Across the narrow beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,--
One little sandpiper and I.
Above our heads the sullen clouds
Scud black and swift across the sky;
Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds
Stand out the white lighthouses high.
Almost as far as eye can reach
I see the close-reefed vessels fly,
As fast we flit along the beach,--
One little sandpiper and I.
I watch him as he skims along,
Uttering his sweet and mournful cry;
He starts not at my fitful song,
Or flash of fluttering drapery;
He has no thought of any wrong;
He scans me with a fearless eye.
Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
The little sandpiper and I.
Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
When the loosed storm breaks furiously?
My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
I do not fear for thee, though wroth
The tempest rushes through the sky;
For are we not God's children both,
Thou, little sandpiper, and I?
Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most
cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and
have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his
pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked upon the
bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:--
"Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to wicket,
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate:
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.
"It was there, perhaps, last year,
That his little house he built;
For he seems to perk and peer,
And to twitter, too, and tilt
The bare branches in between,
With a fond, familiar mien."
The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and Mrs.
Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there
fall that first note of his in early spring,--a note that may be called
the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear, heard above the cold,
damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later Lowell's
two lines come nearer the mark:--
"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
From post to post along the cheerless fence."
Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley,
laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in
the heart, who has put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too, escapes
through the finest meshes of rhyme.
The most melodious of our songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit
thrush,--birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony
and serenity,--have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them their
merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done this service
for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here
the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening
star, and the hermit thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part
throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance
of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet when the
powerful shock of the President's assassination comes upon him, and he
flees from the stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation
of the house,--
"Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."
Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by their
calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellowthroat, for instance,
standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out as you approach,
_"which way, sir! which way, sir!"_ If he says this to the ear of common
folk, what would he not say to the poet? One of the peewees says _"stay
there!"_ with great emphasis. The cardinal grosbeak calls out _"what
cheer" "what cheer;"_ " the bluebird says _"purity," "purity," "purity;"_
the brown thrasher, or ferruginous thrush, according to Thoreau, calls
out to the farmer planting his corn, _"drop it," "drop it," "cover it
up," "cover it up"_ The yellow-breasted chat says _"who," "who"_ and
_"tea-boy"_ What the robin says, caroling that simple strain from
the top of the tall maple, or the crow with his hardy haw-haw, or the
pedestrain meadowlark sounding his piercing and long-drawn note in the
spring meadows, the poets ought to be able to tell us. I only know the
birds all have a language which is very expressive, and which is easily
translatable into the human tongue.