![]() Poets, who are often nocturnal creatures, have identified with “spring’s messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale,” as Sappho (late seventh century BCE) calls it. It fills an apparently irresistible need to attribute human feelings to the bird’s pure and persistent song. The nightingale-a small, secretive, solitary songbird that goes on singing late into the night-has always had a special metaphorical and symbolic power. The tradition of imitating bird song is so strong that it sometimes begs for counterstatement, as in Michael Collier’s poem “In Certain Situations I’m Very Much Against Birdsong” (2011). Yeats’s wild swans at Coole, Robinson Jeffers’s hawks, Wallace Stevens’s blackbird, Osip Mandelstam’s goldfinch, Randall Jarrell’s mockingbird. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, William Cullen Bryant’s waterfowl, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s windhover, W. They have treated birds as messengers from the beyond, the embodiment of a transcendent vocation. They have watched them in their backyards ( John Keats, “ Ode to a Nightingale,” 1819 Anthony Hecht, “House Sparrows,” 1979), followed them into the woods ( Robert Burns, “Address to the Woodlark,” 1795 Amy Clampitt, “A Whippoorwill in the Woods,” 1990), and tracked them to the shore ( May Swenson, “One of the Strangest,” 1978 Galway Kinnell, “The Gray Heron,” 1980). They have also noted their difference from us. In Bright Wings (2012), Billy Collins points out that in early English poetry, “birds can be emblematic (the royal eagle), mythological (the reborn phoenix), or symbolic (the self-wounding pelican as Christ).” Over the centuries, poets have frequently identified with cuckoos (“Sumer is icumen in - / Lhude, sing cuccu!”) and mockingbirds, seagulls, herons, and owls. Greek poet Alcman of Sardis claimed to know the strains of all the birds. “Sir, we are a nest of singing birds,” Samuel Johnson told James Boswell. The vocal music of birds has always had a great hold on poets. The following definition of the term bird song is reprinted from A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch. ![]() ![]() Bird song is an important influence on poets and poetry recurring across cultures and eras. ![]()
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