Sithens in these nets I seek to hold the wind

Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse

Dear Reader, I suggest that you first read “The Nightingale” before continuing with this essay.

Poor wretched Narcissus filled all water with himself. It is through his own eyes that he will die. A Blakean Newton - hunched and monocled, he calls the song what it is not. But Samuel has listened - the song is only sad when it reflects a sadness within. 

No matter who the one-line deemer of the nightingale’s song “most melancholy” is, which I think is, in fact, Wordsworth, he is coming from a clearly Wordsworthian place. After all, what is our life but a sleep and a forgetting? What is interesting is that Coleridge is also giving him a somewhat Wordsworthian answer to oppose such a sordid view. It is Coleridge’s son, the infant, who not only “knows” Nature, but can play with it, that is, he can participate in the dynamics of giving and receiving contrary to being a static and lifeless melancholic. Adults can only reach out, but then they are met with an impossible impasse. Their limbs are too long. Gentle and small is the hand that beholds the moon. In 1798, Coleridge’s “father’s tale” is a wish that in 1807, Wordsworth will put in the past as a memory that he had, but he cannot see no more. But this is not about Wordsworth, so now I will talk about the bird. 

The poem claims the nightingale’s joy as if during the day the little warbler travels to the Heights and at night returns to sing a record of the Source. But the bird is neither melancholic nor joyous, for it does not operate on the level of semiotics. 

 The poet sees the bird rushing for the sublime - “As he were fearful that an April night/Would be too short for him to utter forth/ His love-chant.” If it is only a bird and its song is as natural as the movement of the cloud in the sky, then man really is so self-centered that he has to “build up” a message for himself out of a clump of water vapor. And if the nightingale is, in fact, in a hurry to sing its love chant, then it must possess a certain spiritual dimension. Which would make the uniqueness of the human soul completely non-unique, not human. Then Nature’s purpose would not be to serve us, nor to reflect our inner being - it would not be here for us but here with us. Nature would be a colleague walking on an unknown path, similarly reaching for the Heavens.

But it is possible that the melancholic is wrong to see the song as melancholic only because the joy seeker demands that there be joy in all. Can we see into the life of things, or are we stuck in limbo? The abyss seems to be having fun at our guessing game. 

And the gentle Maid, my words can’t catch. She is an apparition, slipping through the holes of all my e’s and o’s and in between the wings of that enchanting bird. 

Coleridge says that man only needs to “stretch his limbs,” and then he will be delivered from the conceits he echoes. Surrender to the valley, and the valley shall give you wisdom. Maybe he was right. Yet it has been five hundred years, and if at any moment Adam had stretched his hand, we would have known. The ceiling would have cracked open, and wisdom would have entered the chapel. 

All

is 

silent.