The connection between the nightingale and the poet, both as singers, is explored most fully in the Romantic period. Milton also associated the nightingale with lovers, and calls the nightingale’s song “amorous.” Milton, too, frequently mentions the nightingale in “Paradise Lost,” where it appears as a wakeful bird who is hidden in the dark. Perhaps most famously this happens when Romeo and Juliet, after spending their one night together hear a bird, and debate whether it is nightingale or a lark ( “Romeo and Juliet,” 3.5). In English literature, the nightingale is often paired with the lark, the former as the songbird of the night, and the latter the songbird of the morning. Versions of this Ovidian story can be found in Chaucer’s “The Legend of Good Women,” Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” John Keats’s “Eve of St Agnes,” and T.S. The sisters then escape by turning into birds. Her sister comes to rescue her, and then together the two sisters get their revenge by killing Tereus’s son and feeding the flesh to Tereus for dinner.

She manages to contact her sister by weaving a message on her loom. In this version, Philomela is raped by her sister’s husband Tereus, who then cuts out her tongue to prevent her from speaking and locks her in a cottage. Ovid tells a version of the Philomela myth (Philomela was Greek for nightingale) which connects the nightingale to both mourning and violence. But the Greeks also heard something melancholy in the song of the nightingale, and it became associated with mourning. In the “Odyssey,” for example, Homer describes a nightingale singing in the woods “when springtime has just begun” (Odyssey 19.519). Most commonly, the nightingale is understood as a sign of the coming spring, its song ushering in new leaves after the winter. Later, through its link to spring and night, it also became a bird of love.”

It has appeared in many thousands of poems from Homer to the twentieth century, and even in ancient times it acquired an almost formulaic meaning as the bird of spring, of night, and of mourning. As Michael Ferber helpfully explains: “The nightingale has had the most spectacular career of all literary birds. Nightingales are known for the beauty of their song, an impression which perhaps has less to do with the actual noises nightingales make and more to do with their mythic status, promoted throughout history by their association with poetry. Nightingale of ancient Uglich (Source: cheloVechek / talk, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

A nightingale sang in berkeley square