Judith Leitermann 
Animal Poetry. Comparison between John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and John Burnside’s ‘The Nightingale’ [PDF ebook] 

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English – Literature, Works, grade: 1, 5, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Proseminar ”Animal Poetry“, language: English, abstract: In my paper, the poems ”Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats and
”The Nightingale” by John Burnside will be analysed and compared. Furthermore, I want to analyse the different roles of the nightingales in both poems.
For hundreds of years poets have often used the nightingale as a symbol because they felt inspired by its entrancing song, although it is not a very beautiful bird. The bird is a symbol of the night because it mostly sings at night. It also symbolises secret love, e.g. in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “It was the nightingale, and not the lark.” (Act 3, scene 5).