In "The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the speaker, the speaker's friend, and the friend's sister are sitting and talking on a bridge near a stream about nightingales and nature. I believe that the speaker is Coleridge himself, and his friend is actually William Wordsworth. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and all Romantics loved nature and praised its beauty, because they believed nature is always joyous. It is obvious that this poem praises the beauty of the natural world, referring to the moon, nighttime, and the nightingale's song. Coleridge refuted those that said that the nightingale was melancholy just because a melancholy man sees his own feelings in the nightingale's song, because nature always inspires joy. Therefore, nature is not a representation of human feelings, but can shift to resemble a person's feelings. Coleridge and Wordsworth also believed that nature was a vital part to a child's development and to fully understand yourself as a person you should spend a lot of time in nature as a child. The baby in the story is Coleridge's first-born son Hartley, and Coleridge takes him outside under the moonlight when he was crying because nature is always so joyous. He wanted to make sure that from a young age his son would recognize this and grow up loving nature just as much as his father. I've included a picture of a baby simply enjoying nature.
Jonathan -
ReplyDeleteYou summarize several of the main ideas in the poem and give some thought to what it has to say about man's relation to nature. A tighter focus on the significance of a particular line would work better for a short blog entry. Also, while your identification of Wordsworth as one of Coleridge's accompanying friends is certainly a possibility, you need to provide evidence for that sort of claim.