by Ann Wroe
Indecipherable messages might lurk even on the eggs of birds, with their dashes of light and shade. Jefferies thought those markings, especially the ‘brown, black, greenish, reddish’ blotches on finches’ eggs, contained a whole library of knowledge without an alphabet, as wonderful and puzzling as ‘the strange inscriptions of Assyria’.14 Ravilious, another avid nester, more than once drew untidy boys, dangerously high in trees, reaching in for the mysterious treasure, and would break off his open-air sketching in sand pits to plunge his hand into sand martins’ holes in the cliffs. In his Wedgwood alphabet ‘N’ was a nest, with shining eggs in it. Hopkins, evidently seeking and finding along the hedgerows, called thrushes’ eggs ‘little low heavens’. They were sparely marked with black dots, but did not need those to be eloquent. The light-filled song of the thrush had formed within eggs as blue and fragile as the April sky.
Clare, the most expert birder among poets, was equally interested in the secret construction of nests: how the golden-crested wren glued its eggs to the base with resin; how the blackbird lined its nest with hair, but the mistle thrush used wool; how the song thrush made a lining of smoothed dried dung, and the nightingale (most retiring of birds, whose nest he had never procured) wove an outer shell of old oak leaves.15 The nest once admired, though, and the bird away, he slipped in his hand to count, and feel, and take one of, the smooth still-warm eggs, sometimes – in the case of the titmouse and the wren – little larger than pearls. He loved to watch, motionless, the bird sitting, hiding as he was; and then as quietly, as if investigating his own pounding heart, to take stock and steal.
A similar communion was reported by the priest-poet R.S. Thomas, who did not expect it. One October day, walking or cycling about his country parish as his habit was, he blundered into a spinney full of splintered sunlight and goldcrests, at Lleyn on the western coast of Wales. He found himself ‘netted … in their shadows’ while the birds themselves behaved as though he were another sunlit tree, nothing more. He tried to fathom why the moment was so important to him, and how it seemed that ‘When it was happening, I was not’. The words that came to him at last were those of Coleridge, from his Biographia Literaria of 1817: what was occurring within him and around him, as he stood there invisible, was ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. He and the birds were both involved in building the world from light.
Coleridge himself, on a January evening in 1804, had stumbled across a flock of brown linnets in a thicket, flying in a roughly circular formation: the ‘twinkling of wings’ and their ‘sweet straight onward motion’ across the diameter of their own circle, ‘all at once in one beautiful Whole, like a Machine’. He did not know what they made, or why; again, they did not seem to notice him. But by his very presence he was implicated in the forms they were creating.
Both these encounters were apparently silent. Like the falling hawk and the flocking starlings, birds did not need to vocalise in order to express light. But they could do that, too. The song of birds, Messiaen wrote, seemed ‘an absolutely impenetrable chaos, a prodigious entanglement’ of free rhythms, strange pitches, added semiquavers and untempered intervals smaller than a semitone. Yet out of it came rhythmic symmetry and ‘non-reversible rhythms’, of the kind he also saw, traced by light, in the wings of butterflies and the veins of leaves. Out of it came forms. Again he noticed this most clearly in the song of the wood thrush: ‘stanzas repeated two or three times, incisively and with authority’.
At Dartington in Devon, in the early 1940s, the painter Cecil Collins saw one April afternoon a thrush singing. A shower had fallen, and the sun shone through the raindrops on the leaves to turn them into diamonds. Collins had already painted a thrush singing dreams for a young man asleep on a hillside. Now it seemed to him that this bird’s song made the intricate, swirling shape of the jewel-bright bush on which it sat. By evoking light, it could also construct the waking world.
Tradition and folklore already connected the songs and sights of spring. Clare noted that the catkins appeared on the hazel when the mistle thrush began to sing, and that the sallow-catkins turned from white to yellow when the blackcap started. The trees were defined both by those songs and by slanting, flickering light, as if birds flew there. Some city blackbird, perhaps, sang the silver birch I saw once from the bus in Camden, scribbled over with long catkins like sunlit shafts of rain; and, even earlier in the year, the same tree decked in dreams of catkins, its thread-like smallest twigs blown to brilliance by the wind. On the Downs the first larksong sprinkling the sky, and the earliest violets in the rough, pale winter grass, make their entrance together. Thoreau on a March morning in 1858 thought the spring deep-blue of the valley of the Concord river, and the new look of the mountains suddenly clear of snow, had come at the very same moment as the chorusing, returning birds. Whole landscapes may be embroidered, or woven, or incised, by birdsong and the beat of wings.
Ravilious sometimes did his wood engravings with his parents’ canary, Charlie, freed from his cage to perch on his left hand or his shoulder.17 He would sit ‘very quietly … as long as he is allowed, but [he] makes rather a mess of my coat, so I can’t encourage him too much. His whistle in my ear is so startling if he begins to sing.’ With Charlie or without him, he whistled like a bird himself (‘better than a nightingale,’ his friends said): Tudor ballads or ‘vocal gems from Show Boat’ or airs from The Beggar’s Opera, his long delicate forefinger held along the graver as it cut into the boxwood block. He seemed to whistle in thirds, rapidly and trillingly, on the inbreath rather than the outbreath, his line of incised light following the song. At moments, man and bird worked together. The same synchronism struck the hermit-author of a ninth-century Irish poem, who found that when he sat with his white ruled book beneath the leafing trees where blackbird and cuckoo were singing, his words flowed as never before.
