"To left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the
hills."
The cuckoo is a bird that figures largely in English poetry, but he
always has an equivocal look in American verse, unless sharply
discriminated. We have a cuckoo, but he is a great recluse; and I
am sure the poets do not know when he comes or goes, while to make
him sing familiarly like the British species, as I have known at
least one of our poets to do, is to come very wide of the mark.
Our bird is as solitary and joyless as the most veritable
anchorite. He contributes nothing to the melody or the gayety of
the season. He is, indeed, known in some sections as the rain-
crow," but I presume that not one person in ten of those who spend
their lives in the country has ever seen or heard him. He is like
the showy orchis, or the lady's-slipper, or the shooting star among
plants,-- a stranger to all but the few; and when an American poet
says cuckoo, he must say it with such specifications as to leave no
doubt what cuckoo he means, as Lowell does in his "Nightingale in
the Study:"--
"And, hark, the cuckoo, weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes
you."
In like manner the primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say
nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English
poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so
abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early
and is very pretty. Cowslip and oxlip are familiar names of
varieties of the same plant, and they bear so close a resemblance
that it is hard to tell them apart. Hence Tennyson, in "The
Talking Oak:"--
"As cowslip unto oxlip is,
So seems she to the boy."
Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose,--a rank, tall weed
that blooms with the mullein in late summer. Its small, yellow,
slightly fragrant blossoms open only at night, but remain open
during the next day. By cowslip, our poets and writers generally
mean the yellow marsh marigold, which belongs to a different family
of plants, but which, as a spring token and a pretty flower, is a
very good substitute for the cowslip. Our real cowslip, the
shooting star, is very rare, and is one of the most beautiful of
native flowers. I believe it is not found north of Pennsylvania.
I have found it in a single locality in the District of Columbia,
and the day is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster of pink
flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving the air. I do not
know that it has ever been mentioned in poetry.
Another flower, which I suspect our poets see largely through the
medium of English literature and invest with borrowed charms, is
the violet. The violet is a much more winsome and poetic flower in
England than it is in this country, for the reason that it comes
very early and is sweet-scented; our common violet is not among the
earliest flowers, and it is odorless. It affects sunny slopes,
like the English flower; yet Shakespeare never could have made the
allusion to it which he makes to his own species in these lines:--
"That strain again! it had a dying fall:
Oh! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor,"
or lauded it as
"Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath."
Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small, white, lilac-veined
species (not yellow, as Bryant has it in his poem), that is common
in wet, out-of-the-way places. Our common blue violet--the only
species that is found abundantly everywhere in the North--blooms in
May, and makes bright many a grassy meadow slope and sunny nook.
Yet, for all that, it does not awaken the emotion in one that the
earlier and more delicate spring flowers do,--the hepatica, say,
with its shy wood habits, its pure, infantile expression, and at
times its delicate perfume; or the houstonia,--"innocence,"--
flecking or streaking the cold spring earth with a milky way of
minute stars; or the trailing arbutus, sweeter scented than the
English violet, and outvying in tints Cytherea's or any other
blooming goddess's cheek. Yet these flowers have no classical
associations, and are consequently far less often upon the lips of
our poets than the violet.
To return to birds, another dangerous one for the American poet is
the lark, and our singers generally are very shy of him. The term
has been applied very loosely in this country to both the meadow-
lark and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally understood now
that we have no genuine skylark east of the Mississippi. Hence I
am curious to know what bird Bayard Taylor refers to when he speaks
in his "Spring Pastoral" of
"Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the
bluebird."
Our so-called meadowlark is no lark at all, but a starling, and the
titlark and shore lark breed and pass the summer far to the north,
and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The
shore lark has changed its habits in this respect of late years.
It now breeds regularly on my native hills in Delaware County, New
York, and may be heard in full song there from April to June or
later.]
The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be
accurate when they particularize. We expect them to see the fact
through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the
medium must not distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or
a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it,
it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history. I
doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this
respect, except where he followed the superstition and the
imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey-
bee. His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main
purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer. For
instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into
the mouth of Banquo!--
"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does
approve,
By his loved masonry that the
heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze.
