Nightime melodies
Cicestrians! Walk to the end of East Street. Cross Market Avenue at the lights. Walk five paces into the Hornet. You are now opposite the Observer Newspaper building. Do not look at that. Look the other way, high as you can, to the top of the red brick building. There you will see a large plaque honouring a man of world renown. Smack on your own doorstep.
In that bedroom up there John Keats lay in bed with his girl and in between whiles dreamt up one of the most famous poems in literature: The Eve of St Agnes. But he was already famous with what he had written one year before, 190 years ago this week, in April 1819: Ode to a Nightingale.
He was living in Hampstead then with his friend Brown. A nightingale was building her nest in the garden. "Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books" Brown recorded. "On inquiry, I found these scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of the nightingale.
The writing was not well legible, and it was difficult to arrange the stanza on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his Ode to a Nightingale". The words shook the world, so eloquently did they portray the fear of all at the transience of human life and its clutching at fading beauty and life itself. The resonance rung on into the following century.
The American writer F.Scott Fitzgerald, most famous for his 1920s novels of the Jazz Age and in particular The Great Gatsby which has been called the greatest American novel of all, took one famous line from Ode to a Nightingale for a novel based on his own marriage. Tender is the Night described how he rebuilt his wife's shattered mental state at the expense of his own. Keats held the nightingale as a symbol of immortality, a straw to which he was already clinging in his youth as consumption tolled his bell. "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird. No hungry generations tread thee down. The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown: perhaps the self-same song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn."
How hopeful too, the sound of nightingales opening up their own reply to the barrage of guns during the Siege of Monte Casino in Italy during WW2. An officer who was there as this enemy fortress was being attacked said how wonderful yet poignant it was to hear beauty triumphing in battle. Back in 1917 too, the nightingales soothed my poor old fretful father during his third return to the trenches of France and Belgium. But will the nightingale ever more return to give this glimpse of hope?
We hope. At this moment there should be 1,000 nightingales in Sussex, 5,000 in Britain. I have just been listening to them among the moonlit olive groves in the Alentejo, with the full moon playing silver lines in response along the stream beside my son's small farmhouse. They find it hard to get here, though there is hope that Malta is attempting to limit its barrage by ten thousand gunners there of everything that comes in on migration. Let us all listen out for the nightingale during May, as it sings briefly here.
We hope future hungry generations do not tread it down, or will it become in Keats' final words "... a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music:– do I wake or sleep?"
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 13 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 3 C to 7 C
Wind Speed: 22 mph
Wind direction: North west
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Temperature: 6 C to 8 C
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