When one hears of ‘the dead months,’ of ‘dead December’ and ‘bleak
January,’ the best corrective is to be found in the coppice or by
the stream-side, by the field-thicket, in the glens, and even on the
wide moors if the snow is not everywhere fallen, a coverlet so dense
and wide that even the juniper has not a green spike to show, or the
dauntless bunting a clean whin-branch to call from on the broomieknowe.
Even the common sayings reveal a knowledge hidden from those to whom
winter is ‘a dead season’ ... and it is a continual surprise to find
how many people believe that from the fall of the leaf or the first
sleet and snow, till the thrush doubles and trebles his note in the
February wet-shine, that bird and insect and all green life have gone,
that all Nature is dead or asleep. Thus, for example, ‘as keen in
the hearing as a winter-plover’ must have been uttered, when first
said, by a watcher of the multiform bird-life of our winter-fields and
fallow lands, one who knew that the same drama of life and death is
enacted in midwinter as in midspring or midsummer, a drama only less
crowded, less complex and less obvious, but not less continual, not
less vital for the actors. Who that has watched the pee-wits seeking
worms on ploughed lands at midwinter, and seen them poise their
delicate heads and listen for the phantom rustle of a worm in this
clod or under yonder fallow, while the greedy but incapable seamews,
inland come from frost bound coasts or on the front of prolonged gales,
hear nothing of ‘the red people’ and trust only to bulk and fierce
beak to snatch the prey from hungry plover-bills ... who that has
seen this can fail to recognise the aptness of the saying, ‘as keen
in the hearing as a winter-plover’? Who that has watched the ebb and
flow of lark-life, resident and immigrant; the troubled winter-days of
the field-travellers (as the familiar word ‘fieldfare’ means) and the
wandering thrushes; the vagrant rooks, the barn-haunting hoodie; the
yellow-hammer flocks and the tribes of the finch; the ample riverside
life, where heron and snipe, mallard and moor-hen, wren and kingfisher,
and even plover and the everywhere adaptable starling are to be found
with ease by quick eyes and careful ears: who that has seen the sudden
apparition of the bat, or the columnar dance of the ephemeridæ, or the
flight of the winter-moth along the dishevelled hedgerows: or who that,
besides the mistletoe and the ivy, the holly and the fir, the box and
the late-flowering clematis, and many other of the green and flowering
clans of the forest and the garden, has noted the midwinter-blooming
shepherd’s purse, healing groundsel, bright chickweed, and red
deadnettle, can think of nature as lifeless at this season? When amid
the rains and storms of December an old gardener, instead of saying
that spring was on the move, remarked to me that ‘’Twill be starling
days soon,’ he gave voice to a truth of observation as impressive as it
is beautiful. For often December has not lapsed before the mysterious
breeding-change of the Vita Nuova, the New Life that spreads like a
flowing wave so early in the coming year will begin to be obvious on
the dun-hued lapwing, on the inland-wandering gull, and even on one or
other of the small ‘clan of the bushes’ more dear and familiar to us.
On none, however, is the change so marked as on the blithe starling,
surely the bird of cheerfulness, for he will sing (does he ever cease
that ever-varying call or flute or whistle of his?) when the lark
cannot rise in the polar air, when the missel-thrush will not throw a
challenge on the wet wind, and long before the most jubilant great-tit
in the forest will ring his early tinkling bell under leafless boughs.
For, even at Christmastide, though rarely perhaps quite so early, the
dark bill will suddenly yellow, and a green and purple sheen will
come over the russet plumage. Already Nature has looked northward
again. And, when she looks, there is at once a first movement of the
infinite sweet trouble of the New Life once more. The Creative Spirit
is come again from the sun-ways of the South. ‘’Twill be starling days
soon’--what is that but a homely way of saying that the old year has
not lapsed before the new year has already stirred with the divine
throes of rebirth. ‘The King is dead: Long live the King!’ is the human
analogue. There is no interregnum. The cuckoo may have fled before the
swallow, the landrail before the wild swan, but during the grey ebb
of autumn ten thousand wings have rustled in the dawn as the migrants
from oversea descend at last on our English and Scottish shores. A
myriad host may have fled at the equinox, or lingered till the wet
winds of the west and the freezing blasts of the north swept them
from November; but on those east winds from Norway and the Baltic,
from Jutland and Friesland, on those south winds leaping upward from
the marshes of Picardy and the Breton heathlands and from all of the
swarm-delivering South behind, on those south-west gales warm with the
soft air of the isles of the west, and wet with the foam over lost Ys
and sunken Lyonesse, what an incalculable host has come hitherward.
Like great fans, the invisible pinions of the Bird-God, that Winged
Spirit whom a Finnish legend images in continual suspense at the Cross
ways of the Four Winds, beat this way and that: so that when already
the lament of the wild-geese in storm-baffled flight from the South
ulules in our norland dawns, clouds of larks are gathered like dust
from the North-Sea lands, and are blown upon our shores, a multitude of
thrush turn westward, the rook and the hoodie rise on the Danish wind,
and yonder shadow drifting over the woods of Norway is none other than
ten thousand fieldfares whose congregation will soon be spilt like rain
upon our fields and pastures.
