by Ann Wroe
To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise.
In Palmer’s etching, a shepherd at his cottage gate stood watching the bird; his dog, too, watched. The trees were heavy with night, the clouds just beginning to part with the coming day. That dappling effect, which both Palmer and Hopkins read as heavenly messaging, spread across the sky. The lark’s song of light outlined the crowded sheepfold and the crisped, bowed heads of a field of wheat which, as always, Palmer could not forget. Larks traditionally sprang from wheat, especially Hopkins’s young wheat of emerald and chrysoprase, and fell again, straight as a stone, to the deep concealing meadow. They were silent as they fell, Dante wrote, because they were satiated with sweetness. Palmer’s son Alfred observed that at his father’s burial in 1881 a lark sang joyously above them the whole time, ‘till, as the last words of the service died away, it dropped silently into the long grass.’5
Blake also saw larks sold in the London streets: not as sophisticated mouthfuls like wheatears, but to be hung up in cages indoors or outside city windows. They were caught in nets on the open Downs and transferred to wooden boxes, where most failed to sing. For Blake the caging of birds was unremitting cruelty, the coffering of light itself. Others found beauty and enjoyment in it, as though greenwood-and-meadow freshness came indoors with them. Ravilious, who kept a log of his bird sightings in the wild, painted the parlour of his house in Great Bardfield in Essex as a wicker cage alive with birds, vying with the swallows that built above the door. He bought a toy bird in a cage for his baby son John, but liked it so much he decided to keep it for himself. His alphabet ‘B’ for the Wedgwood china company was a bird in a cage; and in silhouette again, but this time dark. Almost certainly it would reverse into light, when it flew.
For poets the imprisoned bird was their own imagination curbed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, working as a journalist in London in 1808, heard from his bedroom at the Courier office (looking out on the dirty brick walls of the Lyceum) the continual song of a sweet bird ‘encaged somewhere out of Sight’ and found in it hope, love and growing fields. In fact, he told his little son Hartley, all birds sang of love, the lark especially: and love and light often seemed, to him, intrinsically connected. His own songs, though, struggled to emerge.6 His marriage was unhappy, his amours hopeless, his literary and philosophical productions too prolix for their own good. Too often he was ‘bird-limed’ or ‘a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole note is, Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow’. Tomorrow, he meant, he would accomplish something. Or, as a different agent of light, he might sweep over southern oceans; but there he flew in danger of his Ancient Mariner’s crossbow on flagging albatross wings.
‘In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.’
The great bird, which Coleridge had never seen, seemed obscured (like him, unkind contemporaries said) by the metaphysical fog around it. In certain weather smaller seabirds, too, became confused with air or ocean, as if they were merely part of the play of atmospheric light. This Coleridge did observe, in a brisk gale, when seagulls rose up from ‘the ever perishing white wave head’ as if ‘the foam-spots had taken Life and Wing’. On Iona, St Columba (whom Coleridge eagerly declared ‘shall be my Saint’) was said to have meditated on small birds which, as they flew, vanished into the storm, and as they dived disappeared into the tumbling waves. With these flew the storm petrel, famed for tireless flight even in the worst weather, its snow-white rump flashing through the turbulent air, seeming never to take food either from the sea, or from the air above it. Such birds of passage fascinated Coleridge; he even dreamed he might be one, flying beside Sara Hutchinson whom he loved but who did not love him, ‘reciprocally resting on each other in order to support the long flight, the awful Journey’ and never, perhaps, finding land again.7
Onshore, swifts play this role. They live in the air, launching into it from their brief nesting places, feeding there, coupling there, holding screaming ‘parties’ and, presumably, drowsing and sleeping there. Light is their element; they perform in it and, in flight, can seem to generate, gather and disperse it. In May 1873 Hopkins watched them ‘round and scurl’ under the clouds, flinging bright streamers away ‘row by row behind them like spokes of a lighthung wheel’.
