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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.
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 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]
The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". The term was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well.
When The Nightingale Sings is a Middle English poem, author unknown, recorded in the British Library's Harley 2253 manuscript, verse 25. It is a love poem, extolling the beauty and lost love of an unknown maiden.
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."
"Ode to a Nightingale" is the longest of the 1819 odes with 8 stanzas containing 10 lines each. The poem begins by describing the state of the poet, using negative statements to intensify the description of the poet's physical state such as "numbless pains" and "not through envy of thy happy lot" (lines 1–5).