When is the turn of the year? We have certainly not to wait till the
missel-thrush calls down the wind on the moist south-wester that comes
in February. The changing seasons are indifferent to our calendars.
Autumn may burn the lime and chestnut while Summer is still in her
glory; Summer may steal back upon us through the September haze, or
even after we have heard the dry rustle in the woods of October. We are
familiar with the return of halcyon days when St. Luke’s Peace follows
the wind Euroclydon, or when St. Martin’s summer gleams like a quiet
sunset on the stormy brows of Winter. In mid-December the gnat may
still be seen spinning her dance by the hedgerow, the warmth-loving
bat may still wheel through silent afternoon dusks, the robin will
pitch his blithe song from holly to holly, the hedgesparrow will chase
the winter moth, the chaffinch will challenge the marauding tit. In
January, when the snow-lids open and the blue is seen, a lark will
spray his sudden music from far up in the pale azure, and as the long
notes tinkle and the interwoven song falls down the blue invisible
ways, we almost imagine that sky-glimpse to be the very face of spring.
Thus we have to wait for no day on which to note from the calendar
that the New Year is come, or on which to exclaim that Winter is gone
and Spring has arrived. A day may come, in February, perhaps, when,
suddenly, one will realise, as after sleep one realises one is awake,
that the hands of the South are in the woods, that the eyes of the
South are looking into the white sleep of blossom and flower, that the
breath of the South has awakened love, has stirred music in the hearts
of all the clans of song. But if we had not ourselves been asleep we
should not have waited thus long for the exquisite surprise. We should
have known the divine conspiracy by which the North and South are
lovers, and the West comrade to the East. The conspiracy of the eternal
passion by which power desires power, and dominion lusteth after
dominion: so that all the effort of the North is to touch the lips of
the South, all the dream of the East is to reach the sunset-gardens of
the West. We should have known, when out of December frost or January
snow the redbreast thrilled a canticle of joy, or the russet moth
sought his wingless love in windless flame-set twilights, that the Grey
Lover already felt the breath from those ardent lips. We should have
realised that when across the snow-silence the fieldfares no longer
edged southward, that when on the upland-pasture the lapwing began his
bridal change and in the bare orchard the starling began to glisten
as though he had bathed at the edge of the rainbow, or to wonder, in
some ice-set mirror, at his dun beak now grown yellow as the sheltered
crocus he knows of under the garden-yew ... we should have realised
that while this dark-browed barbarian from the North slept, the fair
woman of the South had passed smiling by, and kissed him as she passed.
The breeding-change that may be seen even before Christmas, the
January stir that becomes so obvious a week or so, or any day, after
the New Year is come, here and now we are at the turn of the year. By
mid-January, even, here and there, the song-thrush and the missel may
have begun to build, and even the great-tit’s bell may tinkle in the
coppice or wind-spared russet oak-glade. Already the snowdrop and the
Christmas-rose, the green-white aconite and the pale winter-iris are
become old acquaintances: many a primrose may have adventured in shy
retreats: any day a wandering minstrel will spill a tinkle of music
from among the first yellow spray of hazel catkins, the hedgesparrow
may unloosen song under the early-opening woodbine-buds, the
corn-bunting may crack his fairy-hammer or the wren try his new-year
flute among the yellowing gorse: any day, at the sight of the first
nomad daisies or the first gay vagrant dandelion, the yellow-hammer may
become a lover and a poet. It is this unchanging ‘any-day’ element
that redeems even the longest and dreariest midwinter; the sense of the
ever-moving ichor in the eternal veins; the inward exultation at the
ever-quickening and ever-slowing, but never-ceasing fans of life and
death.
Yesterday, rain-fog; to-day, frost-mist. But how fascinating each. How
vast and menacing the familiar oaks looked, leaning gigantic over dim
lapsing hedgerows. How phantom-like and processional, the elms stealing
into view one after the other; the birches disclosing tresses wet with
dews from the secret woods they are gliding from to regain the secret
lands beyond the misty river where I can hear the mallard call, like
a sudden tocsin among the falling towers and silent avalanches of
Cloudland.
It is desolate here, where I stand.
“_Cinnidh feanntag’s a ghàradh
’N uair thig faillinn ’san ròs_”
“_Nettles grow in the garden,
While the roses decay._”
A long way off yet till the wood-thrush rings his falling chime from
the April-Tree or French-Broom, as the laburnum is called in some parts
of the Highlands. I know a wood where a great _Bealaidh Fhrangach_
sleeps, to awake months hence in sun-gold beauty. The wood-thrush will
be its flute. Already I have to-day cut a slip from a garden-laburnum,
for a friend who wants ‘a flute of the April-Tree’ (_feadan na Craobh
Abraon_) ... for there is no timber better for the whistlewood of the
bagpipe than this. And what more fit for the Strayed Pan, if perchance
he follow the Phantom Call in the Hills of the North? But see ... the
mist has gone like a haze from blue water. I hear starling-music over
yonder in the _Talamh nan Ramh_, as Ossian calls the Country of the
Woods. _The Flute of the April-Tree_, and snow at my feet! ‘The Flute
of the April-Tree’: it has the yellow and white magic of spring in it.