The Nightingale

The nightingale symbolizes escape from suffering. Singing unseen in the darkened wood, the bird inspires the speaker’s attempts to escape his own grief. Initially the speaker conceptualizes this as a flight from consciousness through wine, imagination, and death. Wine, for example, is a play on the bird’s “full-throated ease” (10), allowing the speaker to fill his own throat with something that would ease his suffering. Wine would allow the speaker to join the bird in “the forest dim” (20) while poetry would allow him to fly on “viewless wings” (33) with it. It is only once this chain of association leads the speaker the prospect of suicide that his hope to merge with the bird ends. Death would allow the speaker to escape his pain for good, and yet the bird would continue singing. At this point, the bird comes to represent the escape from death...