced (far) below, the hawk’s tale also tells of a golden era of innocence overshadowed by the practical and tangible aspects of an industrial age. A certain version of the story recounts the nightingale’s offer to delight the hawk/kite with its song in exchange for its life; an idea that the predator scornfully dismisses. The moral of the story is: “an empty stomach has no ear.” A surprisingly learned Wikipedia article calls it “a statement against the intangibility of art” as well as “a lesson in practicality.” It is almost endearing to think that what we consider an uncorrupt era of pastoral Greek bliss was seen by Hesiod as an already contaminated state of mankind. His concept of a “golden age” went even further back in history; and theirs, in turn, even further. (It does give one the uncomfortable notion that we have not advanced in all these millennia as far as we aspired to. Well, at least the golden age is before us rather than in the distant past.)
This was also the period when the story of Procne and Philomela was first sung (though the version I’m recounting here4 is based on a Roman retelling of the tale). Philomela, on the way to visit her sister, was captured and raped by her brother-in-law, the King of Thrace, who consequently locked her into a cabin in the woods, where he continued to abuse and beat her. As a precaution, he cut out her tongue lest she should be able to share her misery.
(I cannot resist a little detour here: she was deprived of what was perceived as her greatest power and sharpest weapon: speaking. It is strange to think that the idea continues to live on today in the form of jokes about women’s gossiping, a weapon that indeed seems successful at keeping men away…)
Philomela, however, found a way to send word to her sister by way of a tapestry she wove, depicting the horrors she had endured. (And yet another short deviation from the storyline: weaving, sewing and spinning frequently crop up in tales as the occupations relegated for women. Think about Snow White’s mother sewing by the wintry window; Penelope weaving by day and undoing by night, waiting in loyalty for her husband Odysseus to return; or the industrious girl in the story of Mother Holle, spinning by the fountain. [We shouldn’t dismiss the Parcae either, for that matter; three women pulling the strings of life, the Fates. {Soon there will be no parentheses for me to use. «Though I hope that doesn’t come to pass.»}] Since the monotony of these activities was often made more endurable by sharing tales, the idea of storytelling is deeply interwoven with them [pun intended]. (This is where expressions such as “to spin a yarn” originate from.)
In the end, the tapestry, deciphered by Procne, indeed contributed to setting Philomela free, and the two sisters plotted a terrible revenge on the King. They fed him his own son, unbeknownst to him. When he discovered what had happened, in his rage he grabbed an axe and attacked the two women. However, to prevent further carnage, Zeus intervened and turned them all into birds. You guessed it; Philomela’s new form took that of a nightingale. (Actually, and this is the last parenthesis in this heading, I promise, in Ovid’s version it is Procne that is turned into a nightingale, but for convenience’s sake let us just assume I referred to other versions.) As the Greek legend has us believe, the doleful aria of the bird is nothing other than Philomela’s voice regained, ever singing about her adversity. This tale is the reason why the nightingale is often called philomel in poetry.
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In classic literature, the nightingale’s little breast heaves with the melodies of melancholy love. According to Wikipedia, Philomel’s tale was a great contributor to this notion: “because of the violence associated with the myth, the nightingale’s song was long interpreted as a lament.” In consequent centuries the nightingale sings of feelings unrequited, love unfulfilled or otherwise made impossible. The classic example is Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, where the small songbird offers its own life for the happiness of a young man. Witnessing his misery because he cannot find a red rose to bring to his beloved, the bird lets a thorn pierce its breast and heart. Combined with the power of its most beautiful song, the blood flowing from its heart creates a magical red rose on a dead bush. If you think the detailed description of the thorn pushing deeper into the bird’s chest is cruel, wait until you find out the ending. The girl throws the rose away and informs the student that she decided to go to the ball with a richer man. There’s some crude naturalism for you. (I’m almost sure Oscar Wilde never woke to the nightingale’s song on a spring night.) It does contribute to mythologizing the bird, though.
