Poetry and birds... I was flicking through some blogs and spotted that Matt Merritt who posts here is a keen birder, perhaps even a twitcher. Seems to be quite a popular interest among poets. I'm not an expert, but a couple of times a year, Nina and I find ourselves in some rainy part of the countryside, taking turns with my amateur £80 Argos binoculars.

My pal Michael McKimm, a Gregory winner last year is a keen birder, as is Paul Farley and of course, Helen Macdonald does astonishing things with falcons.

Is there a natural affinity between poetry and birds. What are your favourite bird poems?

I don't know if there is a natural affinity between poets and birds but poets do have an abiding obsession with the winged ones, which is natural, given that birds are inevitably symbolic, even when, as Milosz put it, "a thrush on a branch is not a sign / But just a thrush on the branch".

Birds must have always embodied our big wish to be airborne. But I'm afraid I am one of those uninformed ones who too often hear them as part of that generic soundtrack, birdsong. When I do notice particular birds I try to identify them, sometimes so that I can honour them in poems.
Séan Lysaght is a great birder. His books are full of them. His 2007 collection, 'The Mouth of a River', contains a wonderful reimagining, 'Bird Sweeney', in which Sweeney enters a number of different birds:

'Then Sweeney surged into the blue
above them, a dove in mourning.

He jingled the keys of a robin's song
beside a gardener.

As a house sparrow,
he arrowed into their eaves...'

Once, as we were walking a country road, Séan drew my attention to a noise from the hedgerow, a soft chirring that I would hardly have registered. "A grasshopper warbler". So one tiny key was given me to jingle.

My stubborn refusal to engage with wildlife is a source of despair for my wife, a keen and knowledgeable observer of such things. We had the following exchange once, in the garden of our last house, which adjoined woodland.

Her: Oh, listen? Did you hear that?
Me: What?
Her: A woodpecker. There he is again? Can you hear him?
Me: No. (listens) No, I can't hear it.
Her: There he goes again! You must be able to hear him.
Me: (Listens). No, I really can't.
Her: (Suddenly suspicious) What are you listening for, exactly?
Me: Er... HaHaHaHAha?


Birds make occasional appearance in my poems - as 'the bird'. Or 'clutters of birdsong'. That sort of thing.

This puts me in mind of 'The Unknown Bird' by Edward Thomas, which begins:

"Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
if others sang; but others never sang
in the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
though many listened."

The poet/persona can't work out whether or not the birdsong's an auditory hallucination; he tells "the naturalists", but "neither had they heard / anything like the notes that did so haunt me."

It's probably too obvious to mention, but birds feature from the very beginning of poetry in English. There's an Anglo-Saxon piece in which a swallow flying in to the mead hall at one end, spending a few brief moments in the warmth and then flying out, back into the cold world outside is made into a symbol of the brevity of human life. Chaucer had his parliament of fowls, Keats his nightingale, and Hughes his Crow, Hawk, swifts, etc.

Very often they function as symbols for the poet (flight and the nature of the creative imagination, song and music, etc.). I particularly like Baudelaire's Albatross, another symbol for the poet. It's graceful when in its own element, when in flight, but when it lands on a ship the sailors mock its inelegant attempts to walk across the deck, and it becomes clownish. He concludes (and I apologise for not being able to include the accents):

"Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees
Qui haunte la tempete et se rit de l'archer;
Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees,
Ses ailes de geant le'empechent de marcher."

It's a great excuse for creative types who find it difficult to cope with the more mundane and routine elements of making a living. "Well, I may not fit in at the office, and my sales figures might be disappointing, but that's because I was made for greater things, etc."

But it seems to me that contemporary poets tend to steer clear of the conceit, not just in terms of the bird-as-poet thing (something mgranier mentioned), but with regard to most subjects. Is is just me, or has the conceit, in the sense of a neatly-closed, extended metaphor fallen out of favour, particularly with regard to poems about birds? Perhaps it's the anthropomorphism that's unfashionable, the interest being more focused on otherness instead?

