Both John Keats, in "Ode to a Nightingale," and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," use a bird as a central motif of their poem. However, these creatures are definitely not birds of a feather; their function within their respective works reflects the vastly different themes of the two works themselves, as well as the psyches of the men who wrote them. This paper will discuss both Keats' and Coleridge's symbolic use of birds, and analyze what they represent within their differing contexts.
             John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem of both despair and strength. It was written less than a year after the death of the poet's beloved brother Tom from a long, wasting bout with tuberculosis. Keats himself was not in good health either (he would die of tuberculosis himself less than two years later) and he had almost sole care of his brother in Tom's last days. In addition, the orphaned Keats suffered from acute financial worries, his finances being tied up by the trustee of the family will who considered Keats a wastrel. This plunged the poet into a demeaning cycle of borrowing from and taking up residence with supportive literary friends. Keats scholar Fred Inglis adds that "Anxiety over money disrupted [Keats'] life from his childhood onwards. . . and the deprivation resulting from his poverty must have accelerated his deterioration and shortened his life even more" (Inglis, 37). His monetary wants were especially acute after Tom's death and at the time of the on!
             All of this serves to explain the profound atmosphere of gloom that surrounds "Ode To A Nightingale". Keats gives us four lines of the deepest depression -- and suddenly the nightingale sings. Inglis quotes D.H. Lawrence's comments on this poem in particular, and nightingales in general: "He (the nightingale) is the noisiest, most inconsiderate, most ob...