The Nightingale as a Symbol in the Works of Coleridge and Charlotte Smith (‘Sonnet III. To a Nightingale’) Anonymous College

Situated in the liminal space between literal and figurative expression, a symbol possesses constructed meaning that both transcends, and is indebted to, its empirical counterpart. Thus, there exists both a symbolic nightingale, borne of literary convention, and the nightingale in nature, whose musical beauty itself serves as artistic inspiration. Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet III: To a Nightingale” (1784) is one of a series in her collection of Elegiac Sonnets that utilises the nightingale as an embodiment of sadness in her exploration of personal melancholy. However, it is this conventional association between the songbird and sorrow that Samuel Taylor Coleridge finds issue with, and he seeks to subvert the nightingale archetype in his conversation poem “The Nightingale” (1798) by exploring the bird’s potential for joy and creativity.

Smith invokes the literary nightingale in the opening quatrain of her elegiac sonnet, drawing upon conventional Romantic and Classic constructs of the songbird as an embodiment of heartache and grief. Indeed, the epithet “melancholy” (Smith, 1) in the poem’s opening line can be attributed to Milton, and the imagery of the bird “that all night long/Tell’st to the Moon” (2) is distinctly Spenserian...