In the last spring of the nineteenth century W.H. Hudson, walking near Midhurst in Sussex, met ‘a singular looking boy’, very thin, with a sharp face and earth-coloured clothes. The boy said he was looking for primroses; but he preferred to relate how, ‘morning after morning’ just after sunrise, swifts would plummet out of the sky to one chosen spot, near a field from which he had to scare the crows away. Yards from the hard ground, they saved themselves. Evidently they had roosted higher than any tree, and higher than eyes could follow them. Hudson claimed that if they tumbled to earth they could usually rise again, but Clare doubted it. The church clerk brought him a fallen swift once, all stubby feathered legs ‘like a bantum’ and curved, narrow, pointed wings, its eyes protected by tufts from the ‘sharp’ wind; inspecting it, he thought it unsuited to anything but continual life in the air.
Hawks, too, soared to the zenith and back again, plunging like a shooting star: as Milton said Mulciber and Uriel fell, angels out of heaven. To Thoreau, the nighthawks at Walden came ‘with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent’.8 At their highest they were invisible unless the sun flashed from breast and wings, as from Hopkins’s windhover in Wales, ‘daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon’:
AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
On both its rise and its dive to earth the bird selved in light, like his aspens and chestnuts in the wind; like the coming of Christ. Indeed hawks bring down with them a whole litter of light, heaven crashing into the hedge in a swirl of pigeon’s feathers, as young Dudeney saw them smash down among his trapped, terrified wheatears. Yet the killer itself is often unseen then or later, when it leaves a random graveyard of tiny bones and small, beaked skulls.
PeregrineSouthease
Sky-scything hawk that crashes to the earth
Blades in the warm breast, the sharp-clawed hedge
Shaking with fright and death – this must be yours,
Yours too, the ossuary of torn-off wings
And thin-beaked skulls – oh, and one perfect shell
Picked, quiet and clean.
Clare tamed a pair of hawks, ‘of what species I cannot tell’.9 He loved the way each bird hung motionless above him, ‘as if it was as light as a shadow & could find like the clouds a resting place upon the blue air’. The larger bird would come to his whistle and once, when he was out in the fields, settled on his shoulder, startling him with its wild familiarity. It would not, however, let itself be caught; it followed him where it would, when it would, until he ‘took no more heed of losing them’ and became free, as they were. For Jefferies, the ‘unchecked’ life of every wild hawk already belonged to him, expanding his own life. A hawk would pass him, as he dreamed, ‘like thought’. For Coleridge even a hawk’s dropping was beautiful as it fell against the sun: ‘a falling star, gem, the fixation, & chrystal, of substantial Light … how altogether lovely this to the Eye, and to the mind too …’
Olivier Messiaen, composing in the mid-twentieth century, thought all birds represented light ‘and our desire for light’. They were éclairs sur l’au-delà, flashes of the beyond. Some did better than others in this role. The corncrake in the meadow grass was faint as could be, ‘slow, distant, lunar sounds, as if
it’s from another planet and the bird has long gone’. But all birdsong was divine, since this was the music inherent in the act of creation: music that reflected the patternings of light. Messiaen did his considerable best to notate it, wandering in the woods in raincoat and beret with his manuscript book, sleeping in haystacks so he would not miss the greeting chorus of the dawn. In particular he listened for the song of the wood thrush, ‘the loveliest singer in France’, with its incantation that was ‘full of sunlight, almost sacramental’. Hopkins, though less quick to use that word so freely, also loved the thrush’s loud strikes and ‘lightnings’ of melody, like ‘rinsing drops’ on pear-tree leaves, tools on metal, or a snail-shell knocked on a stone.10 As for Thoreau, striding over the hills on a late summer afternoon, this song was a ‘medicative draught’ to his soul, ‘[which] changes all hours to an eternal morning’.
