"In summer, when the shawes be shene,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the fowles' song.
The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,
Sitting upon the spray;
So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay."
It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and
of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that
fully responds to them. So true is this, that all the great
ornithologists--original namers and biographers of the birds--have been
poets in deed if not in word. Audubon is a notable case in point, who,
if he had not the tongue or the pen of the poet, certainly had the
eye and ear and heart--"the fluid and attaching character"--and the
singleness of purpose, the enthusiasm, the unworldliness, the love, that
characterize the true and divine race of bards.
So had Wilson, though perhaps not in as large a measure; yet he took
fire as only a poet can. While making a journey on foot to Philadelphia,
shortly after landing in this country, he caught sight of the red-headed
woodpecker flitting among the trees,--a bird that shows like a
tricolored scarf among the foliage,--and it so kindled his enthusiasm
that his life was devoted to the pursuit of the birds from that day. It
was a lucky hit. Wilson had already set up as a poet in Scotland, and
was still fermenting when the bird met his eye and suggested to his soul
a new outlet for its enthusiasm.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A
bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is
his life,--large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged
with buoyancy and his heart with song. The beautiful vagabonds, endowed
with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds,--how
many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday lives, and
how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and
do we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out his
carols" in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged
prototype? Kingsley has shown how surely the old minnesingers and early
ballad-writers have learned of the birds, taking their key-note from the
blackbird, or the wood-lark, or the throstle, and giving utterance to a
melody as simple and unstudied. Such things as the following were surely
caught from the fields or the woods:--
"She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley,
And there has she her sweet babe borne,
And the green leaves they grow rarely."
Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain
bird-songs!--clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge
and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not
the genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially masculine?) Keats and
Shelley, perhaps more notably than any other English poets, have the
bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry. This, of course,
is not saying that they are the greatest poets, but that they have
preeminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and the larks.
But when the general reader thinks of the birds of the poets, he
very naturally calls to mind the renowned birds, the lark and the
nightingale, Old World melodists, embalmed in Old World poetry, but
occasionally appearing on these shores, transported in the verse of some
callow singer.
The very oldest poets, the towering antique bards, seem to make little
mention of the song-birds. They loved better the soaring, swooping birds
of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures, the storks and
cranes, or the clamorous sea-birds and the screaming hawks. These
suited better the rugged, warlike character of the times and the simple,
powerful souls of the singers themselves. Homer must have heard the
twittering of the swallows, the cry of the plover, the voice of the
turtle, and the warble of the nightingale; but they were not adequate
symbols to express what he felt or to adorn his theme. Aeschylus saw in
the eagle "the dog of Jove," and his verse cuts like a sword with such a
conception.
It is not because the old bards were less as poets, but that they were
more as men. To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is
not confined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the hawk circling
aloft, the wild whinny of the loon, the whooping of the crane, the
booming of the bittern, the vulpine bark of the eagle, the loud
trumpeting of the migratory geese sounding down out of the midnight sky;
or by the seashore, the coast of New Jersey or Long Island, the wild
crooning of the flocks of gulls, repeated, continued by the hour,
swirling sharp and shrill, rising and falling like the wind in a storm,
as they circle above the beach or dip to the dash of the waves,--are
much more welcome in certain moods than any and all mere bird-melodies,
in keeping as they are with the shaggy and untamed features of ocean
and woods, and suggesting something like the Richard Wagner music in the
ornithological orchestra.
"Nor these alone whose notes
Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,
But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime
In still repeated circles, screaming loud,
The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl,
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me,"
says Cowper. "I never hear," says Burns in one of his letters, "the
loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild
mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning,
without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or
poetry."
Even the Greek minor poets, the swarm of them that are represented in
the Greek Anthology, rarely make affectionate mention of the birds,
except perhaps Sappho, whom Ben Jonson makes speak of the nightingale
as--
"The dear glad angel of the spring."
The cicada, the locust, and the grasshopper are often referred to, but
rarely by name any of the common birds. That Greek grasshopper must
have been a wonderful creature. He was a sacred object in Greece, and
is spoken of by the poets as a charming songster. What we would say of
birds the Greek said of this favorite insect. When Socrates and Phaedrus
came to the fountain shaded by the plane-tree, where they had their
famous discourse, Socrates said: "Observe the freshness of the spot, how
charming and very delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill
it sounds from the choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the
Anthology finds a grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he
releases with the words:--
"Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."