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Friendship is a recurring motif in the poem. The joyful song of the nightingale is heard by the three friends who listen in companionable silence. They are all in agreement about the joy, love, and beauty that nature offers. Everything is harmonious between them, and the reader senses the warmth with which they interact, even though only Coleridge’s voice is heard. “My Friend, and thou, our Sister!” (Line 40) suggests a close relationship between the three. The sister (Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy) is sister to them both, suggesting the affection Coleridge felt for her.
Moreover, the “most gentle Maid” (Line 71), who is so familiar with the grove of nightingales, may be a playfully veiled compliment to Dorothy. Coleridge’s words of farewell to his friends also suggest closeness, since they will all see each other again very soon: “And you, my friends! farewell, a short farewell! / We have been loitering long and pleasantly, / And now for our dear homes” (Lines 90-92). The human bonds have thus been nourished and enriched in the presence of nature. Joy in nature fosters joy in friendship.
The moon is an integral part of the nighttime scene. It is a symbol of the animating, awakening, and restorative power of nature. In the third verse paragraph, moonlight enables the three friends to see and not just hear the nightingales; they can see the birds on the twigs of “moon-lit bushes” (Line 65), “their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, / Glittering” (Lines 67-68). The moon plays a role in the fourth verse paragraph too; when it goes behind a cloud, the nightingales fall silent, only to take up their song again when the moon emerges, awakening “earth and sky” (Line 80). It is as if the moon is the conductor of the song, activating this particular aspect of nature’s joy.
Finally, Coleridge brings his young son, who is upset after a nighttime dream, out into the moonlight, which has an immediate effect on the child: It calms him down, and his eyes too, like those of the nightingales, “glitter in the yellow moon-beam!” (Line 107). The moon thus sheds a beneficent light that can activate joy and banish all bad dreams.
Of the English Romantic poets, both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Coleridge used the stringed instrument known as the Eolian harp as a symbol of nature when the spirit animates it. When the breeze touches the strings of the harp, the harp plays harmonious music. Spirit and nature thus cooperate to create a manifestation of the beautiful and the joyful. Coleridge speculated about the metaphor in his poem “The Eolian Harp”:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (Coleridge, Lines 45-49).
In “The Nightingale,” the harp symbol occurs once, in the fourth verse paragraph. When the moon reemerges from behind a cloud, it acts like a stimulating, creative force, and the nightingales, who had fallen silent for a few moments, resume their song. Coleridge then compares the nightingales to “a hundred airy harps” (Line 84) when a gale (like the “intellectual breeze” in the above quotation) sweeps over them. In this instance, the nightingales act as Eolian harps, symbolizing the role they are playing in the vast harmonious music that makes up nature.
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By Samuel Taylor Coleridge