Interesting readings here. Thanks for bumping, Hilary.
I think Nemo has got to the quick of it, and rather concisely, here:
"It does seem to be striking a blow for romanticism, asserting the nightingale to be as real as all those banal details we have come, in our time, to believe in as the only reality. Of course it is embracing the nightingale through the unavoidable veil of our ironic post-modern sensibility. Yet the conclusion is still: imagination rules even the filthy roost."
Though I see the nightingale's gesture-to-the-imagination as redemption, rather than levelling it alongside the other banalities.
We may be disappointed that the consolation of the poem is, finally, gestural (unlike Keats' poem, or so we may assert (one might argue that Keats' is a different kind of gesture, but we're without doubt moving to a different level of symbolic reference)): a gesture of a gesture, in fact, and, so, we may be likewise disappointed that this is the form of much of modern poetry's consolation.
But if you're disappointed -- ah well,
but the nightingale...
PS: In contrast to
Björk's advice, I intend to let poets continue to 'lie' to me.