The Conversational Revisionism of "The Nightingale"

『나이팅게일』의 대화적 수정주의

This paper attempts to read "The Nightingale" as an experimental proponent of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, one that inaugurated British Romanticism. It is never accidental for this poem to come to replace "Lewti" at the last moment of publication and to be tied to the poetic principles manifested in the "Advertisement" of the 1798 volume. The speaker of this poem, for example, is an ordinary man, who presents himself as a friend and a loving father. Opting for conversational styles rather than blindly copying literary conceits, he even incorporates an evening episode he happens to recall into a legitimate subject matter. The notion of "conversation," which appears in the subtitle, offers a key to figuring out the ideal of poetic language, the figure of the poet, and compositional procedures Coleridge and Wordsworth proposed in their collaborative project. "The Nightingale" can be a dubious, if not totally failed, poetical journey to subverting an incidence of misnaming acts. He finally reaches the limits of poetic figuration in a process of textualizing nature. The leitmotif of "In nature there is nothing melancholy" testifies to the fact that the bird nightingale, which the narrator is hard at work to rename as a joyous bird, is nothing but a poetic metaphor. "The Nightingale" is more likely to be a revisional, regenerative performance based on the strategy of conversation than an embodiment of a daring novelty.