The Nightingale in Silent Night

Read about The Nightingale In Silent Night by Thomas Bateson and see the artwork, lyrics and similar artists.
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Poster advertising Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet. Just as the writers of the past endeavored to celebrate the magnificent song of this little bird through the written word, so the sound recordists of today try to do the same with sound.

Here is just one of our many recordings of a singing Nightingale, recorded in an English forest in the early hours of an April morning in by Phil Riddett. A sweet lullaby indeed.

The Nightingale in Silent Night | Sheet Music Now

Nightingale song recorded in Kent by Phil Riddett. Literature , Sound and vision , Wildlife sounds. British Library website satisfaction survey Take part in our web survey! Why not take a few moments to tell us what you think of our website?

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Your views could help shape our site for the future. A Midsummer Night's Dream 2: Taming of the Shrew 2: Romeo and Juliet 3: Posted by Cheryl Tipp at 4: All I could think in that brief moment between consciousness and darkness was: I remember feeling shame too, a kind of shame that left me dousing myself with nail polish remover in a panicked attempt to destroy any evidence still defiling my body. I felt the only way I could survive at that moment was to run from it all.


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I hid from my closest friends. No one could know — not even me. So I attempted to erase the memory. I channeled all of my energy into anything that allowed me to forget. But so much purposed forgetting was not sustainable. Eventually, my demons caught up to me. Sitting in a law school lecture hall three years later, I learned that my Criminal Law professor included rape in her syllabus. Even reading the word made my hands shake and my mind swell with fear.

The Nightingale in Silent Night Sheet Music by Thomas Bateson

The trauma was closing in on me. But still I tried to evade it. I skipped classes that I knew involved the topic and would leave the classroom when it was unexpectedly mentioned.

Kelly Clarkson - Silent Night ft. Trisha Yearwood, Reba McEntire

The following year, I was once again blindsided when I learned the focus of my client counseling class was sexual assaults on college campuses. This was right before the topic became a daily headline.

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Once again, my reaction was to hide, but my skills were not as refined as they had been. Instead of taking this experience in stride, accepting it as an opportunity to be honest with myself, I again felt more comfortable retreating deeper within the remaining shadows of my mind. It helped that I learned of the anesthetic properties of alcohol; but when the stupor wore off, the memories returned with each clank of the liquor bottles piling in the trash can. I finally stopped running before my final year in law school.

In the midst of a pre-finals breakdown, I surrendered to the trauma and told my parents that I had been raped while in college. And so my journey to healing began examining a culturally significant and controversial rape trial for the first time as someone who had actually been raped. As I thought about what one of my favorite stories added to the dialogue of sexual assault, I became angry.

Poems (Wordsworth, 1815)/Volume 1/O Nightingale

So I decided to finish my law school journey by writing about the sexual violence epidemic in America. An avid recreational bird watcher, I spend a great deal of time in the company of mockingbirds. They will sing all day if unbothered by other business. But they do not sing songs of their own. Fierce nest guardians, they only reveal a cry of their own when asserting their dominance over their territory. It is a shrill and broken buzz. But the nightingale, though small in stature, is renowned for its powerful and beautiful song, a song of its very own. A song heralded as the most beautiful birdsong in the word.

I posit then, that to silence a nightingale is just as great a sin as killing a mockingbird.

Sexual violence is not about sex, it is about power. It may take years to find that power again. It may never return. The vocal chords shrivel in fear, their screams denied. Without a sense of personal power and autonomy, the voice seems useless, as useless as a bruised eye or broken pelvis. Unless that voice is nurtured and soothed, it cannot share, it cannot sing.