Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of sexual assault and violence.

Lines 1-39

The poem is divided into five verse paragraphs of varying lengths. In the first paragraph, Lines 1-3 effectively set the scene. It is evening, and darkness has fallen. Line 4 refers to “we,” but the reader must wait until later in the poem to find out who that refers to. The word does, however, establish here that the speaker, who turns out to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself, is not alone.

As they sit on an “old mossy bridge” (Line 4), a stream flows silently below, and the stars are dim. The absence of sound and light sets up the scene in which the human observers can hear the nightingale’s song all the more clearly. The nightingale’s song first appears in Line 12, and immediately Coleridge makes a literary allusion to how nightingales have traditionally been associated with melancholy: “‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird!” (Line 13). Literary man that he is, Coleridge is quoting John Milton’s poem “Il Penseroso” (1645). Here is the line in context:

Sweet bird that shunn’st the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy!

Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among,

I woo to hear thy even-song (Milton, Lines 61-64).