I HAVE said on a former occasion that "the true poet knows more
about Nature than the naturalist, because he carries her open
secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in
ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning
and mystery of the bird?" But the poets sometimes rely too
confidently upon their supposed intuitive knowledge of nature, and
grow careless about the accuracy of the details of their pictures.
I am not aware that this was ever the case with Goethe; I think it
was not, for as a rule, the greater the poet, the more correct and
truthful will be his specifications. It is the lesser poets who
trip most over their facts. Thus a New England poet speaks of
"plucking the apple from the pine," as if the pineapple grew upon
the pine-tree. A Western poet sings of the bluebird in a strain in
which every feature and characteristic of the bird is lost; not one
trait of the bird is faithfully set down. When the robin and the
swallow come, he says, the bluebird hies him to some mossy old
wood, where, amid the deep seclusion, he pours out his song.
In a poem by a well-known author in one of the popular journals, a
hummingbird's nest is shown the reader, and it has BLUE eggs in it.
A more cautious poet would have turned to Audubon or Wilson before
venturing upon such a statement. But then it was necessary to have
a word to rhyme with "view," and what could be easier than to make
a white egg "blue"? Again, one of our later poets has evidently
confounded the hummingbird with that curious parody upon it, the
hawk or sphinx moth, as in his poem upon the subject he has hit off
exactly the habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a
cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the habits of the
one and the plumage of the other. The time to see the hummingbird,
he says, is after sunset in the summer gloaming; then it steals
forth and hovers over the flowers. Now, the hummingbird is
eminently a creature of the sun and of the broad open day, and I
have never seen it after sundown, while the moth is rarely seen
except at twilight. It is much smaller and less brilliant than the
hummingbird; but its flight and motions are so nearly the same that
a poet, with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, might easily mistake
one for the other. It is but a small slip in such a poet as poor
George Arnold, when he makes the sweet-scented honeysuckle bloom
for the bee, for surely the name suggests the bee, though in fact
she does not work upon it; but what shall we say of the Kansas
poet, who, in his published volume, claims both the yew and the
nightingale for his native State? Or of a Massachusetts poet, who
finds the snowdrop and the early primrose blooming along his native
streams, with the orchis and the yellow violet, and makes the
blackbird conspicuous among New England songsters? Our ordinary
yew is not a tree at all, but a low spreading evergreen shrub that
one may step over; and as for the nightingale, if they have the
mockingbird in Kansas, they can very well do without him. We have
several varieties of blackbirds, it is true; but when an American
poet speaks in a general way of the blackbird piping or singing in
a tree, as he would speak of a robin or a sparrow, the suggestion
or reminiscence awakened is always that of the blackbird of English
poetry.
"In days when daisies deck the ground,
And blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound
To see the coming year"--
sings Burns. I suspect that the English reader of even some of
Emerson's and Lowell's poems would infer that our blackbird was
identical with the British species. I refer to these lines of
Emerson:--
"Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbirds' roundelay;"
and to these lines from Lowell's "Rosaline:"--
"A blackbird whistling overhead
Thrilled through my brain;"
and again these from "The Fountain of Youth:"--
" 'T is a woodland enchanted;
By no sadder spirit
Than blackbirds and thrushes
That whistle to cheer it,
All day in the bushes."
The blackbird of the English poets is like our robin in everything
except color. He is familiar, hardy, abundant, thievish, and his
habits, manners, and song recall our bird to the life. Our own
native blackbirds, the crow blackbird, the rusty grackle, the
cowbird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not songsters, even
in the latitude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers,
unless we credit them with a "split-whistle," as Thoreau does. The
two first named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in spring
(as at times both our crow and jay have), which is very pleasing,
and to which Emerson aptly refers in these lines from "May-Day:"--
"The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee"--
but it is not a song. The note of the starling in the trees and
alders along the creeks and marshes is better calculated to arrest
the attention of the casual observer; but it is far from being a
song or a whistle like that of the European blackbird, or our
robin. Its most familiar call is like the word "BAZIQUE,"
"BAZIQUE," but it has a wild musical note which Emerson has
embalmed in this line:--
"The redwing flutes his O-KA-LEE."
Here Emerson discriminates; there is no mistaking his blackbird
this time for the European species, though it is true there is
nothing fluty or flute-like in the redwing's voice. The flute is
mellow, while the "O-KA-LEE" of the starling is strong and sharply
accented. The voice of the thrushes (and our robin and the European
blackbird are thrushes) is flute-like. Hence the aptness of this
line of Tennyson:--
"The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm,"--
the blackbird being the ouzel, or ouzel-cock, as Shakespeare calls
him.