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. Send us feedback about these examples.Nightingale of ancient Uglich (Source: cheloVechek / talk, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons) These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'nightingale.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2022 If Elvis Presley was the lovable dodo, Roy Orbison was a nightingale if Jerry Lee Lewis was the virtuoso magpie, Johnny Cash was-well, a kind of crow, a spectral oddity with dubious pipes. Matt Wake | al, The constant intermingling of the BBC’s journalists and the country’s political class means that bust-ups are as predictable as the nightingale in spring. Stephen Humphries, The Christian Science Monitor, 6 June 2022 His nightingale vocals set a beautiful tone for the night. 2022 For example, Ludwig van Beethoven’s 6th Symphony simulates a cuckoo with a clarinet, a nightingale with a flute, and a quail with an oboe. 2022 Starting in May, 1924, the BBC played a nightingale’s song every spring for almost twenty years. 2022 For her pains, the gods transmuted her into a nightingale. 2021 And clarinetist Chernyshev lovingly shaped nocturnal music representing the song of the nightingale. Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Nov. Recent Examples on the Web Data from over 50 years from bird sighting retreats in Africa and Spain's South Coast revealed that between 19, European migratory birds-like the willow warbler, garden warbler, and the nightingale-were arriving at their overwintering spots in Africa later in the fall.
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