Birds and Poets : with Other Papers Part 1

Birds and Poets.

by John Burroughs.

PREFACE

I have deliberated a long time about coupling some of my sketches of outdoor nature with a few chapters of a more purely literary character, and thus confiding to my reader what absorbs and delights me inside my four walls, as well as what pleases and engages me outside those walls; especially since I have aimed to bring my outdoor spirit and method within, and still to look upon my subject with the best naturalist's eye I could command.

I hope, therefore, he will not be scared away when I boldly confront him in the latter portions of my book with this name of strange portent, Walt Whitman, for I a.s.sure him that in this misjudged man he may press the strongest poetic pulse that has yet beaten in America, or perhaps in modern times. Then, these chapters are a proper supplement or continuation of my themes and their a.n.a.logy in literature, because in them we shall "follow out these lessons of the earth and air," and behold their application to higher matters.

It is not an artificially graded path strewn with roses that invites us in this part, but, let me hope, something better, a rugged trail through the woods or along the beach where we shall now and then get a whiff of natural air, or a glimpse of something to

"Make the wild blood start In its mystic springs."

ESOPUS-ON-HUDSON, March, 1877.

I

BIRDS AND POETS

"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 woodp.e.c.k.e.r 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 seash.o.r.e, 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 gra.s.shopper are often referred to, but rarely by name any of the common birds. That Greek gra.s.shopper 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 gra.s.shoppers." One of the poets in the Anthology finds a gra.s.shopper struggling in a spider's web, which he releases with the words:--

"Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."

Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:--

"Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."

Still another sings how a gra.s.shopper took the place of a broken string on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."

"For while six chords beneath my fingers cried, He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied; The midday songster of the mountain set His pastoral ditty to my canzonet; And when he sang, his modulated throat Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."

While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not try this Pindaric gra.s.shopper also?

It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age that we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for poetical rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general favorite, and nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her praises. To the melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the cheerful she is cheerful.

Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks of her song as mournful, while Martial calls her the "most garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--

"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy, Thee, chantress, oft the woods among I woo, to hear thy evening song."

To Wordsworth she told another story:--

"O nightingale! thou surely art A creature of ebullient heart; These notes of thine,--they pierce and pierce,-- Tumultuous harmony and fierce!

Thou sing'st as if the G.o.d of wine Had helped thee to a valentine; A song in mockery and despite Of shades, and dews, and silent night, And steady bliss, and all the loves Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."

In a like vein Coleridge sang:--

"'T is the merry nightingale That crowds and hurries and precipitates With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."

Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of the bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the song and more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale

"The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."

I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its American rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States, which is also a nightingale,--a night-singer,--and which no doubt excels the Old World bird in the variety and compa.s.s of its powers. The two birds belong to totally distinct families, there being no American species which answers to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the color, manners, and habits of a thrush,--our hermit thrush,--but it is not a thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its song is protracted and full rather than melodious,--a capricious, long-continued warble, doubling and redoubling, rising and falling, issuing from the groves and the great gardens, and a.s.sociated in the minds of the poets with love and moonlight and the privacy of sequestered walks. All our sympathies and attractions are with the bird, and we do not forget that Arabia and Persia are there back of its song.

_Our_ nightingale has mainly the reputation of the caged bird, and is famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly wonderful, enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve upon the notes of almost any other songster. But in a state of freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon in its nature which too often flavors its whole performance, especially in captivity; but in its native haunts, and when its love-pa.s.sion is upon it, the serious and even grand side of its character comes out. In Alabama and Florida its song may be heard all through the sultry summer night, at times low and plaintive, then full and strong. A friend of Th.o.r.eau and a careful observer, who has resided in Florida, tells me that this bird is a much more marvelous singer than it has the credit of being. He describes a habit it has of singing on the wing on moonlight nights, that would be worth going South to hear. Starting from a low bush, it mounts in the air and continues its flight apparently to an alt.i.tude of several hundred feet, remaining on the wing a number of minutes, and pouring out its song with the utmost clearness and abandon,--a slowly rising musical rocket that fills the night air with harmonious sounds. Here are both the lark and nightingale in one; and if poets were as plentiful down South as they are in New England, we should have heard of this song long ago, and had it celebrated in appropriate verse. But so far only one Southern poet, Wilde, has accredited the bird this song. This he has done in the following admirable sonnet:--

TO THE MOCKINGBIRD

Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!

Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe?

Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.

Wit--sophist--songster--Yorick of thy tribe, Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school, To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe, Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot of Misrule!

For such thou art by day--but all night long Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain, As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song, Like to the melancholy Jaques, complain, Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong, And sighing for thy motley coat again.

Aside from this sonnet, the mockingbird has got into poetical literature, so far as I know, in only one notable instance, and that in the page of a poet where we would least expect to find him,--a bard who habitually bends his ear only to the musical surge and rhythmus of total nature, and is as little wont to turn aside for any special beauties or points as the most austere of the ancient masters. I refer to Walt Whitman's "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking," in which the mockingbird plays a part. The poet's treatment of the bird is entirely ideal and eminently characteristic. That is to say, it is altogether poetical and not at all ornithological; yet it contains a rendering or free translation of a bird-song--the nocturne of the mockingbird, singing and calling through the night for its lost mate--that I consider quite unmatched in our literature:--

Once, Paumanok, When the snows had melted, and the Fifth-month gra.s.s was growing, Up this seash.o.r.e, in some briers, Two guests from Alabama--two together, And their nest, and four light green eggs, spotted with brown, And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand, And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.