Nightingales

Nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos), also known as rufous nightingale, is a small passerine bird best known for its powerful and beautiful song. It was formerly classed as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but is now more generally considered to be an Old World flycatcher, Muscicapidae. It belongs to a group of more terrestrial species, often called chats.

A nightingale

Quotes

• Hark! ah, the nightingale—
  The tawny-throated!
  Hark from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
  What triumph! hark!—what pain!
  * * * * * *
  Listen, Eugenia—
  How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
  Again—thou hearest?
  Eternal passion!
  Eternal pain!
  • Matthew Arnold, Philomela (1853), line 32.

• For as nightingales do upon glow-worms feed,
  So poets live upon the living light.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene Home.

• The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
  When every goose is cackling, would be thought
  No better a musician than the wren.
  How many things by season season'd are
  To their right praise, and true perfection!
  • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s), Act V, scene 1, line 104.

• Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
  It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
  That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear;
  Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree:
  Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act III, scene 5, line 1.

• Lend me your song, ye Nightingales! O, pour
  The mazy-running soul of melody
  Into my varied verse.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Spring (1728), line 574.

• En la huerta nasce la rosa:
  quiérome ir allá
  por mirar al ruiseñor cómo cantavá.
  • The rose looks out in the valley,
    And thither will I go,
    To the rosy vale, where the nightingale
    Sings his song of woe.
  • Gil Vicente, "The Nightingale", as translated by John Bowring in Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), p. 316.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 557-59.

• I have heard the nightingale herself.
  • King Agesilaus when asked to listen to a man imitate the nightingale. Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus.

• As it fell upon a day
  In the merry month of May,
  Sitting in a pleasant shade
  Which a grove of myrtles made.
  • Richard Barnfield, Address to the Nightingale.

• It is the hour when from the boughs
  The nightingale's high note is heard;
  It is the hour when lovers' vows
  Seem sweet in every whisper'd word.
  • Lord Byron, Parisina, Stanza 1.

• "Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
  A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
  In nature there is nothing melancholy.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nightingale, line 13.

• 'Tis the merry nightingale
  That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
  With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
  As he were fearful that an April night
  Would be too short for him to utter forth
  His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
  Of all its music!
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nightingale, line 43.

• Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours,
  Of winter's past or coming void of care,
  Well pleaséd with delights which present are,
  Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers.
  • William Drummond of Hawthornden, Sonnet, To a Nightingale.

• Like a wedding-song all-melting
  Sings the nightingale, the dear one.
  • Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, Donna Clara.

• The nightingale appear'd the first,
  And as her melody she sang,
  The apple into blossom burst,
  To life the grass and violets sprang.
  • Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, New Spring, No. 9.

• Where the nightingale doth sing
  Not a senseless, tranced thing,
  But divine melodious truth.
  • John Keats, Ode, Bards of Passion and of Mirth.

• Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
  Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
  In the next valley-glades:
  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
  Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
  • John Keats, To a Nightingale.

• Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
  No hungry generations tread thee down;
  The voice I hear this passing night was heard
  In ancient days by emperor and clown.
  • John Keats, To a Nightingale.

• Soft as Memnon's harp at morning,
  To the inward ear devout,
  Touched by light, with heavenly warning
  Your transporting chords ring out.
  Every leaf in every nook,
  Every wave in every brook,
  Chanting with a solemn voice
  Minds us of our better choice.
  • John Keble, The Nightingale.

• To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
  The nightingale is singing from the steep.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Keats.

• What bird so sings, yet does so wail?
  O, 'tis the ravish'd nightingale—
  Jug, jug, jug, jug—tereu—she cries,
  And still her woes at midnight rise.
  • John Lyly, The Songs of Birds.

• Sweet bird that shunn'st the noise of folly,
  Most musical, most melancholy!
  Thee, chauntress, oft, the woods among,
  I woo, to hear thy even-song.
  • John Milton, Il Penseroso (1631), line 61.

• O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
  Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still;
  Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill
  While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.
  • John Milton, Sonnet, To the Nightingale.

• Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day
  First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill,
  Portend success in love.
  • John Milton, Sonnet. To the Nightingale.

• I said to the Nightingale:
  "Hail, all hail!
  Pierce with thy trill the dark,
  Like a glittering music-spark,
  When the earth grows pale and dumb."
  • Dinah Craik, A Rhyme About Birds.

• Yon nightingale, whose strain so sweetly flows,
  Mourning her ravish'd young or much-loved mate,
  A soothing charm o'er all the valleys throws
  And skies, with notes well tuned to her sad state.
  • Petrarch, To Laura in Death, Sonnet XLIII.

• The sunrise wakes the lark to sing,
  The moonrise wakes the nightingale.
  Come, darkness, moonrise, everything
  That is so silent, sweet, and pale:
  Come, so ye wake the nightingale.
  • Christina G. Rossetti, Bird Raptures.

• Hark! that's the nightingale,
  Telling the self-same tale
  Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
  So echoes answered when her song was sung
  In the first wooded vale.
  • Christina G. Rossetti, Twilight Calm, Stanza 7.

• The angel of spring, the mellow-throated nightingale.
  • Sappho, Fragment 39.

• O Nightingale,
  Cease from thy enamoured tale.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Scenes from "Magico Prodigioso", Scene 3.

• One nightingale in an interfluous wood
  Satiate the hungry dark with melody.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Woodman and the Nightingale.

• The nightingale as soon as April bringeth
  Unto her rested sense a perfect waking,
  While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth,
  Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making.
  And mournfully bewailing,
  Her throat in tunes expresseth
  What grief her breast oppresseth.
  • Sir Philip Sidney, O Philomela Fair.

• Where beneath the ivy shade,
  In the dew-besprinkled glade,
  Many a love-lorn nightingale,
  Warbles sweet her plaintive tale.
  • Sophocles, Œdipus Coloneus. Translation by Thomas Francklin.

• —Under the linden,
  On the meadow,
  Where our bed arranged was,
  There now you may find e'en
  In the shadow
  Broken flowers and crushed grass.
  —Near the woods, down in the vale,
  Tandaradi!
  Sweetly sang the nightingale.
  • Walter von der Vogelweide, translation in The Minnesinger of Germany, Under the Linden.

• Last night the nightingale woke me,
  Last night, when all was still.
  It sang in the golden moonlight,
  From out the woodland hill.
  • Christian Winther, Sehnsucht. Translation used by Marzials in his song, Last Night.