The witty Sydney Goodsir Smith, New-Zealand-born son of a professor of forensic medicine at Edinburgh University, salutes the nightingale, masquerading under its Latin and French names, in his little gem of a poem in Scots.
Below it, are two magical verses from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.
PHILOMEL
The hushed world o midnicht
Stude strucken still,
Still were aa the simmer sternes,
The mune slept on the hill.
~
The void whispered in my hert,
The tuim airts were filled
As throu the nichtit wuid I heard
The dervish rossignel.
~
The firmament was opened wide
And aa the waters melled,
The reid tod stude by the dyke –
O Youth! O Luve! O Philomel!
from Keats’s ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
~
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I heard this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
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