Teaching Birdsong with Shelley and Keats

By Alexander Schlutz

One of the pleasures of teaching P. B. Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”—two texts I usually bring together in a three-class unit—is the opportunity to introduce birdsong in the classroom. For Shelley’s poem, which I discuss first with my CUNY undergraduate students, it is helpful for the class to not only hear the voice of the Eurasian Skylark, but to also see, or rather not see, the bird soaring high in the sky while singing the “profuse strains” of its display song, which indeed seems to emanate “from Heaven, or near it,” as Shelley’s opening stanza puts it. Several options are available online; this video recording of skylarks singing over a field near Bath, England is a good example. I find it useful to follow up with a close-up of a skylark in song flight, and this video at Forvie National Nature Reserve near Aberdeen, Scotland works particularly well. Once students have gained the basic naturalist knowledge about the bird Shelley could take for granted for most of his European readers, except his most resolutely urban audience, they can then discover for themselves that much of Shelley’s seemingly extravagant six opening stanzas is in fact descriptive and a quite marvelous evocation of the experience of listening to the skylark’s song.

I usually also share my own memories of skylarks growing up. If somebody were to ask me about the essence of summer, walking through fields enveloped by the sound of skylarks singing overhead would still be one of the first images to come to my mind. This recollection provides an opening where students might volunteer their own experiences with bird song, and we can return to Shelley’s text with a sense of shared understanding of the powerful affective charge birdsong can hold for human listeners. That connection in turn helps the class to grasp why and how Shelley’s speaker comes to hear in the skylark’s empirical, embodied song the voice of an entity beyond comprehension that defies the representational capacities of human language. Understanding the improvisational quality of the skylark’s breathless singing, which can continue for well over ten minutes, is then helpful to read Shelley’s potentially endless sequence of similes, which both imitates and necessarily fails to capture the “crystal stream” of sound the speaker hears. There may not be time to play it in the classroom, but this video offers a brief, informative introduction (referencing the skylark as “the blithe spirit itself”), followed by a good six minutes of uninterrupted song. I post it for students so they can watch and hear on their own time.

Playing the song of the nightingale before we discuss Keats’s ode and explaining that the nightingale, in stark contrast to the skylark, will (though not exclusively) sing at dusk and into the night, hidden in thickets where it is extremely difficult to find even as its famed song is so clearly audible, makes clear to students that the “darkling” atmosphere of Keats’s poem is inspired not just by Milton, but the empirical experience of listening to the bird’s song. In this way, the distinctly different mood and verbal texture of the two texts emerges as not only the outcome of Shelley’s and Keats’s different poetic styles, topics, and linguistic choices, but also as the effect of listening and responding to the voice of two very different birds, the skylark’s “shrill delight” in the daytime and the nightingale’s “happiness” on a summer night. I like to play a few minutes of this long recording of nightingale song at dusk in Hammerwood, Sussex, which features the distinct song of the nightingales as part of a wider soundscape. (If students choose to do so after the class, the video, where the song continues for over thirty minutes, also allows them to get a sense of the birds’s vast repertoire and improvisational abilities. For those who want to learn more, I also make a piece by James Duncan for the Sussex Wildlife Trust available that offers an informative discussion of nightingale song.) In the classroom, I again find it helpful to follow up with a close-up of the bird, this brief recording included in Duncan’s post for example, which also illustrates that the nightingale, despite its name, sings “of summer in full-throated ease” during the day as well.

            As with the skylark, in the case of the nightingale, too, I share my own listening experience with the students and tell them about the bird that would visit a stand of tall fir trees next to the student housing complex where I lived while pursuing my master’s degree, to sing there at nightfall in May and June. This moment also lends itself to pointing out the bird’s vast range and migratory journeys. Sharing a range map, this one on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird page for example, provides an opportunity to explain why the nightingale holds such a central place not only in Western European literature, but in mystical Persian and Turkish poetry as well, an extensive tradition within which Keats’s poem is embedded.

            I finish the unit with a discussion of two performances of Keats’s ode, Ben Whishaw’s in Jane Campion’s 2009 movie Bright Star and Benedict Cumberbatch’s from a 2010 Universal Records CD. While Whishaw’s rendition is preceded by a brief recording of nightingale song and accompanied by solo cello and vocalizations by Erica Englert and Mark Bradshaw, Cumberbatch delivers the poem while the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony, made popular by Luchino Visconti’s 1971 movie Death in Venice, can be heard in the background. Comparing the distinctly different aesthetic choices of the two actors and the creators of the two recordings allows us to discuss the relationship between human and avian voices, and between poetry, birdsong, and music more broadly, as we bring our conversation about Shelley’s and Keats’s poems to a close.

Author Bio:

Alexander Schlutz teaches both at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism (University of Washington Press), which won the International Conference on Romanticism’s Jean-Pierre Barricelli prize for best book published in Romanticism studies in 2009, and co-editor, with Frank Madro, of Im Prozeß der Kultur. Essays, Perspektiven und Entwürfe (In the Process of Culture. Essays, Perspectives, and Sketches) (Merus, 2008), a collection of essays on questions of contemporary culture. Professor Schlutz also co-edited with Thora Brylowe, Michael Gamer, and Alan Vardy, the Essays in Romanticism special issue, Romantic Pedagogies in the 2020s. Look for his forthcoming essay on Birdsong in the Keats-Shelley Journal.