Coleridge did away with the idea that nightingale song was melancholic, claiming that nothing in nature is sorrowful and the association is nothing more than a heartbroken lover’s narcissistic projections that was copied by other writers: King Pandion, their father, gives Procne in marriage to Tereus, liberator of Athens. Tereus and Procne leave for Thrace, the homeland of Tereus. It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it, but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether anyone listens to it or not.” Soren Kierkegaard What does the nightingale symbolize? Her father was the ruler of a city called "Tantalis" or "the city of Tantalus", or as "Sipylus", in reference to Mount Sipylus at the foot of which his city was located and whose ruins were reported to be still visible in the beginning of the 1st century C.E although few traces remain today. She was already mentioned in Homer's Iliad which relates her proud hubris, for which she was punished by Leto, who sent Apollo and Artemis, with the loss of all her children, and her nine days of abstention from food during which time her children lay unburied. Once the gods interred them, she retreated to her native Sipylus, "where Nymphs dance around the River Acheloos, and although being a stone, she broods over the sorrows sent from the Gods". For this unit, we are working on a scripted piece called The Love of a Nightingale by Timberlake Wertenbaker. 'It is an adaptation of the Ancient Greek legend of the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus, and the gruesome revenge undertaken by Philomela and her sister Procne. The play takes a feminist look at the ancient tale.'

The beauty of the nightingale's song is a theme in Hans Christian Andersen's story " The Nightingale" from 1843. [29] In Odysseus’ story of his travels in The Odyssey, he speaks of hearing the beautiful song from a nightingale outside while inside Penelope’s palace where there is only silence. This moment helped him realize that he has found his home again after all these years away from Ithaca and his wife. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet On his return home, Tereus informs Procne that Philomele was drowned on the journey. Five years pass. In the end, Keats realizes that merging with the ‘embalmed darkness’ means dying, giving himself up completely to death, and becoming one of the worlds that he admires, however, it would mean that he can no longer hear the nightingale and would be farther away from beauty. Neither life nor death is acceptable to Keats. He belongs nowhere. With this theme of a loss of pleasure and inevitable death, the poem, according to Claude Finney, describes "the inadequacy of the romantic escape from the world of reality to the world of ideal beauty". [31] Earl Wasserman essentially agrees with Finney, but he extended his summation of the poem to incorporate the themes of Keats's Mansion of Many Apartments when he says, "the core of the poem is the search for the mystery, the unsuccessful quest for light within its darkness" and this "leads only to an increasing darkness, or a growing recognition of how impenetrable the mystery is to mortals." [32] With these views in mind, the poem recalls Keats's earlier view of pleasure and an optimistic view of poetry found within his earlier poems, especially Sleep and Poetry, and rejects them. [33] This loss of pleasure and incorporation of death imagery lends the poem a dark air, which connects "Ode to a Nightingale" with Keats' other poems that discuss the demonic nature of poetic imagination, including Lamia. [34] In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—he uses an abrupt, almost brutal word for it—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination. [35] Reception [ edit ]This common warbler sings by day, often in the same scrubby or open wooded habitats as the nightingale, and it also has a rich, bright, loud voice with real vigour. Matthews, G.M. (1971), Keats: The Critical Heritage, New York: Barnes & Noble, ISBN 0-415-13447-1 . Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 (1808), the "Pastoral Symphony", includes in its second movement flute imitations of nightingale calls.

A nightingale appearing to you in a dream means that you should evaluate any problems you might be having and make a conscious effort to face them head-on. Florence, so aptly named after this bird, was caught up in the Crimean War where she set up a chain of hospital tents to tend to wounded and dying soldiers. The national survey of Nightingales organised by BTO in 1999 estimated the population at 6,700 (5,600-9,400) males, a marked range contraction since the previous survey in 1980, but only an 8% overall population decline ( Wilson et al. 2002. Atlas surveys in 2008-11 found a 43% reduction in occupied 10-km squares since 1968-72, with withdrawal especially from western parts of the range ( Balmer et al. 2013). Results from the most recent Nightingale Survey across Britain in 2012-13 indicated that further decrease has occurred since 1999, with 12 population estimates ranging from 5,094 to 5,938 territorial males ( Hewson et al. 2017). Unlike previous estimates, the 2012-13 estimates also accounted for detectability, so the decline since 1999 is believed to be higher than the figures suggest. In 1976, over 71% of males were associated with woodland, especially coppice and young plantations, but by 2012 this had decreased to 37% and 55% of territories were then in scrub ( Hayhow et al. 2015). A Shore—On a moonlit beach Tereus declares his love for Philomele, quoting the words of Aphrodite from the play. Philomele rejects his proposition as against the law; he rapes her. Niobe recounts her life in a world in which women are brutalised.

Where to see nightingales in the UK

This shows feminism as Philomele is trying to speak about what happened even though she has been silenced by Tereus. She is trying to stand up against him.