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Not every tale of love in which the nightingale features is woebegone, however. The classic disconsolate tone in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is sharply contrasted with the description of the bird’s cheery summer song, blissfully unaware of the “leaden-eyed despairs” of humans and the suffering that sheer breathing constitutes. The gloom reaches its pinnacle in the following lines:
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
The first line is a shocker. Its brevity and minimalism of expression yield a brutal impact. Its darkness would defy the mirth imparted by the birdsong that is referred to. Fortunately, we are anchored in romanticism now, and naturally, the “full-throated ease” of the nightingale triumphs over the lugubriousness of the human listener. Almost as if Keats had to keep his spirits under control, though, he does manage to sneak in some spleenful “gloom.” But aside from that, it is a deeply beautiful image, really; summer breezes blowing light into a mossy green nocturnal forest scene. (I hope you noticed the rhythm.) The sky, imbued with supernatural mysticism, becomes heaven; and the nightingale (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”) ceases to be a transient creature. Yet it is not a pedestal of poesy that he elevates the bird onto. I believe he fell under the spell of the same sense of unjustifiable beauty that the originators of ancient legends were possessed by. It was not a metaphor of “joy against all odds” or even poetic eloquence that he perceived in the bird’s unremarkable appearance and majestic song. He rather saw the physical bird itself as something magical and ever present in the world, far above human concerns and misery.
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.
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W.J. Neatby: Illustration of Ode to a Nightingale. From: A Day With Keats by May Clarissa Gillington. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913. (Part of the “Days with Poets” series)
And an emperor it was, indeed, that elevated the healing powers of the birdsong to new heights, and made the nightingale myth widely known to children all around the world. Its Lebensfreude and majestic singing, in stark contrast to its plain appearance, is what Andersen investigates in his story called (unsurprisingly) “The Nightingale”. The emperor of China (as foreseen by Keats, who preceded Andersen by half a century) found out from foreign reports of his own country that all else in it pales next to the marvel that is the nightingale, a creature he had never heard of. In a remote corner of his gardens (that he has never been to) a maid revealed to his gentlemen and ladies-in-waiting the usual dwelling place of the little bird, who was subsequently taken to the emperor.
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Edmund Dulac: I have not been able to locate the title of the first image, but it’s the same scene as Pedersen’s illustration. The second Dulac image is titled The Same Gurgling. The gurgling refers to the voice of the nightingale: the ladies-in-waiting took water into their mouths to reproduce the birdsong. How presumptuous.
Its songs brought tears of joy into his eyes, a feat that the nightingale considered its greatest reward. The bird was then held in captivity to delight the emperor and his court at any and all times, until a package came from Japan. It contained a manmade replica of the real nightingale, studded with gems and precious stones and able to sing one of the nightingale’s songs5.
Then they had to sing together, but they did not get on very well, for the real nightingale sang in its own way, and the artificial one could only sing waltzes.
“There is no fault in that,” said the music-master; “it is perfectly in time and correct in every way!”6
And while the entire court listened to the standardized song of the artificial nightingale with delight, the real bird took flight and left the palace. The music master reasoned that the reliability and predictability of a human construction was much to be preferred to the capricious, unexpected tunes of the real bird. Here one cannot be so sure there is no metaphor involved, unlike in Keats’s case. And the irony of the present situation does not escape me, either; after all, I began by showing you a digital recording of the nightingale’s song…
There’s another tongue-in-cheek aspect in the story that has a special (though not in any way pleasant) significance for me. Trying to demonstrate the superiority of the manmade machine, “the music master wrote five-and-twenty volumes about the artificial bird; the treatise was very long and written in all the most difficult Chinese characters.” I hope I do not resemble the poor fellow with the present long-winded commentary. (And in my defence, there is always the urge to use select words when addressing an audience trained on John’s newsletters.)
