The Writings of John Burroughs Part 4

IV

NATURE AND THE POETS

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. .h.i.t 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 lat.i.tude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers, unless we credit them with a "split-whistle," as Th.o.r.eau 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-c.o.c.k, as Shakespeare calls him.

In the line which precedes this, Tennyson has stamped the cuckoo:--

"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 subst.i.tute 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 gra.s.sy 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 G.o.ddess's cheek. Yet these flowers have no cla.s.sical a.s.sociations, 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 t.i.tlark and sh.o.r.e lark breed and pa.s.s the summer far to the north, and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The sh.o.r.e 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 ent.i.tled 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sage, 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.

b.u.t.tress, 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 pa.s.senger 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."