I put up a post recently on the Fuselit blog asking if it was possible to compile an anthology which contained an ode to every bird in my WHSmith Book of British Birds:

http://fuselit.blogspot.com/2008/05/ode-to-every-bird.html

I didn't get very far in my initial investigations, but it was only a brief thought. Regarding an affinity, I wonder if it's to do with the immediacy of birds. It's not just poets, after all; the RSPB is the biggest wildlife-related charity in Europe. If you live in an urban area, it's rare to encounter wild animals outside of birds (and insects, I suppose) so birds immediately become envoys from the wilder world. Even if you live in the suburbs and keep a creature-friendly garden, as my parents do, you'll get a larger variety of birds than mammals visiting, and while a dedicated mother (by which I mean someone who moths - what's the noun for that?) might identify many more species of moth visiting a house in a 24 hour cycle, birds exhibit a wider variety of behaviours than lepidoptera, so are richer in character.

I find birds flutter into my poetry quite often. Someone once said to me that, "Every poet has a heron poem somewhere," and I'm no exception. The difficulty lies in making the ornithological poetic. Here's one of my more unusual species:

Oilbirds

(Steatornis caripensis, the Oilbird or Devilbird, lives in Caribbean caves, uses echo-location, feeds on fruit; until recently its fat fledglings were caught and boiled for their oil)

Trapped in its cave, our beach is ours, and open.
We fly about, knowing where
a warmed wind makes music.
In the high whine of insects we sense
the weight of our fluttering wings.
On the Earth, above our heads,
narrow leaves stutter, we feel air
cooling our beaks, we hear
the clatter of branches.
Down here the cheerful twitter
of constant movement.
We know no liquid flutings,
our furtive clicks point our torches.
The softer floor densely echoes an arch
far above, and rustles of a thousand wings,
invisible presences, chart pipes and stacks.
Below, light-shy creatures scuttle
over our voided dinings,
or crackle in the branches of ribs of the furred.
Scents come and go, wafting
from hidden heaps.
Reds, whites and browns are wasted here.
Caked mud plasters feet and feathers
of the fallen.
We will remember them,
they flickered us into being.

My own particular bent is more horticultural and botanical than ornithological. Though I do know how to stuff a turkey.

I'd say Jon has probably hit the nail on the head - there's not a huge amount in the way of mammal or reptile life in Britain, relatively speaking, and insect-watching probably requires huge amounts of patience, so birds are the easiest and most frequent link between a wilder world and our daily lives, and that inevitably finds its way into poems.

I think another reason for the poetry/birding link is probably that birding involves long periods of time trudging around the countryside not seeing very much, or sitting in freezing cold hides doing the same. Ideal thinking time for any poet.

There's a superb book called Bird Britannica that's full of literary references to British birds. Just flicking through it now I noticed, in the entry on Gannets, mention of it and several other species in the 7th century Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer (in fact, so specific are the references, it's thought that the passage in question is referring to the Bass Rock, off Scotland, sometime between April 20 and 27), which ties in with what David mentioned. But the bird in the feasting hall is in Bede's Eccesiastical History, not a poem, and it's in winter, so it's usually assumed to be a sparrow.

As for favourite bird poems, three that spring to mind immediately are Elizabeth Bishop's Sandpiper, Ted Hughes' Swifts, and Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Windhover. I'll be really interested to hear everyone's choices - I work for Bird Watching magazine and I'm going to be putting together a feature about bird poetry sometime in the next year. It'd be nice to be able to feature some less obvious and maybe newer choices (I've already got a poem from Alex McRae lined up).

PS. Definitely not a twitcher, Roddy! Dashing round the country actively chasing birds seems to take a lot of the pleasure out of it, for me - I get more of a kick out of seeing what turns up on a fairly small local patch. But I will admit to an occasional twitch.

Yes, I too love Bishop's Sandpiper. I had a problem once with that poem. A woman in one of my groups was affronted by the wonderful and accurate domestic image: 'The beach hisses like fat...' She objected so vociferously ('No! That is NOT poetry! That is UGLY! The beach does NOT hiss like fat...') that she began to impress other students by the sheer magnitude of her certainty.
How to explain to people with set ideas about poetry that the objective is, very often, to surprise, or startle if possible.

Other bird poems that come to mind are Keats's Nightingale (mentioned already) and Edward Thomas's

OWL

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved,
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the north wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry.

