Ode to a thrush? Why Keats plumped for a nightingale
IF anyone could get away with poetic licence, it was John Keats.
When he composed his Ode to a Nightingale, one of the most-loved poems in English literature, he was actually writing an ode to a thrush, researchers say.
In the April volume of The Keats-Shelley Review, Dr Judith Chernaik presents what she describes as “unassailable evidence” that challenges the recollection of Keats’s friend Charles Brown, who said that inspiration came to the poet in spring 1819 when a nightingale built her nest at Wentworth Place, his home in Hampstead, north-west London.
Years later, Brown wrote: “Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand… Those scraps… contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale… This was his Ode to a Nightingale.”
Dr Chernaik told The Sunday Telegraph that the account had been repeated in the biographies, yet the evidence showed “all of that is invented”. She argues: “It is strange to think of Keats composing his poem in the morning, when the ode presents itself so convincingly as a night piece… What is surely questionable is the claim that the ode was inspired by the song of a nightingale nesting near the house. Nightingales are famously secretive, nesting by preference in woodland undergrowth. They do not nest near houses. Nor is it the nesting female who sings.”
“As in all his greatest poetry, Keats seamlessly combines intense personal feelings, literary inspiration and realistic observation… it does not take a professional ornithologist to know that it is the male nightingale who sings.”
The thrush is a popular garden songbird. Dr Chernaik said: “Keats loved thrushes. It’s thrushes that he knew. But the nightingale is the poetic bird.”
Keats mentions nightingales in his poems, she says, while his letters refer to thrushes and other common birds. She concludes that Brown’s famous account is “demonstrably fictional”: “It might mean rewriting the biographies.”