Ode to a thrush? Why John Keats plumped for a nightingale

If anyone could get away with poetic licence, it was John Keats.

When he composed his Ode to a Nightingale, one of the most-loved poems in English literature, the poetic genius got his birds confused and he was actually writing an Ode to a Thrush, according to the latest research.

In the forthcoming volume of the Keats-Shelley Review, Dr Judith Chernaik publishes a study under the sub-heading: “Was Keats’s Nightingale really a Thrush?”

Presenting what she describes as “unassailable evidence”, she is challenging the recollection of Keats’s friend Charles Brown that inspiration came to the poet in the spring of 1819, when a nightingale had built her nest at Wentworth Place, his home in Hampstead, north-west London, now Keats House Museum.

Years later, Brown wrote: “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 tree, 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… Those scraps… contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale…This was his Ode to a Nightingale.”

Dr Chernaik told the Telegraph that the account has been repeated in the biographies, yet the evidence shows that “all of that is invented”.

She argues: “It is strange to think of Keats composing his poem in the morning, when the ode presents itself so convincingly as a night piece…

“What is surely questionable is the claim that the ode was inspired by the song of a nightingale nesting near the house. Nightingales are famously secretive, nesting by preference in woodland undergrowth. They do not nest near houses. Nor is it the nesting female who sings. In the ode, Keats imagines the nightingale singing ‘In some melodious plot’…

“As in all his greatest poetry, Keats seamlessly combines intense personal feelings, literary inspiration and realistic observation…. Keats addresses the nightingale as a ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ - hence female… But it does not take a professional ornithologist to know that it is the male nightingale, not the female, who sings.”

The thrush is a popular garden songbird, while nightingales have more variety in their song.

Dr Chernaik said: “Keats loved thrushes. It’s thrushes that he knew. But the nightingale is the poetic bird.”

She argues that Keats mentions nightingales in his poems, while his letters refer to thrushes and other common birds, including blackbirds.

In one letter from Hampstead, Keats wrote: ‘The Thrushes and Blackbirds have been singing me into an idea that it was spring.” In another, also from Hampstead: “That Thrush is a fine fellow.”

In The Keats-Shelley Review, to be published in April, Dr Chernaik writes: “Although there are no surviving letters from ‘mid-May’, the likely time of the Nightingale ode, there are clues in earlier letters and also in other poems. Nightingales appear conventionally in several of Keats’s poems… But Keats does refer to nightingales in his letter about his meeting with Coleridge… ‘He broached a thousand things… Nightingales, Poetry…’.”

Dr Chernaik said: “It is possible that Keats heard nightingales on his walks across the heath.”

Analysing Keats’s lyrical poem, she writes: “Keats is transported by his imagination not only to the nearby wood, with its hidden flowers and scents, but to Shakespeare…, to Greek and Biblical times, until he is abruptly recalled to his ‘sole self’ by his own words and his grief – for the miseries of the world, for his brother Tom’s death.”

Dr Chernaik lives near Keats’s home and, in conducting her research during the Covid-19 lockdown, was struck that while the area was eerily quiet, the woods were full of birdsong: “I wondered if the ancient oaks, sycamores and beech trees could have inspired the ‘verdurous glooms and mossy paths’ Keats imagined in his Ode…, composed, according to Brown’s memoir, in the garden of Wentworth Place. I knew I must look again at Brown’s memoir.”

She adds: “After Keats’s death [in 1821], Brown had great difficulty in writing it. He started work in 1829… but was unable to publish the memoir himself, and in 1841…he gave his revised manuscript to the young Keats enthusiast Richard Monckton Milnes [who] freely incorporated Brown’s text in Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, published in 1848. The memoir itself remained unpublished until 1937. It has been a primary source of biographies up to the present day.”

She concludes that Brown’s famous account is “demonstrably fictional”: “It might mean rewriting the biographies.”

Dr Chernaik, whose books include The Lyrics of Shelley, is founder of London's Poems on the Underground, a popular public art project. Most recently, it has displayed Keats’s words on tube stations near where he lived and worked, including London Bridge (the original site of Guy’s Hospital, where he qualified as an apothecary) and Hampstead (his homes in Well Walk and Keats Grove).