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.


Also Eamon Grennan's poem about a marsh hawk, one of my favourites. There's a version of it here, titled: AT WORK (I think the older title, 'Artist At Work' is better).

Very often, rather that poems 'about' birds, it is stray lines or images that stay in my mind, as in Heaney's "earthed lightning of a flock of swans" or Shakespeare's:

...Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood;
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse...

(and, also from Macbeth)

Duncan:
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.

Banquo:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt I have observed,
The air is delicate.

Yes, definitely with you on those, Mark. I can remember those lines from Macbeth burning themselves onto my memory when we did it at school aged 13, and had to watch the Polanski film version. Although all that gore and Francesca Annis wandering around naked were impressive too, now I come to think of it.

A Blackbird Singing
RS Thomas

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

Ah, what the hell, here's three of my own (the first from AIRBORNE, the second from THE SKY ROAD, the last one unpublished):

ANOTHER LOOK

Taller than a three-storey house,
the steep shaggy old cypress

in front of my window outdarkens
an off-white, rain-battered day.

Fronds tangle and wave
like seaweed in the undersea heave

into deeper bluegreen; the stage
for nothing to happen is set

then something, a bird, flickers
and hops through the wind-ruffled ledges,

a blackbird glossy as split coal
lights for a few seconds, cocks

a pared cadmium-yellow beak
and the afternoon breaks.


SOUNDTRACK

The starlings in the trees of Leicester Square,
on a busy, end-of-winter evening, are a full-fledged

metropolis whirring and throbbing overhead,
making connections, working into the threads

chirping mobiles, strands of talk and laughter
from a lengthening restless queue outside The Empire.



CRITIC

I should have forgotten that pet shop
off some back street, somewhere on the north side.
Dim, nicotine light, salty-sweet smells
of dogbiscuit, straw, big sacks of grain and seed.

What am I doing there, lost in the usual dream?
Startled out of it by a hoarse, old-woman voice
shouting – Gedoffdatchair!
I spin round. Nobody there

but the shopkeeper, his mustached smile.
– Gedoffdatchair! Now I see it
in a cage hanging from the ceiling : a restless crow.
No, ‘a Mynah.’ Imagine bringing home that

cracked voice for a pet. Where would it go?
Here, here in my ear – Get off that chair.

Thanks to Matt for pointing out my erroneous attribution (and indeed description) of the sparrow in the feasting hall. It's an image that's stayed with me for years, but I was a bit hazy about where it came from. Note to self: look things up!

Anyway, I quite like this, from Peter Reading's Ob:

Chiricahuas, Arizona,

four-and-a-half mile ascent
through resinous pines to the crest's
defunct fire lookout cabin
perched on a crag at 9,000

where a tiny alpine meadow
(burgeoning moist crisp verdure
and carmine blooms distilling
nectareous fumes, and a single
Rufous Hummingbird)
was suddenly epiphanic.

I was thinking about this last night,, David, and remember reading a poem about that passage from Bede, in which the bird IS a swallow. I think it might have been by Stephen Dobyns. Does anyone know it?

And not that it really matters - it's a great passage, whatever bird it happens to be.

I don't know the Stephen Dobyns poem, but MacNeice's Dark Age Glosses (from "Solstices") also has it as a swallow.

I rather like Paul Farley's Heron (from "Tramp in Flames"), which opens with:

One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
is the heron's fucking hell, all right, all right,
I'll go to the garage for your flaming fags
cranky departure, though once they're up
their flight can be extravagant.

The Stephen Dobyns poem is Where We Are (after Bede), and the bird is "perhaps a swift". It's reprinted in Staying Alive.

Many thanks to Matt, Alan and Sunny for their superior twitching skills in helping to identify "the unknown bird". But I also like the ambiguity of its being "perhaps a swift" in the Dobyns poem. Something very recognisable in that instinctive tendency to presume the good omen, when it's really a symbol of mortality.

Ah, that's the one I was thinking of Colin, thank you.
It's interesting that MacNeice also has it as a summer bird, when the passage in Bede is specifically talking about a bird flying into the hall in the middle of winter. I wonder whether his original does specifically say sparrow, rather than just a small bird.

