Birds and Poets

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THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME III

BIRDS AND POETS
WITH OTHER PAPERS

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 assure 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 analogy 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.

CONTENTS
I. BIRDS AND POETS
II. TOUCHES OF NATURE
III. A BIRD MEDLEY
IV. APRIL
V. SPRING POEMS
VI. OUR RURAL DIVINITY
VII. BEFORE GENIUS
VIII. BEFORE BEAUTY
IX. EMERSON
X. THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BARN SWALLOW (colored)
From a drawing by L. A. Fuertes
EMERSON'S HOUSE IN CONCORD
From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason
A RIVER VIEW IN APRIL
From a drawing by Charles H. Woodbury
FLICKER
From a drawing by L. A. Fuertes Cows
IN RURAL LANDSCAPE
From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason
VIEW FROM A HILLTOP
From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason

BIRDS AND POETS

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 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."

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 grasshopper 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 grasshopper 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 god 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 compass 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 associated 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-passion 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 Thoreau 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 altitude 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 grass was growing,
Up this seashore, 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.

_Shine! Shine! Shine!
Pour down your warmth, great Sun!
While we bask--we two together._

_Two together!
Winds blow South, or winds blow North,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
If we two but keep together._

Till of a sudden,
Maybe killed unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest,
Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appeared again.

And thenceforward all summer, in the sound of the sea,
And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.

_Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up, sea-winds, along Paumanok's shore!
I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me._

Yes, when the stars glistened,
All night long, on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake,
Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.

He called on his mate:
He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.

. . . . . . . . . . .

_Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me._

_Low hangs the moon--it rose late.
Oh it is lagging--oh I think it is heavy with love, with love._

_Oh madly the sea pushes, pushes upon the land,
With love--with love._

_O night! do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers!
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?_

_Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!
High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves:
Surely you must know who is here, is here;
You must know who I am, my love._

_Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
Oh it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
O moon, do not keep her from me any longer._

_Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, oh I think you could give my mate back again,
if you only would;
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look._

_O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you._

_O throat! O trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth;
Somewhere listening to catch you, must be the one I want._

_Shake out, carols!
Solitary here--the night's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! Death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
Oh, under that moon, where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless, despairing carols._

_But soft! sink low! Soft! let me just murmur;
And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea;
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint--I must be still, be still to listen!
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately
to me._

_Hither, my love!
Here I am! Here!
With this just-sustained note I announce myself to you;
This gentle call is for you, my love, for you._

_Do not be decoyed elsewhere!
That is the whistle of the wind--it is not my voice;
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
Those are the shadows of leaves._

_O darkness! Oh in vain!
Oh I am very sick and sorrowful._

. . . . . . . . . . .

The bird that occupies the second place to the nightingale in
British poetical literature is the skylark, a pastoral bird as the
Philomel is an arboreal,-- a creature of light and air and motion,
the companion of the plowman, the shepherd, the harvester,--whose
nest is in the stubble and whose tryst is in the clouds. Its life
affords that kind of contrast which the imagination loves,--one
moment a plain pedestrian bird, hardly distinguishable from the
ground, the next a soaring, untiring songster, reveling in the
upper air, challenging the eye to follow him and the ear to
separate his notes.

The lark's song is not especially melodious, but is blithesome,
sibilant, and unceasing. Its type is the grass, where the bird
makes its home, abounding, multitudinous, the notes nearly all
alike and all in the same key, but rapid, swarming, prodigal,
showering down as thick and fast as drops of rain in a summer
shower.

Many noted poets have sung the praises of the lark, or been kindled
by his example. Shelley's ode and Wordsworth's "To a Skylark" are
well known to all readers of poetry, while every schoolboy will
recall Hogg's poem, beginning:--

"Bird of the wilderness,
Blithesome and cumberless,
Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea!
Emblem of happiness,
Blest is thy dwelling-place--
Oh to abide in the desert with thee!"

I heard of an enthusiastic American who went about English fields
hunting a lark with Shelley's poem in his hand, thinking no doubt
to use it as a kind of guide-book to the intricacies and harmonies
of the song. He reported not having heard any larks, though I have
little doubt they were soaring and singing about him all the time,
though of course they did not sing to his ear the song that Shelley
heard. The poets are the best natural historians, only you must
know how to read them. They translate the facts largely and freely.
A celebrated lady once said to Turner, "I confess I cannot see in
nature what you do." "Ah, madam," said the complacent artist,
"don't you wish you could!"

Shelley's poem is perhaps better known, and has a higher reputation
among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and
lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the
lark's song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can. I
quote only a few stanzas:--

"In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

"The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

"Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there;

"All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when Night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed."

Wordsworth has written two poems upon the lark, in one of which he
calls the bird "pilgrim of the sky." This is the one quoted by
Emerson in "Parnassus." Here is the concluding stanza:--

"Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine,
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home."

The other poem I give entire:--

"Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind!

"I have walked through wilderness dreary,
And to-day my heart is weary;
Had I now the wings of a Faery
Up to thee would I fly.
There is madness about thee, and joy divine
In that song of thine;
Lift me, guide me high and high
To thy banqueting-place in the sky.

"Joyous as morning
Thou art laughing and scorning;
Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,
And, though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou wouldst be loth
To be such a traveler as I.
Happy, happy Liver!
With a soul as strong as a mountain river,
Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both!

"Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."

But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is
Shakespeare's simple line,--

"Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"

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