Short Story of Frog and Nightingale by Vikram Seth goes as follows. A frog in the jungle keeps croaking the whole night. The animals are quite irritated because of its ugly and noisy croaking. They try a lot but fail to make the frog stop the noise. The frog, on the other hand, having full confidence itself keeps the animals awake in the night.
One day a nightingale visits the jungle and starts living there. Her voice is quite sweet and even the frog stops croaking to listen to it. One day frog meets nightingale and finding that the latter lacks self-confidence, frog talks high about himself and offers to help him sing sweeter.

He also starts charging for tuitions to the nightingale. Doing this the frog earns a reputed status in the jungle. Nightingale soon makes herself better but loses the happiness that it once had.

As the frog gets more jealous of the nightingale, it makes the latter to practice more. Ultimately, nightingale dies one day and the frog starts croaking again.

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The Frog and the Nightingale by Vikram Seth is a symbolic poem in which the poet explains why self-confidence is important and that why one should do the things which he loves.

In the poem, the frog maintains its status because of its confidence though it has no talent. On the other hand, the nightingale in spite of having talent dooms to death because it lacks self-confidence and is trapped in the words of the frog.

Thus in this world, one should always have confidence in himself and should never allow anyone else to interfere in his life. One can enjoy his life and succeed only when he loving doing his work and never allows anybody to change him.

Read the summary of the poem here.

The Nightingale and the Frog are the protagonists of this poem. Both sing. But there is a difference of earth and sky in their traits.

Frog’s Character Sketch

In this poem, the frog is portrayed as proud, haughty, jealous, unskilled and quite clever. In the beginning, it irritates all the animals of the forest by croaking in the night. It never listens to the requests of the animals. When it listens to the sweet voice of the nightingale, it is stunned and gets jealous.

Feeling insecure, it plays a trick with the nightingale and makes it believe that it is the master of singing. It starts charging the nightingale for tuition classes and forces it to do overtime. Ultimately, it succeeds in regaining its lost position when the nightingale dies.

Nightingale’s Character Sketch

Nightingale, on the other hand, is quite skilful, sweet, shy and unconfident. With its extraordinary skills, it wins the hearts of the animals of the forest including the frog. However, the lack of confidence makes it a prey of the frog’s trick.

It takes frog’s claims as truth and starts doing what the frog says. Soon, it loses the joy of singing which it once had. As it worked too hard, it lost its life.

Read the summary of the poem here.