OED #1 Word: Rove

In “Sonnet III: To a Nightingale,” Charlotte Smith expresses praise to and envy of the nightingale for its liberty to express its emotions at will.  Smith utilizes apostrophe to make as if she is talking to the nightingale to express her longings to release her emotions freely. As symbolism, Smith idolizes the nightingale as a poet’s inspiration from nature who sings “tales[s] of tender woe” in the night. In the first two stanzas, Smith asks the nightingale of the melancholy song the bird sings every night to the moon. She specifically inquires where this “mournful melody of song” is coming from. In this way, Smith implies in her communication with the nightingale that there exists sadness within the songs that the nightingale sings and also her sympathy with the nightingale’s sadness. Furthermore, Smith illustrates an image of the nightingale leaving its nest to sing “at dewy eve…to the listening night to sing [its] fate.” Later in the last stanza of the sonnet, Smith transitions her sympathetic disposition towards a more envious attitude with the nightingale’s ability to release its emotion in song. “Now releas’d in woodlands wild to rove [,]” the nightingale is free and could “sigh and sing at liberty.”

          The word “rove” in the context of Smith’s Sonnet plays a significant role in expressing the emotional liberty that the nightingale possessed that Smith wishes she could have. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the definitions of Rove is “to travel from place to place without fixed route or destination, especially over a wide area; to wander in an aimless or unsystematic way; or to roam.”  In the sonnet, the word “rove” appears in the tenth line as "Pale Sorrow's victim wert though once among,/Tho' now releas'd in woordlands wild to rove." In this line, the nightingale is released to the wild free to roam about anywhere in nature. As mentioned in the definition, the word also carries the meaning of wandering in “an aimless or unsystematic way,” which enforces the idea in romanticism of breaking free from reasoning and societal binds. In this sonnet, Smith embraces the nightingale’s fortune to be free of social regulation and rational reasoning even when the nightingale’s song indicated melancholy. Although she is sympathetic of the sadness that traveled through the melodies of the nightingale, Smith expressed that she would rather “sigh and sing at liberty --- like [the nightingale].”