96POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEthe nightingale does not produce a single identifiable melody—a
repeated series of notes or warbles like the cuckoo or the wood thrush—
but a wide range of pleasing sounds, not unlike the American mocking-
bird.^25 (The nightingale produces its variety in dialogue with other
nightingales, while the mockingbird produces its impressive range
by paying attention to the host of other bird species it encounters). As
music, one identifies nightingale vocalizations not as melodies but by
recognizing consistency of variability—a range, tonality, and timbre—a
bit like identifying the music of a favorite band, as opposed to just know-
ing a single song.
Even as Coleridge’s poem presents a host of problems involved with
understanding birdsong (including the almost automatic response of
turning it into a human symbol), it also acknowledges that ultimately
these songs produce in us an immediate emotional response (usually of
pleasure and happiness, as Coleridge insists, correcting Milton) and a sec-
ondary desire to understand something about them. As David Rothen-
berg has shown, though we cannot know fully why birds sing, we know
that there must be multiple reasons, such as demonstrating fitness in
attracting mates, defining territory, and pleasure, and that these rea-
sons are part of the meaning of birdsong. That we normally define
birdsong by species suggests we are already aware that songs operate
semiotically within a specific community and that we are eavesdrop-
pers. On a larger scale, birdsong is culturally significant for us because
it is vivid evidence of animal life around us; we hear birds as much as
we see them, and the beauty of these songs (their aesthetic surplus for us)
is a tangible sign of something in nature beyond mere survival, func-
tion, and evolution. All these reasons help to explain why there are so
many poems about birds and birdsong; although these poems reflect the
desire to anchor the lyric moment in an analogous natural form, they
also point to an awareness of birdsong’s complexity and profundity,
an awareness we can see stretching back into classical poetry and more
recently in Rachel Carson’s invocation of its power in Silent Spring.
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is probably the best-known poem
about birdsong in English, though it actually describes only the speaker’s
own experience and desires in response to the nightingale’s singing. It