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but
this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and
procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt,
I have observed,
The air is delicate."
Nature is of course universal, but in the same sense is she local
and particular,--cuts every suit to fit the wearer, gives every
land an earth and sky of its own, and a flora and fauna to match.
The poets and their readers delight in local touches. We have both
the hare and the rabbit in America, but this line from Thomson's
description of a summer morning,--
"And from the bladed field the fearful
hare limps awkward,"--
or this from Beattie,--
"Through rustling corn the hare
astonished sprang"--
would not apply with the same force in New England, because our
hare is never found in the fields, but in dense, remote woods. In
England both hares and rabbits abound to such an extent that in
places the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the ground is
undermined by their burrows, till they become a serious pest to the
farmer, and are trapped in vast numbers. The same remark applies
to this from Tennyson:--
"From the woods
Came voices of the well-contented
doves."
Doves and wood-pigeons are almost as abundant in England as hares
and rabbits, and are also a serious annoyance to the farmer; while
in this country the dove and pigeon are much less marked and
permanent features in our rural scenery,--less permanent, except in
the case of the mourning dove, which is found here and there the
season through; and less marked, except when the hordes of the
passenger pigeon once in a decade or two invade the land, rarely
tarrying longer than the bands of a foraging army. I hardly know
what Trowbridge means by the "wood-pigeon" in his midsummer poem,
for, strictly speaking, the wood-pigeon is a European bird, and a
very common one in England. But let me say here, however, that
Trowbridge, as a rule, keeps very close to the natural history of
his own country when he has occasion to draw material from this
source, and to American nature generally. You will find in his
poems the wood pewee, the bluebird, the oriole, the robin, the
grouse, the kingfisher, the chipmunk, the mink, the bobolink, the
wood thrush, all in their proper places. There are few bird-poems
that combine so much good poetry and good natural history as his
"Pewee." Here we have a glimpse of the catbird:--
"In the alders, dank with noonday
dews,
The restless catbird darts and mews;"
here, of the cliff swallow: -
"In the autumn, when the hollows
All are filled with flying leaves
And the colonies of swallows
Quit the quaintly stuccoed eaves."
Only the dates are not quite right. The swallows leave their nests
in July, which is nearly three months before the leaves fall. The
poet is also a little unfaithful to the lore of his boyhood when he
says
"The partridge beats his throbbing drum"
in midsummer. As a rule, the partridge does not drum later than
June, except fitfully during the Indian summer, while April and May
are his favorite months. And let me say here, for the benefit of
the poets who do not go to the woods, that the partridge does not
always drum upon a log; he frequently drums upon a rock or a stone
wall, if a suitable log be not handy, and no ear can detect the
difference. His drum is really his own proud breast, and beneath
his small hollow wings gives forth the same low, mellow thunder
from a rock as from a log. Bryant has recognized this fact in one
of his poems.
Our poets are quite apt to get ahead or behind the season with
their flowers and birds. It is not often that we catch such a poet
as Emerson napping. He knows nature, and he knows the New England
fields and woods, as few poets do. One may study our flora and
fauna in his pages. He puts in the moose and the "surly bear," and
makes the latter rhyme with "woodpecker:"--
"He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous
beds,
The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born
heads.
. . . . . . . .
.
He heard, when in the grove, at
intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree
falls,--
One crash, the death-hymn of the
perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green
century."
"They led me through the thicket
damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers'
camp."
"He saw the partridge drum in the
woods;
He heard the woodcock's evening
hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him."
His "Titmouse" is studied in our winter woods, and his "Humble-Bee"
in our summer fields. He has seen farther into the pine-tree than
any other poet; his "May-Day" is full of our spring sounds and
tokens; he knows the "punctual birds," and the "herbs and simples
of the wood:"--
"Rue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and
agrimony,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk-weed,
sassafras,
Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint
pipes and sun-dew."