On evidence like this, birds did not merely hint and prophesy. They might steer the human mind directly towards light. This could be true of birds as small as goldcrests or as silent as swans. It seemed particularly true, though – as R.S. Thomas wrote, remembering that moment in the spinney – of migrating birds, drawing lines of travel and as restless on the earth as he was.18
‘A repetition in time of the eternal
I AM.’ Say it. Don’t be shy.
Escape from your mortal cage
in thought. Your migrations will never
be over. Between two truths
there is only the mind to fly with.
Navigate by such stars as are not
leaves falling from life’s
deciduous tree, but spray from the fountain
of the imagination, endlessly
replenishing itself out of its own waters.
Swallows, those mysterious navigators, warbled and cried rather than sang. They gave their message mainly by darting to and fro, pointing the way with their sharp wings to hidden, holy places. They swooped past Catherine Blake’s window in Lambeth, ‘the angels of our journey’, directing her and Mr Blake to Felpham, and visions. Ravilious was delighted when, one Christmas, his wife Tirzah devised a Nativity scene featuring flights of swallow-tailed angels.
It was easy to miss their going, as Clare did in October 1824, being dull and unhappy, so that ‘when they went I know not’ – and where they went ‘is a mystery … & remains a mystery’. For him, as for Gilbert White, it seemed vital to know it; and he longed to uncover it, whether from chalk cliffs falling or some other strange occurrence. He was well aware, though, that the birds played tricks with him, one moment gathering as if to go, the next dipping and dispersing, flaunting their white and blue livery, as usual. On a village green at evening – as at Alfriston once, near the church – it is hard to tell what may be swallows, and what some effect of the fading summer light. Jefferies observed them in the height of the sky become colourless, like the air.
In Crete once a swallow flew pell-mell from a whitewashed village church, invit
ing me to enter with sweeping, silent urgency. It was nesting not in the eaves, as I supposed, but on top of an old brass incense-burner that hung above the font. Globules and stalactites of dried clay dripped down towards the basin, so thickly layered with dust and bird-lime that it must have been many years since any child was baptised there. Grace came not from the water, slowly trickled from a brass jug, nor from the prayers of the bearded, black-robed priest, nor from the dim, gilded icons sooty with candle smoke, but from the light and dash of the swallows, inside and out of doors.
Many common birds were associated, in poets’ minds, with the heavenly lights. It was not necessary to spot, as Traherne did, the ‘strange’ Bird of Paradise itself, which timidly shed or hid its gorgeous feathers when flying among men.19 The blue-green sheen on the magpie, and the shimmering dots on starlings, showed where they belonged. Even crows, those hunched marauders, show it. In Gloucestershire once I came across a field dedicated to the death of crows, with their corpses splayed in the sharp, sun-threaded stubble and gibbeted on the wire fence. Farmers no longer employ thin, strange boys to bang on tin trays to scare the birds away; they bring in friends to shoot them. This farmer had left the carnage as a warning to others of their kind. I sympathised with him until I saw that individual crows’ feathers shone with iridescence on the black, and were beautiful. Had I picked one up to use as a quill it might well have written, not dark thoughts, but words as heaven-haunted as the feather of a swan. I have read somewhere that they make fine pens, for those whose hand is neat and small.
Henry Vaughan, a close contemporary and admirer of Herbert’s, interpreted all birds’ markings and specklings – specifically those of starlings – as proof of their ‘native stars’, distancing them from the muddy, beer-stained, clamorous earth:20
I would I were some Bird or Star,
Flutt’ring in woods, or lifted far
Above this inne
And Rode of sin!
Then either Star, or Bird, should be
Shining, or singing still to thee.
‘A star in the sky or a bird on the wing’ were the precious things the Child Jesus might cry for in the old Appalachian carol; and ‘he surely coulda had it/ For he was the king.’ In the medieval stories of his infancy he made sparrows out of clay, as his father had made man, and blessed them: flexing their thick, stubby wings, shedding mud and heaviness as they went, they flew away, as far in the firmament as they were flung to.
The connection of swifts with stars seemed especially close. Jefferies’s acolyte Henry Williamson, lying in the Devon dimmit-light on a grassy garden wall, thought their gradually vanishing cries belonged ‘to the spectral light of the stars and the mystery of infinite space’. He imagined them wheeling, like the constellations, ‘where Aldebaran and Vega shine without quiver in the unearthly air’. (He had also traced swallows vanishing at night, ‘speeding down the silver stain of the Milky Way towards the big lantern star Formalhaut’.)
With sunrise the swifts reappeared, falling like arrows – as Hudson’s young crow-scarer had noticed – from some high, unknown place.
Modern experiments with indigo buntings have shown that at least some migrating birds make use of the stars to steer themselves: instinctively using Polaris, for example, to navigate from the northern hemisphere away to the south, and refining their direction by using the rotational map of the night sky. The light of the stars, therefore, prompts and governs their sudden disappearance in one season; and, in another season, their equally sudden appearance somewhere else.
