Near an olive grove by the residency lives a bird that mimics human song. An opera singer stands there certain afternoons, dust in the tall grasses, heat bringing out the scent of lemon and jasmine. She sings into the field where the unseen bird nests, a tree branch swaying under its small body. The bird waits a beat after she finishes, then—matching her note for note—trills back. Try it yourself, she says, charmed by the idea of speaking across species. Perhaps a mating call. Perhaps a delineation of territory.

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Keats returned often to the figure of the nightingale: a symbol common to the Romantic poets.

“Ode to a Nightingale”:

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

“The Eve of St Agnes”:

She clos’d the door, she panted, all akin

To spirits of the air, and visions wide:

No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!

But to her heart, her heart was voluble,

Paining with eloquence her balmy side;

As though a tongueless nightingale should swell

Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

And no birds sing.

I am most interested in his Philomela reference in “The Eve of St. Agnes.” It is not only that his Madeline is like Philomela, voiceless while her body throbs with unspoken pain, but that Keats’s Philomela, his nightingale, must die.

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DEMETRIUS

So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,

Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravish’d thee.

CHIRON

Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,

An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

DEMETRIUS

She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;

And so let’s leave her to her silent walks.

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Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later poets’ use of the nightingale suggests she is a poet able to sing about and against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes Philomela and Procne by their murder of Itys: “And even so the red marks of the murder / stayed on their breasts; the feathers were blood-colored.” What is our longing to hear Philomela’s song but our own desire for retributive justice? Ovid’s story is clear: the tongue that might give voice to reparation is mute beside the body’s recounting of injury. Philomela’s story, then, is meant to excite, to enrage.

The Metamorphoses, 6.672–673

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