Poetry and Animals

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE95

And murmurs musical and swift jug jug,

And one low piping sound more sweet than all—

Stirring the air with such a harmony,

That should you close your eyes, you might almost

Forget it was not day.

Like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” this passage recollects a moment of
being absorbed in the act of listening to birdsong, an ecstasy the speaker
is unable to attain listening to the single bird. Here, though, the possi-
bility of fully inhabiting the music, of “know[ing] all their notes” is
deferred to a mysterious “gentle Maid” who lives near “the castle,”
rather than enacted through an imagined embodiment through music,
as in Keats’s ode. Yet for all the poem’s deflections and wanderings, it
vividly reproduces the emotion birdsong can produce in human listen-
ers, which leads to the project of attempting to represent the animal,
of translating its language into our own. It reflects, that is, both joy and
melancholy: joy at the presence of animal song and melancholy at its
alien, untranslatable nature. The listener’s desire is for direct contact
with animal being through a full apprehension of its music as a kind
of language, which would give an unmediated connection with the nat-
ural world. The poem’s deferrals signal the failure of the project.^24 The
poem’s final image is a memory of the poet’s infant child, “who, capable
of no articulate sound, / Mars all things with his imitative lisp.” It is only
in silence, and thus more perfectly in a prelinguistic, preconscious state,
that the child can enact a spontaneous and joyous response to nightin-
gale song, suggesting that it is forever beyond the reach of the poet and
his audience. The child’s babbling is more like birdsong than the lan-
guage of the poem.
Coleridge’s poem is about the theoretical problem of reading animal
signs and understands these signs (birdsong) as being both species spe-
cific and culturally constructed. Coleridge’s knowledge of the nightin-
gale song consists initially of the ability to identify it, which is simple
because the nightingale is the rare bird that sings expansively at night
(the symbolic significance of which has of course made it poetry’s favor-
ite bird). Identifying the song is complicated, however, by the fact that