High on a bough beneath the moonlight pale

That over-rated bird the nightingale

Sang and sang on. I thought my heart would break

At first, to feel again that forlorn ache

Across the waste of history — “Wine, Red Wine!”

Fitzgerald’s Nightingale, with voice divine,

Called out — “to stain my rose-love’s pale cheeks red!”

And Keats arose, among the wintry dead,

And testifies, his sunken eyes ashine —

The song; dusk; dream; and oozy eglantine!

But these are dead and dumb. This is a fowl

Hatched from an ordinary egg. The owl

Like generation owneth. The world wags

And from a pure tropism the small bird brags,

His vocal cords to something in the air

Reacting, never of the spring aware,

While still more passive, dumb and deaf and blind

Keats and Fitzgerald slumber, clay-confined;

Close-hugged by greedy earth, whose barren vales

Nurse for one Keats a billion nightingales.