(Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ from the other side)
You slump at my tree’s foot, complex angsts brewing
While our red-clawed, red-beaked animal furies
In these shadowy plots hatch our own undoing.
If thinking is man’s ruin, have no worries.
If you could speak the whistling words of birds
Whose sound to you like music now appears,
As nature’s snow-white cream man sours to curds
To chew, our songs would curdle in your ears:
‘Fly!, fly! The bearded fox is on the prowl!’—
And ‘Keep away! These berries are quick poison!’—
‘I need a mate, or I was born for nought’—
‘Go south, go south!’—‘The horned and hoary owl
Brings swift, crook-taloned death.’ You seek strange joys in
Ignorance, to envy lives so fraught!
Now dull-brained human scientists proclaim
That tool-use is no more unique to apes
Than language, war, or thumbs. They’re all the same
Emergent properties, like wine from grapes.
I am not certain that is Hippocrene;
The Pierian Spring leaves no such scarlet stain.
A jug of wine might well complete the scene:
Your book of verse, &c. A brain
Like smiling Aesop’s, where morals mask the roar
Of lions, the flopping fear of fish in the net,
The worm-wove cloak we dress up in our tomb in—
I think that must be Lethe. Drink, and soar
Above your brain, and me, and quite forget
That you were all too sentient, all too human.
*****
Daniel Galef writes: “I’m a sucker for parodies and response poems! My first book features riffs on Byron, Swift, Ernest Thayer, the ancient epigrammatist Nossis the Epizephyrian, and Doris Day. A few years ago in my master’s program I took a[n excellent] poetry workshop with Barbara Hamby focusing on the history of the Ode, as part of which she had everyone memorize Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” We’d all read the poem before, but engaging with it so closely for a sustained duration was a really lovely experience, and having the whole poem by rote is an excellent party trick if you ever need to clear the room at the end of a party. At the end of the class I sent Professor Hamby a little parody piece, a rebuttal from the nightingale’s point of view to the moping poet sitting underneath its tree. (It was also a gesture of peace because I had gotten on her bad side by insinuating that the speaker calling the nightingale “dryad of the trees” was redundant because all dryads are by definition of the trees.) That poem was three pages or so and more directly parodying Keats’s style, as well as being written with the same stanzaic structure as Keats’s. It was also just for fun and thoroughly unprintable. But something I’ve been doing lately when I can’t bring myself to write an original poem is to sonnet-ize other things I’ve written—short lyric poems, long narrative poems, free verse, even short short stories—as I’m currently putting together a second collection of Imaginary Sonnets, a series of persona poems I’ve been writing for years inspired by the Victorian poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton. I cherrypicked a handful of my favorite lines from the long nightingale poem and spun some sonnet-stuff around them and ended up with this. It was still too much material for fourteen lines but fit into a double-sonnet, which is half as good.”
Daniel Galef’s poetry, half-serious and half-non-, has been published in a variety of venues themselves both serious and non-. His first book, Imaginary Sonnets, collects 70 persona poems from the point of view of various historical figures and literary characters, including Lucrezia Borgia, Christopher Smart’s cat, and a taco. “A Nightingale to a Sad Poet” first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Sein und Werden. Other recent writing can be found in the Indiana Review, the Best Small Fictions anthology, and Scientific American.
“Bard of the Mossy Cot” by Giles Watson’s poetry and prose is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Form in Formless Times 