Sometimes that song was almost human, as when Whitman in 1865 heard the grey-brown hermit thrush piping in the swamps, ‘Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines’, and knew it mourned for Lincoln’s death as he did:
Sing on dearest brother – warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul –
Conversely, too, men and women might emulate the bird. Hudson, out on the Sussex Downs again in midsummer after rain, heard alternating snatches of thrush song and human song, the human performer a boy in the gorse among his cows. The voices of both, bell-like and pure, ringing out at intervals and seeming to answer each other, were ‘indescribably beautiful’. But the singers were invisible, thrush and boy both hiding: the boy’s grey cap glimpsed sometimes, but his habit otherwise ‘like a shy little lizard, or a furze wren’. Clare, too, a grown man who never lost his love of concealment, would creep into bushy coverts where no one could see him, to sing a little with the robins: their ‘melancholy sweetness …very touching to my feelings’ and, perhaps, what he himself felt.
Bird and man could thus share a language, though it might not be understood on either side. Thoreau, who played his flute at Walden like a solitary bird, searched for years in the New England wilderness for one he had never identified, a singer by day and night, which he called ‘the night warbler’. When half-seen it was always diving, into bush or tree, and vanishing; on his evening walks near Fair Haven lake, its song broke out sometimes ‘as in his dreams’. It haunted him alongside other animals he had lost ‘long ago’, ‘a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove’, whose footfalls and wingbeats were occasionally reported to him. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson – incidentally a friend of Whitman’s, too – warned him that if he found and ‘booked’ the bird, ‘life should have nothing more to show him’. Thoreau responded, not quite heeding the warning: ‘You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.’11
Another hidden, unknown bird whistled for Edward Thomas, ‘three lovely notes’, very soft, weaving within the summer wood some sentence meant only, it seemed, for him. It sang all that May and June of 1915 when he turned from writing prose and hackwork to poetry. No one saw the bird, and no one else heard it; he wondered, as Thoreau had, whether he and it were in a dream together. The song was ‘bodiless sweet’ and, inevitably for Thomas, sad; though he felt comforted by it. Perhaps it sang of the path he was to take, climbing at first over steep white chalk, whistling like that bird, towards the battlefields of France on which he would die two years later. For death would mean relief to him; and he would dance then, he wrote, like an aspen tree, no heaviness remaining.
One evening in summer an unseen blackbird sang the sinking of light, somewhere near the golden-apple tree at the back of my London garden. Folding the sheets from the line, I half listened; this was a bird I took for granted. But now the intensity of the song, carrying through the hush and the last pale glow in the silhouetted trees, made me wonder, as I went indoors. And at dawn the next day the melody came again, insistent. This was a song that demanded to be translated, even if it was saying only: ‘This is how it is.’
Some messages we cannot hear,
others we misunderstand;
so when the blackbird sang, clear,
rippling, open-throated, over land
hummocked and hushed to night, there seemed
no requisition in it, no command.
I closed the door. But then, long hours away,
he sang once more, abandoning the tree
for city ledge and wall, at milk-chink day
rousing me, urgent. So his song must be
what poets hear, knowing their summons, then
bending to write. He has not sung again.
Only one bird-summons has been persistent in my case. That has been silent, and from swans. The first came some time in the late 1970s, a date I can fix only from the red bohemian dress and brown beads I was wearing: the wrong clothes, as usual. I had been invited to lunch, as a raw young journalist, with members of The Economist board in the top-floor dining room at St James’s Street. Conversation was sticky, and I had trouble eating my peas politely. At one point, almost frozen by social ineptitude, I glanced up; and three white swans flew past the window.
All three were there at once, almost beside each other, their wings rising and falling in alternate beats. All were silent, and seemed to draw silence after them. They were just outside the glass, flying very close, as if through a canyon of tall office buildings, although they had plenty of space and air. And in an instant they were gone.
