Poetry and Animals

98POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;

And mid-May’s eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

The poem asks readers to imagine that the poet has transformed him-
self into the bird he has been listening to. The bird is in the woods at
night, and so vision is limited to what can be seen by the moonlight as
it dapples through swaying tree limbs and leaves. In this “embalmed
darkness” there are only the odors of flowers and other plants, them-
selves the “murmurous haunt of flies.” The poem is an elaborate artifice,
to be sure, an utterly fanciful attempt to translate limited perception of
the bird into poetry. Its absurdity is in claiming to have bridged the gap
between nightingale and human being, marked by the performative leap
“Already with thee,” and that this imagined experience could itself be
so fulfilling that “now more than ever seems it rich to die.” The poem is
not so much about inhabiting the bird (although this is what the imagi-
native flight attempts to enact) as it is about inhabiting its music. The
speaker is transported by song—which the poem attempts to reflect in
part through the recklessness of its famous onomatopoeic effects, in
which sign and signified are fused (like “Cuckoo Song”), marking the
lyric as pushing beyond mere meaning.
While Coleridge’s and Keats’s poems foreground the process of find-
ing meaning in birdsong, many other poems of the period focus more