One February, back in Ravilious country, I scribbled down some notes on links between birds and stars, standing by the stirrup gate that leads into a hidden wood and valley on the dip-slope of Ditchling Beacon. The day was just mild enough for such a pause, if I did not take my gloves off.
Birds mark out the landscape for shore-dwellers, as for sailors the vast undifferentiated canvas of the sea is defined and explained by stars –
Here, at the gate between dip-slope and hanging wood (the gate’s decided clang accentuating the quiet), birdsong gradually scoops out a small dry valley, sketching in the reddish tips of the February trees; and the slow blink of a crow’s flight northward illuminates the scale and gives the bearing, as would a star –
The great tit’s song, that high repeated sawing, is so sharp as to seem visible; it hones the grass blades and outlines the gold-grey lichen on the old thorns, as would a star –
The peregrine, her yellow eye and talons raying out danger, patrols and knows the field below her; seagulls, with their long quartering sweeps, chart the emptiness of the sea, and their cries curve elliptically across it towards unknown promontories, marking the landfall, as would a star –
It is cockerels, above all, that sing the landscape gradually mapped by light: the edge of the wood, the shape of the hill, the white house crowning it. This must be why they preside on weather vanes to point north, south, east and west. They sing substance into the scene, carving through the mist of barely contrasted forms. Before even this, their first cry cracks the dark, finely, as an old glaze will craze on a teacup, or as new light first flickered through unbroken night and undifferentiated space. Coleridge, typically insomniac, recorded it in Keswick near the River Greta on November 2nd 1803, ‘Wednesday Morning, 20 minutes past 2 o’clock’:21
The Voice of the Greta, and the Cock-crowing … the Cock crowing is nowhere particular, it is at any place I imagine & do not distinctly see …
There may be only one bird, distantly coming awake ‘past the edge of the world’, as Edward Thomas wrote. Or perhaps there are two, one confirming the other, as he splendidly imagined them:
Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light –
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each, as in a coat of arms:
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
Between four and five in the morning on his long voyage to Malta, in a dead calm, Coleridge heard two cocks answering each other from his own ship and one that lay nearby on the flat, rippling sea.22 He thought it might be how Calm itself sounded: the call and its reply, with the quivering delay between.
The first crow is tentative, teetering out of the dark, like a pencil that dare not make its mark. But then each one comes stronger, more defined and settled, as hills, trees and gables creep into focus after them. Each cry rings out more confidently, brisker, painting with louder strokes. Thoreau said that cockcrow, like sunshine, filled him with ‘illimitable holiness’. Ravilious, engraving a prospectus for the Golden Cockerel Press in 1933, surrounded his lean shouting bird with rays of clover leaves, flower buds and printed pages springing from the dark, as though it had created them all.
The thought of cockcrow still summons up for me the eastern attic window of my great-aunt’s house, by the dressing table with its three tall mirrors folded in to sleep. It comes with a taste, of astringent early-morning tea, and a smell, the mustiness of an old sideboard creaking open on a bowl of dark brown sugar. (No one ate the sugar; it seemed there only to fascinate me, as it slid damply from the silver spoon.) The smoke of a first cigarette would drift upstairs, with my great-aunt’s voice, hoarse as cockcrow, upbraiding the dogs. So day began. From the western attic window – as small as the eastern, its thin gingham curtain still drawn – came a contrary sound, the cooing of wood pigeons deep in the dark pines, muffled as the drop of cones on the thickly needled lawn. The east had been sharpened and scoured by cockcrow, but in the west there was muddle in the messy branches and a confusion of soft sounds, no message yet made out.
For the cock is the great declarer: the bird that continually cries Christus natus est! on Christmas morning, shouting out light, while other birds and animals mutter Ubi? Cur? Quand
o?, ‘Where?’, ‘Why?’, ‘When?’ (In Dante’s universe these questions, especially Ubi? and Quando? reverberated through heaven, philosophers’ confusions, to be answered curtly and definitively by the sheer blaze of luce etterna, the Ecce! of God.23) There must be, wrote Vaughan, some ‘seed’ or ‘glance’ or ‘magnetisme’ that turned the cock so steadfastly to light: that made it, too, like a star, ‘tinn’d and lighted at the sunne’. He thought it must dream all night of Paradise.
Such orientation, or light-seeking, was instinctive in Nature. Flowers and herald-cock turned to the dawn; salmon and swallow followed the magnetic pull of seas known or skies flown; the frost on the cedar, as Hopkins observed it in November 1869, left each needle ‘edged with a blade of ice made of fine horizontal bars of spars all pointing one way, N. and S.’ Nothing seemed to draw men to focus on one direction rather than another, accounting perhaps for their inveterate restlessness. Coleridge remarked that he never knew which quarter he, or the wind, was in – and, for him, none was home. When, as a child of four or five, Albert Einstein was shown a compass by his father, he was shocked that the needle behaved in such a determined way. ‘It did not fit at all into the nature of events,’ he wrote later. ‘It made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.’