Presuming no one else had noticed, I said nothing, and hid the sighting away for years. The swans have persisted, though. They have appeared in dreams, their feathers painted in impasto so thick that it seethes with mystical, all-smothering light: Apollo’s light, perhaps, since these are his birds. I have seen them on the Thames, on the Hampstead ponds, on a reed-filled backwater of the Ouse in York, and very often on the shallow, muddy Cuckmere as it winds through waterlogged meadows under the Downs near Alfriston, by the wooden bridge. There are always three of them. If two are there, the third will soon appear, rounding the river bend or preening on a bank, its blackish beak thrust into a cumulus of feathers. One bird I can ignore; like the tiny plastic swan of my childhood, carefully glued to a pocket mirror, it seems to live only an introverted, decorative life. The exception was the single swan in Cornwall, on a creek near Fowey on a May morning of torrential rain, when steeply down through the stitchwort-starred and dripping woods I glimpsed a nook of river on which the white bird floated. Green water backed it like a cameo. That swan said: Remember! But three seem to repeat the words at the entrance to Apollo’s temple, Know thyself.
Perhaps the simplest message comes from the white dove that flutters through Christian art, appearing from heaven directly. It is linked to one word – as in the beginning was one Word – that might be given as Ecce, ‘Look.’ The word of light. Thus a dove pecked at the Virgin’s casement, pushing gently to come in among her cushions and prayer books, with its pink determined eye; so another hovered at the Jordan river, a single bright cloud above the wet and naked Christ. This is she; this is he; God pronounces, and it is.
Anyone who has dealings with doves – their plump prissiness, their gluttonous hustling after crusts, the restless thunder of their feet on the roof tiles at dawn – knows that they make unlikely agents of celestial light. Italian Renaissance doves are as solid as pieces of domestic chinaware; and those that hover over the heads of saints, fatly foreshortened and stuck fast with their own rays, seem even heavier than those that have escaped divinity for the warm, seed-strewn ground. Yet it is that very stillness that recommends them. Doves are tame creatures. They nestle in the hand, press against the cheek, as Picasso painted one held almost too hard by a child in a pale sashed dress. They subside, and curl their heads under; they consent sometimes to be captured, where earth-light never will. Hopkins’s incarnate light was the wildly beautiful buckling windhover; but his Peace was
the wild wood-dove, ‘shy wings shut’, which ‘comes to brood and sit’.12
The souls of the outer regions of Paradise – almost wholly light, as Dante reported, having been swept up by light to join them – had not yet found that dovelike calm. Their habits were those of starlings. They moved in flocks in the wide, brilliant skies of the sixth heaven, rising and whirling in the air to form circles, hexagons and the letters ‘D’, ‘I’ and ‘L’, until they had spelled out the words Diligite Iustitiam, ‘Love Justice’. On the final ‘M’ they wove a white lily, for Maria. Then, ‘like sparks from a log’, innumerabili faville, in glittering trails against the golden air, they flew back up in their thousands.
In November 1799 a similar ‘vast flight’ of starlings astonished Coleridge, as he rattled south to London in the overnight coach.13 His mood was sleepless and hectic, not only because he had just met Sara Hutchinson, but because his collaboration with Wordsworth on their revolutionary book of poems, Lyrical Ballads, had become an exercise in frustration. His ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was now his only substantial contribution. But for a moment, just after sunrise, he was distracted by the shapes the birds were making:
like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition – now a circular area inclined in an Arc – now a globe – now from complete orb into an ellipse & oblong – now a balloon with the car suspended, now a concaved semicircle & still it expands & condenses, some moments glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening! –
Inevitably, the starlings had come to symbolise himself. They did not form words but seemed, all the same, to be his thoughts flocking and swarming, some catching light but most failing to, and the whole spectacle a portrait of his own troubled soul.
The starlings in their winter murmurations over Brighton Pier form exactly the shapes he saw, as well as double helices that build and flow into each other with endless invention and grace. Small posses of latecomers, desperately speeding against the sunset, are effortlessly swallowed into the ever-evolving cloud. From time to time, as the angle changes, whole curves and ellipses disappear. Tourists and locals alike, rapt in that heady evening smell of ozone and chip-frying, pause to watch and photograph the whirling, silent display. It may be mass exhibitionism, and nothing else; but the birds discuss it afterwards, roosting and shuffling under the seaweedy girders of the pier, as though their performance held meaning not only for themselves but also for the lumbering, unwitting world of men.