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.