Round 442 – 27 July 2010

Ode to a Nightingale

Shy creatures of the night rustled in the bushes at her side and, to top the whole thing off, somewhere in the woods a nightingale had begun to sing with the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats ...
– Ring for Jeeves, Chapter 10

Bertie Wooster knows his Shelley. Do you know your Keats – more specifically, your "Ode to a Nightingale" (click here for a hint)?

1. "But how," she asked, "did you know who I was?"

"I recognised your voice."

"Recognised my voice?" A__ stared. "After half a dozen words on the telephone?"

"One would have been enough," said B__. He had now got over his initial nervousness and was feeling his affable self once more. "It is a lovely, unique voice, in a class of its own and once heard never forgotten, limpid as a woodland brook and vibrant with all the music of the spheres. When you asked that child in the apron with the gravy spots on it to send the head-waiter along, one could fancy one was listening to silver bells tinkling across the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."

"Seas where?"

"In faery lands forlorn. Not my own. Keats."

2. He paused to allow those wishing to do so to refresh themselves with another look at C__, and I found myself musing in some little perplexity. Long association with members of the Drones has put me pretty well in touch with the various ways in which an overdose of the blushful Hippocrene can take the individual, but I had never seen anyone react quite as D__ was doing.

3. As a rule, these story-conferences were the part of his work which E__ most enjoyed. His own share in them was not exacting, and, as he often said, you met such interesting people.

To-day, however, though there were eleven of the studio's weirdest authors present, each well worth more than a cursory inspection, he found himself unable to overcome the dull listlessness which had been gripping him since he had first gone to the refrigerator that morning to put ice on his temples. As the poet Keats puts it in his "Ode to a Nightingale", his head ached and a drowsy numbness pained his sense.

4. "I am afraid, madam," he said smoothly, "that I am wholly to blame for this untimely intrusion. Lying awake in bed just now, I happened to hear the nightingale, and feeling that F__ ought not to miss this treat I woke him and suggested that he should accompany me into the garden."

"Oh?"

"Yes, madam. We could not see what flowers were at our feet, nor what soft incense hung upon the boughs, but we managed to catch a glimpse of the bird, did we not, sir?"

"Yeah," said F__. "It was a whopper."

"Quite well-developed," assented G__. "And vocally in tremendous form. We listened entranced. 'Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird,' said F__, and I agreed with him. I often say that there is no melody quite like the song of the nightingale. F__ feels the same."

"Yeah," said F__.

"He put forward the rather interesting theory that this was quite possibly 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. I thought there might be something in it."

"G__," said H__, "have you been drinking?"

"Only of the Pierian fount, madam."

The intellectual pressure of the conversation was becoming too much for H__.

Bonus point: What does Hippocrene taste like, according to a character in an early Wodehouse novel?

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Answers, please, by 6pm GMT on Wednesday, 4 August 2010

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Your Quizmaster, Arthur Robinson

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