Birds bring out the best in us
Still touched by spring fever, this week I consider the role of birds in poetry and drama, as inspiration and source of envy
If flowers are in bloom, can birds be far behind, to paraphrase Shelley. And what an abundance of birds there are in mythology, folklore, stories, songs, poems and plays! I’m neither a twitcher nor an ornithologist but, like most people, I like looking at birds and relish their singing. During the Covid pandemic people remarked on the volume of birdsong, tuning into it afresh in the absence of traffic, construction and industrial noise.
 As I thought about, and researched, the subject I was struck by how ancient and profound is our admiration for birds. Gods with the attributes of birds feature in the pantheon of most mythologies and spiritual traditions, from the Egyptian Horus to the Hindu Garuda, and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl. The dove bearing an olive branch in the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark has become a universal symbol of peace and the Christian Holy Spirit is usually represented as a dove.
One of the earliest known fables is Hesiod’s ‘The Hawk and the Nightingale’ (8th century BCE) – a lesson in tyranny. Many of the Greek and Roman stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, composed 1,600 years later, involve transformations from human to bird form, including Philomel, who becomes a nightingale, gifted with song to compensate for having her tongue cut out.
  Flight and song are the two most remarkable attributes of birds and are, I believe, the source of our fascination with them. The gods, Horus and Garuda, have the bodies of men, but the heads of a falcon and an eagle, respectively. Garuda also has wings – hence the name of the Indonesian national airline. From the ill-fated Icarus to budget airlines, we love to fly!
 Shelley wonders at these combined and enviable characteristics in ‘To a Skylark’:
Higher still and higher  From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire;  The deep blue thou wingest. And singing still dost soar and soaring every singest.
The words ‘joyous’, ‘joyance’ and ‘joy’ occur in the poem as Shelley marvels at the bird’s exuberance, as he seeks an image to match this delight. Regretting, however, that ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’ he ends by wishing for ‘half the gladness’ the bird feels because:
Such harmonious madness  From my lips would flow The world should listen then – as I am listening now. (1820)
A few years later George Meredith echoed Shelley’s wish in his poem ‘The Lark Ascending’:
. . . Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink: Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality . . . Â
Meredith’s original is less well-known now than Ralph Vaughan Williams’ tone poem of the same title, composed on the eve of the First World War, a yearning towards the harmony of the lark’s notes.
 In these works the bird’s song is a channel for spiritual experience, although neither poet was ‘religious’ in the conventional sense. Shelley hails the skylark as a ‘blithe spirit’ (a term that gave Noël Coward the title for his 1941 farce about spiritualism) and, while Meredith’s bird is ‘singing till his heaven fills’, it fosters greater love of earth and humankind, ‘. . . Yet men have we, whom we revere . . . Whom heavenly singing gives us new . . .’ .  Â
 French poet, St. John Perse says of birds, ‘and from this dawn briskness, as from a very pure immersion, they protect among us something of the dream of creation’ (my translation) in his prose poem, Birds (1963). The poem was a collaboration with the painter Georges Braque, whose birds Perse admired for describing their metaphysical essence rather than their biological identity, although he also alludes to the illustrations of naturalist, James Audubon.
 This work, too, has been given a musical interpretation by Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho (2002) where the flute part is almost like speech. One section, ‘Dancing Bird’, refers to an Australian Aboriginal story of a bird who taught a tribe how to dance (possibly based on the Brolga bird – said to move like Mick Jagger!). Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1910) ballet is based on the Russian legend of a bird whose feathers confer beauty and protection on the earth.
Maybe because birds have a voice and poise that we aspire to they have become the subject of allegorical negotiations with higher powers. The Sufi poem by Attar of Nishapur, The Conference of the Birds (1177), brought to magical life in a stage production by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière (1979), tells of thirty birds who go in search of their spiritual leader, the Simurgh. They are led by the hoopoe because, it is said, King Solomon used him as his go-between with the Queen of Sheba. At their destination the Simurgh tells them: Â
. . . I am a mirror set before your eyes And all who come before my splendour see Themselves, their own unique reality; Â Â Â Â . . . Â (Trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, 1984)
The hoopoe features too in Aristophanes’ satire, The Birds (414 BCE) – not to be confused with Daphne du Maurier’s bleak story of mid-twentieth century paranoia, or Hitchcock’s 1963 film of the same name. Aristophanes’ play concerns two elderly men who, weary of the corruption and sycophancy in Athens, look for a better place to live. They consult the Epops (hoopoe) who was once a man, Tereus (back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses), for information on places he has flown over.
Unhappy with his answers they propose founding a new state, between earth and heaven, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, whither they will divert the offerings due to the gods and so starve them into subjugation. Rich with bird and wordplay, not to mention political wheeler-dealing, this ancient drama is ripe for revival.
 In his Parliament of Fowls (1381) Chaucer satirises courtly love and presents a parade of caricatures:
. . . The wakeful goose; the cuckoo all unkind; The parrot cramful of lechery; The drake, destroyer of his own kind; The stork, avenger of adultery; The cormorant hot for gluttony; . . . (Trans. A. Kline, 2007)
One of Aristophanes’ heroes, Pisthetaerus, says ‘words give wing to the mind and make a man soar to heaven’, encapsulating perfectly our figurative use of terms associated with birds. We love birds for their emblematic quality as much as their reality. Hence, eagle standards, and the wearing of feathers as a mark of honour or status, from Polynesian feather cloaks (responsible for the extinction of some species) to the plumes in warriors’ helmets, and the feather in your cap. Â
Finally, hot off the press, this came in yesterday from Knopf’s Poem-a-Day for April, ‘Tanager’ (2021) by Sarah Arvio:
. . . I had seen it in books --the tanager— a bright black-winged cry bringing me up to its tablet of joy its template of joy its plateful of fruit . . .
It seems we can never get enough of looking up at birds and trying to at once emulate their beauty, their song and the wonder they inspire. Â
Indeed I could fill another newsletter with works about hawks or swans! Let me know your thoughts on the birds and whether you would enjoy further discussion of their literary excursions.
Oh good, thank you Tod. There's so much great poetry and prose about birds I'd love to share with other readers.
Yes please, more on birds.
I love how birds have evolved to live everywhere on earth.
I often take binoculars with me on walks to get closer to birds,
though I am not a birder in the usual sense of the word :)