94POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEdramatically apparent.^23 The speaker’s curious response is not sponta-
neous feeling or insight but a quotation from Milton’s “Il Penseroso”:
“ ‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird.” Though the speaker immedi-
ately rejects the quotation as wrong about the bird, a vain projection by
a melancholic poet, we can think of the quotation as an analogy for
nightingale music—a spontaneous utterance that repeats and reflects
(onomatopoeically) the language of another poet, prompted by the bird’s
own music—the poet’s own “chirping.” The speaker understands the
spontaneous quotation as a failure to respond appropriately to the bird,
however, and insists instead that “in Nature there is nothing melan-
choly,” and so the song must be
always full of love
And joyance! ’Tis the merry Nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warbles 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!That Coleridge manages to slide back to the idea of melancholy—that
the bird’s song still invokes potential loss, and that it is always a kind
of “disburthening”—suggests the power of the convention the poem
begins with and the impossibility of an unmediated and transparent
translation of birdsong. The bird’s song continues to be an empty cipher
into which the poet can pour his own meaning, which the rest of the
poem enacts by drifting into various memories and fantasies that explic-
itly take him further away from the immediacy of this bird’s song. One
of these is a memory or fantasy of another instance when he heard a
group of nightingales singing to each other, which actually leads to a
more complete description of the birds’ singing.
They answer and provoke each other’s song,
With skirmish and capricious passagings,