Needless to say, the artificial bird broke at one point (to modern ears, an allusion to the unsustainability of our machine-based lifestyle, or perhaps a reference to the planned obsolescence conspiracy). But the most precious twist in the tale is certainly the moment when the real nightingale returns to the deathbed of the emperor to sing him back to life. Surrounding his bed are his own deeds in the form of talking faces (certainly an eerie idea, depicted by Vilhelm Pedersen, Andersen’s first illustrator, who was best known for his illustrations of this tale. Thankfully, Dulac spared us that spectacle at least; though his maniac, slightly Mayan-inspired Death is alarming, to say the least). To suppress the accusatory voices, the emperor calls for music.
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A photograph of Vilhelm Pedersen, who made the illustrations for the first edition of Andersen’s Eventyr og historier (Fairy Tales and Stories)
“Suddenly, close to the window, there was a burst of lovely song; it was the living nightingale, perched on a branch outside. It had heard of the emperor’s need, and had come to bring comfort and hope to him. As it sang the faces round became fainter and fainter […]. Even Death himself listened to the song and said, ‘Go on, little nightingale, go on!’”
I find it an especially beautiful touch that the nightingale did not drive Death away by singing something unbearably lively, but by evoking the subdued mourning atmosphere of the cemetery that “brought to Death a longing for his own garden.” It is a bird of longing, after all. To the emperor it sang of healing and of vivacity, “and the blood coursed with fresh vigour in the emperor’s veins and through his feeble limbs.”
Others, far earlier in history, also dedicated tributes to the bird’s gleeful, lively trills instead of perceiving only melancholy tones in its song. Sappho, for example, in a poetic fragment, evokes the nightingale’s joyful aspect, calling it “the messenger of spring, the sweet voiced nightingale.” … [The bird’s song] connotes not only heartache and grief, but also renewed vitality; not only autumnal melancholy, but also springtime rejoicing.”7
It is this springtime rejoicing that Chaucer invokes in “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” telling of a night in early May; a reference to the then well-known superstition that the nightingale is a good omen.
But as I lay this other night waking,
I thought how lovers had a tokening,
And among them it was a common tale,
That it were good to hear the nightingale
Rather than the lewd cuckoo sing.
He describes an early spring scene where he witnesses a row between the two birds. The cuckoo (a bad omen) condemns love as a source of suffering, while the little nightingale, a champion of passion, reassures the poet that he should pay no heed to the cuckoo’s words.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge openly contradicts the gloomy symbolism usually associated with the bird, referencing a line by Milton:
“’Most musical, most melancholy” bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
(…)
First named these notes a melancholy strain.
(The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, lines 13–22)
The stanza is very much in line with Keats’s belief that suffering is very human and egocentric; the little songbird perched upon a branch is far above it, literally and figuratively. Besides, these lines were a source of personal pride for me: I was not as self-centered as the man in the poem, after all. As I was listening to the trills that night in early May, all I could hear was playfulness, zest for life; and, yes, the nightingale’s enjoyment of hearing its own song.
The Mistle Thrush
The nightingale was generally seen as a symbol for love and longing, but also a good omen; a feature it shares with the mistle thrush, often a symbol of protection and guidance in tales. I had just read and reread a few stories featuring either of the birds and was musing on their similarities. When I started researching the subject, I realized that the nightingale is a member of the thrush family. Now, there’s a link worth investigating, I thought. The following brief detour is the result.
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In The Secret Garden8, Mary has an internal struggle whether she may entrust the secret of the garden’s existence to her new friend Dickon. Turning back from the gate, she voices her worries, to which his reassuring reply is:
“If tha’ was a missel thrush an’ showed me where thy nest was, does tha’ think I’d tell any one? Not me,” he said. “Tha’ art as safe as a missel thrush.”
And she was quite sure she was.
