The Nightingales Nest

Clare has a very unique style in regards to the way he structures his poems. Like most of the other Clare poems we are reading for class, he does not use punctuation except for dashes. This means there are enjambments and caesuras throughout the poem which slow down the reading of the poem, as if you are with the narrator carefully looking for the nest. Another unique aspect of his style is that Clare does not use a stanza break until line 67, resulting in a very long first stanza and an unbalanced poem. He also uses very common language, which could be attributed to his lack of a higher education, but this also allowed more people to read and understand his poetry and get his messages. Clare uses beautiful descriptions to set the scene and allow the reader to understand the narrator’s love for the nightingale and her songs.

After reading this poem for the first time, I did a little research on nightingales. They are small birds with light brown feathers, red-brown tails, and a white stomach; they are very common in forests and bushy areas in Europe and parts of Asia. Most importantly though, they are best known for their beautiful songs, which is why Clare mentions the bird singing and her songs multiple times throughout the poem. However, general research on nightingales does not bring up information about their nests, which is technically the subject of this poem. But Clare goes into this detail in the last stanza by describing what the nest is made of and what it looks like. The point of those details is seen about two-thirds of the way through that stanza when he says, “Yet nature is the builder and contrives / Homes for her childrens comfort” (lines 83-84). I believe this is one of the main arguments of this poem, to leave nature alone because nature has always been just fine without human intervention and that by disturbing this nest and nature as a whole, human beings are only hurting nature and the animals in it. A few lines later when he writes that, “the old prickly thorn bush guards them well,” he adds to the above argument by stating that even though the nest is not pleasing to the eye, it is perfectly made to blend in with its surroundings and protect the nightingale’s eggs.

I thought this was an interesting poem because it was not what I expected. Since we’ve been talking about animal cruelty and Dr. Porter mentioned to keep that in mind while reading Clare’s poems, I expected the narrator to pick up the nest, especially while he was looking for it at line 42 and when he found it in line 53, “Aye as I live her secret nest is here”. However instead Clare shows the cruelty of taking a nest by showing the Nightingale’s “choaking fear” (line 60) at even the possibility of what might happen to her eggs and her nest. Clare uses the last stanza, after the only stanza break, to wish the birds well by saying “Sing on sweet bird may no worse hap befall / Thy visions then the fear that now decieves” (lines 67-68). The last two lines of the poem, “And here well leave them still unknown to wrong / As the old woodlands legacy of song” (lines 91-31), are very powerful lines because Clare is saying that these eggs, but also all of nature in a more broad sense, are innocent creatures that don’t know the wrongs of humanity.

Questions:

1. Why do you think Clare only used one stanza break? What does this add to the poem?

2. What is the importance of the word “extacy” being used in both line 22 and line 33?

3. Why does Clare specifically mention harebells in line 72? Is there a symbolic meaning to the harebells?