birdsong

I recently came across this drawing which records birdsong as a kind of cardiogram. I made it some time ago on a writing course deep in Sussex woodland with Tiffany Brett, and it got me thinking about the ways in which birdsong shapes our day. Perhaps we all have the birds whose sound has a particular resonance for us - I can’t hear pigeons cooing without thinking of my third-year university room, the tangle of wisteria outside its window and a particular shade of green. It was actually the term in which I did my finals, having also just completed two dissertations, including one on Love’s Labours’ Lost, a play that in many ways also resounds with birdsong. It must have been a stressful time, but something of that sound distilled itself in memory, and persists. 

What have the poets made of birdsong and its uses, and how do we track and record the movements and sounds of our feathered neighbours? Nowadays, of course, there are sophisticated technical instruments by which this can be achieved https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-complete-history-of-collecting-and-imitating-birdsong/, but perhaps these don’t entirely answer to our need to recreate, through some kind of artistic mimesis, the impact of these musical impressions.  The image of the bird, its winged power, seems to go deep into some kind of archetypal memory – even in Jung’s first vision, for example, in The Red Book, Philemon appears with outstretched span of the Egyptian eagle-winged sun, more bird than angel, though perhaps this form could never really fly. In Jung’s painting his wings assume an imperial majesty of a different weight to that of the small creatures that flit with near invisibility in our gardens and woodland. It is this intimate, elusive quality which Chaucer captures in his Parliament of Fowls in the early 1380s, where

On every bow the bryddes herde I synge,

With voys of aungel in here armonye;

On every bough the birds heard I sing,

With voice of angels in their harmony

For all their poetic beauty, however, can we hear these birds? Although we learn they sing like angels, Chaucer’s interest in a mimetic representation of birdsong stops with this simile. Caroline Spurgeon, in her remarkable catalogue, Shakespeare’s Imagery and what it tells us notes that although Shakespeare’s images from birds ‘form by far the largest section drawn from any class of objects’, it is ‘not primarily their song, or their shape, or their colour or their habits’ but their flight and movement which interest him most. So ‘Who is the poet of poem birdsong,’ as the top google search asks?

Edward Hirsch observes in A Poet's Glossary that ‘the vocal music of birds has always had a great hold on poets’, as well as its more literary representations. The term bird song even appears as a category in his book with other literary terms, where he lists the poets for whom birdsong has played a special part, concluding that ‘the tradition of imitating bird song is so strong that it sometimes begs for counterstatement’, and offers Michael Collier’s poem ‘In Certain Situations I’m Very Much Against Birdsong’ (2011) as an antidote –

When poets put the sound of bird song in poems

it's a form of baby talk that gives me the creeps.

What do you think? Chirr-reep, chirr-reep.

In spite of Collins’ objections, it is the nightingale, not least in its mythological association with the myth of silenced Philomena, that has perhaps the longest poetic representation of all songbirds, achieving such special metaphorical and symbolic power that the bird and her song have even become identified with poets themselves. For Shelley, “A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.” (A Defence of Poetry, 1821)

Keats famously engaged with the sorrowful legends of Philomena and Ruth, when hearing the real bird in his garden at Hampstead, but for all its evocation, his poem is more interested in what the nightingale means than how it sounds, locating for it a literary provenance in the ‘self-same song that found a path/ Through the sad heart of Ruth’, and ‘the same that oft-times hath/ Charm’d magic casements’. The elegiacal note of this ‘plaintive anthem’ anticipates his own tragedy, the bittersweet note that could be ‘half in love with easeful Death’, could even wish

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

By contrast, their near contemporary, the poet and naturalist, John Clare, observed in the 1830s how nightingales actually look, sound, and behave. ‘I have watched them often at their song,’ he said, conflating the images of sight and sound in a typical synaesthesia. Remembering his close observations of childhood, and rejecting what he considered to be the old cliché of the ‘lovelorn nightingale’, he reframed its meaning through sound in his poem ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ (1835):

     “Chew-chew chew-chew” and higher still,
     “Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer” more loud and shrill,
     “Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up” — and dropped
     Low — “Tweet tweet jug jug jug” — and stopped

Not quite done, he attempted to capture its ‘stranger witching notes’ thus:

     “Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur
     “Woo-it woo-it” — and could this be her?
     “Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew
     Chew-rit chew-rit” — and ever new — 
     “Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig.”

- an experimental effect perhaps not so removed from a map of sounds drawn free-hand in the woods.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, with characteristic imaginative energy, also attempted to loosen himself from the demands of more conventional rhetoric, animating here with some success the call of the woodlark, but confined by what feel like, particularly in the second line, somewhat limiting rhymes:

Teevo cheevo cheevio chee

O where, what can that be?

Weedio-weedio: there again! 

So tiny a trickle of song-strain

Ted Hughes, in his Primer of Birds, reconfigured the poetic mood traditionally conjured by the nightingale into richly onomatopoeic language that moved away from the elegiac: ‘Your lightning and thunderclap nigh-voice/ Shuts back with gaggings and splutters’. With a similarly radical violence, his ‘Black-back Gull’ has ‘a mouth/God is trying to speak through’:

From a sunken echo-tomb of iron
All the drowned
Gargle over his tongue

Water, stone, wind, almost spoke.

- an attempt, somehow, to force bird-voice, if not song, onto the page. His cuckoo too, ‘through the blue shire/ Trawls a vista-shimmering shawl of echo’, coming to a climax in ‘That lewd loopy shout’, a world away from the pastoral world of Loves Labours’ Lost where ‘merry larks are ploughmen's clocks’, and the cuckoo just sings, well, ‘cuckoo’. In a play that resounds with birdsong - depicted as the great leveller, antidote to courtly sophistication with its folkloric amorality, it is however the erstwhile cuckoo who has the last word, if little poetic drama: 

The cuckoo, then on ev'ry tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he,

  Cuckoo,

Cuckoo, cuckoo: o word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear.

In the deep winter world too, ‘when icicles hang by the wall’, it is only in poetically simple terms that we hear ‘the staring owl’: ‘Tu-who!/ Tu-whit! Tu-who! -- A merry note!’. Perhaps in The Winter’s Tale we come a little closer to mimesis with the lark ‘that tirra-lyra chants’.

Ultimately it is the elegiacal quality of birdsong which seems most to catch the poetic imagination. In her elegy to Robert Lowell, North Haven, Elizabeth Bishop speaks not only of the five-note call of the sparrow, but imitates it in the final line of her fourth stanza, a conceit in which the five-note call also becomes the six-note pattern of the poetic process, a regenerative action which moves imaginatively against loss:

The goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

The poignant shadowy world of dusk, or the first moments of day when it is still dark - those moments that which we can’t quite catch, but fear to lose - persist in the echoes of birdsong. Trevor Nunn’s production of Love's Labour's Lost at the Olivier Theatre in 2003, his last, captured this late mood - set on the eve of the First World War, amidst the fading world of Edwardian England, it staged an evening flooded with sunlit nostalgia and fringed with darkness…In John Gunter's majestic design, a huge tree is dappled with shade and layers of lacy leaves. There is birdsong and the buzz of insects… (Susannah Clapp, The Guardian, 2nd March 2003)

Whatever time of day we hear it, birdsong calls to us with its powerful and elusive music. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s encouragement to ‘let the bird sing without deciphering the song’, we might hear a similar note of mystery, and an invitation to take a walk with a notepad and pen, to draw a trail of the song without words.