Mary was not disappointed in Dickon: the mistle thrush, a good omen, kept her secret safe; just like it did the entrance to the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit. On Thror’s map, in moon-letters, the instructions to the gate said: “stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks” and the setting sun will illuminate the entrance. So it happened: just when the company’s morale had sunken to unprecedented lows, the guidance of the thrush filled them with hope and joy once again. “There on the grey stone in the grass was an enormous thrush, nearly coal black, its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots. Crack! It had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone. (…) The old thrush, who had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes and head cocked on one side, gave a sudden trill.” And to the birdsong, “a flake of rock split from the wall and fell,” revealing the entrance to the depths of the mountain.9
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Following a prophecy that was several centuries old, a bird showed the whereabouts of the secret gate to the company of dwarves. It appeared to be cracking a snail open, unsuspecting and acting as it would in nature, but its action became supernatural in that it complied with the prophecy. In The Secret Garden, it was yet another small passerine, a robin, also formerly classed as a thrush family member, that showed Mary the entrance to the garden. Now, what is it about the Turdidae family? Is there some kind of thrush conspiracy going on? They must have realized we are in on the secret and they lead us to re-class them, I should think…
Yes, birds were believed to represent souls in various belief systems. Owls, doves, eagles and ravens all had their supernatural powers and mythological significance. But why isn’t, say, the stork a legendary bird? Just what is it about these tiny songbirds? For the beauty of their song is the only distinguishing (and uniting) feature I could find about the former and present family members of the Turdidae: “[t]he songs of some species (…) are considered to be among the most beautiful in the avian world.”10 Is it really their ability to sing that bestows supernatural powers on them in human imagination?
Summary of a Birdsong
There is an intrinsic need in us humans to trace anything so exquisitely beautiful as the nightingale’s song back to ourselves. This is some form of self-verification, perhaps; reassurance that we ARE the most artistic and refined creatures on the planet. If inexplicable beauty comes along, we have to make it human by devising origin myths (surely, it could only have been a human being that was transformed into the first nightingale), vesting human characteristics into them (such as the ability to feel miserable and self-pitying), or making them engage in human pastimes (singing contests, for example, as Pliny would have us believe). We shape them into the likeness of our own intellectual pursuits (it obviously exists only to be a metaphor of poetry) and we envy their zest for life (even though we could easily have our own). It is very hard to believe, to accept, that something can exist in its own beauty, uninfluenced by us, purely on its own terms. We have made up our comfort of intellectual and artistic refinement, our convenience of machines and devices to aid our lives. Yet our problems and questions have been the same for thousands of years, and none of our inventions and constructs have offered solace or solution.
There is that unsightly little bird singing in the pitch black night; a bird who should know better, for night is when the hunters are out; and disregarding all darkness and danger, it sings full-throatedly of the joy of being alive in this instant. For millennia we have tried to explain it away with myths and biological observation, decipher it through the language of poetry and love, interpret it with gender studies and class questions; and the bottom line is so freakishly simple, it is almost unacceptable, almost dumb. Because, really, it is all about lying in bed on an early spring night, accepting the indescribable beauty unquestioningly through your pores, being at peace, and “feeling the blood course with fresh vigour in your veins.”
Footnotes:
1. Octarium Salutes Nature Program Notes.
2. Squidoo entry on bird symbolism
3. Jeni Williams: Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and Histories. 1997
4. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 4.
5. In truth, each specimen knows a variety of songs.
6. H.C. Andersen: The Nightingale.
7. James C. McKusick: The Return of the Nightingale
8. By Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gutenberg Project version
9. J.R.R.Tolkien: The Hobbit, p. 268. HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2008. Illustrations by Alan Lee. The other one.
10. Thrush (bird) entry on Wikipedia.
Text © Imola Unger. Used with permission
Following the newsletter about Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, we received a photograph of her memorial, added here as a fitting postscript to the story of her life and work.
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Sincere thanks to Robert Stephenson, from “The Friends of Brompton Cemetery, for the photo.
