POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE97is worth remembering that Keats composed the poem after listening
to nightingales singing, as we know both from the poem and from
Charles Brown’s record of its composition.^26 The complexity of the
nightingale’s singing is mimicked by the complexity of the poem itself.
Each nightingale is a distinct singer/performer, and each performance
is unique, not just a symbol of endless creativity, but an example of it,
which the poem notes by being addressed to “a Nightingale” rather than
“the Nightingale.” The melancholy the speaker describes in the poem’s
first stanza is not that of the bird or its song (the speaker insists on the
bird’s happiness), but the result of the speaker’s awareness of the gap
between the bird’s song and the poet’s consciousness. Being “too happy
in thine happiness” suggests sudden self-consciousness or perhaps
simply the end of the bird’s song—the end, in any case, of living in the
moment of perception, which is intensely a moment of identification.^27
The gap that produces melancholy is the distance between the bird and
the speaker: its spontaneous creativity and his labor, its music and his
language. The poem describes the process of how a desire to return to
this initial intensity of identification with the bird leads to a literal flight
of fancy, an entirely fictive experience of becoming the bird.
While the bird’s song certainly is idealized in the poem as a form of
natural beauty, as Helen Vendler argues,^28 it is also a real sign of the
bird’s existence, which has its own infidel truth. The poem’s speaker has
read the bird’s song as an elaborate sign for the condition of being
the bird, its umwelt—its own subjective experience of living in the
world—and it is this experience that the speaker desires. In this sense,
the poem’s climax occurs in the fourth and fifth stanzas, which describe
the poet’s imagining of the bird’s world, as inspired both by the song
and the speaker’s own sensory impressions of the world around him.
He achieves this leap on the “viewless wings of poesy,” which includes a
flight of imagination and a high degree of negative capability but is pro-
duced in the poem, he insists, by actual experience, even if this is neces-
sarily translated into and through artifice.
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,