Characters
The Nightingale
Love and self-sacrifice
A small brown bird who has sung every night of a true lover she has never met. Hearing the Student's grief, she believes she has found him, and she gives her life to make the red rose he needs, singing all night with a thorn in her breast. She understands the mystery of Love as no one else in the tale does, and her sacrifice is wasted on the very people she dies for.
The Student
Learning without feeling
A handsome young scholar who believes all the secrets of philosophy are his, yet weeps because he has no red rose for the Professor's daughter. He cannot understand the Nightingale's words and dismisses her singing as style without sincerity. When his rose is refused he throws it in the gutter, calls Love a silly thing, and returns to Logic and Metaphysics as if nothing had happened.
The Professor's daughter
Love at a price
The girl the Student loves, who promised to dance with him if he brought her red roses. When he arrives with the rose she is sitting in the doorway winding blue silk, with her little dog at her feet. She refuses it because it will not go with her dress and the Chamberlain's nephew has sent her real jewels, and she scorns the Student as a mere Student without silver buckles on his shoes.
The red Rose-tree
Keeper of the terrible way
The rose-tree beneath the Student's window, whose roses are as red as the feet of the dove but whose buds have been nipped by the winter frost. It is reluctant to tell the Nightingale the only way to make a red rose, and through the night it urges her, 'Press closer, little Nightingale', until the rose is finished. Its brothers, with their white and yellow roses, cannot help.
The Oak-tree
The Nightingale's friend
The holm-oak in whose branches the Nightingale has built her nest. Unlike the Student, he understands what she means to do, and he is sad, because he is very fond of her. He asks her to sing him one last song, since he will be lonely when she is gone, and she sings to him with a voice like water bubbling from a silver jar.
The Green Lizard, the Butterfly and the Daisy
The mocking onlookers
Three small creatures of the garden who ask why the Student is weeping. When the Nightingale tells them it is for a red rose, they cry that this is very ridiculous, and the little Lizard, who is something of a cynic, laughs outright. Their scorn sets off the Nightingale's silence as she alone sits in the oak-tree and thinks about the mystery of Love.