Are swifts good omens? I thought they were 'devil-birds'. Haven't read the Dobyns poem but I instinctively find 'perhaps a swift' a little hard to swallow (not a pun!) because swifts are so recognisable, even up close. Perhaps it's said in the context of not remembering the Bede passage itself clearly?

I've always assumed that, quite apart from it being the most obvious small bird to be hanging around human habitation in the middle of winter, Bede chose sparrow because it resonates with the Bible passage about not even a sparrow falling without God noticing.

Sorry if this has been mentioned elsewhere - no time to trawl the thread - but I should imagine the reason Bede wrote something like that in the first place is because it's a traditional motif from Old English poetry, and probably even earlier ... the bird swooping through the hall and out again.

It's in Beowulf, I believe, and it's in at least one of the great elegies we have left to us from Anglo-Saxon: an image of man's fleeting contact with nature, or more likely a resounding image of life's transience ... i.e. our life on earth is the brief flight of a bird through a great hall.

The most mentioned bird in such literature is probably the hawk. But that should be taken with a large pinch of birdseed. I'm no great expert on birds in early literature.

I once went to Icklesham to see an Artic Tern.

As for poems - Windhover stands out as a classic from childhood - but I'd also like to include Spike Milligans nonsense poem

The Elephant is a dainty bird
it flits from bough to bough
it makes its nest in rhubarb trees
and whsitles like a cow

Not only did I spend my youth searching the skies for elephants, but looking through the fields for rhubarb trees.

As did William S in the absolutely magical passage towards the end of Hamlet after the 'alas poor Yorick' part, in which he foresees his death. Wish I had it on me so I could quote it.

Also this from Theory of Religion by Georges Bataille, which though a little more general, is no less fantastic:

'The animal is not closed and inscrutable to us. The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense I know this depth; it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me.'

[I]

Annie

Here is the quote from Hamlet:

... there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

Don't know, but that reminds me of a nice 'one-word poem' by Ian Hamilton Finlay, about the swift's lookalike:

The Cloud's Anchor
swallow

Yes, I think they are good omens; although, probably only because they seem to share similar associations with the coming of Spring as does the swallow. That's certainly how Hughes uses them in his poem 'Swifts':

"They've made it again
Which means the globe's still working, the Creation's
Still waking refreshed, our summer's
Still all to come..."

and a little later:

"Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings..."

Which alludes to the age-old notion that it's fortunate if a swallow nests under the eaves of one's house, and which Shakespeare is also employing in the "temple-haunting martlet" speech from Macbeth, which someone mentioned earlier.

There seems to have been a fair bit of punning (or just muddle), in the use of swifts and swallows in poetry. Shakespeare, again, suggests that "true hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings"; Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, describes a speedy ship gliding "more swift then swallow sheres the liquid skye"; and Blake, in Milton, has the simile "swift as the swallow or swift". Which from him is either inexcusable, or some sort of joke.

Brewer's doesn't have anything on the swift in and of itself, only the swallow. Perhaps, like the martin, swifts have just acquired the same set of associations (although the martin is, I think, a type of swallow, whereas the swift isn't)? It would be interesting to track down some more specific poetic references to the swift, especially if it turns out to have been a devil-bird all along. Perhaps, then, we could speak about "swifts in swallows' plumage" instead of "wolves in sheep's clothing". ;)

Brewer's doesn't have anything on the swift? Crikey. The 'devil bird' thing comes from the fact that they scream a lot, and they fly so high up that for a long time people didn't know much about them, perhaps doubting that they were even birds. Can't remember where I read that - might have been my actual book on swifts, but that's generally more concerned with their nesting.

The idea of them as harbingers of spring is definitely misplaced; they're one of summer's latest arrivals. The connection with swallows is also a funny thing - apparently they're more closely related to hummingbirds. They certainly fly in a different manner and don't come anywhere near as close to the ground.

I like swifts a lot and I like Ted Hughes but bizarrely, I have never read that poem.

Birds Britannica suggests that the various 'devil' names applied to the swift are meant to convey nothing more than an impish presence - there's no history of them being persecuted, and they don't seem to have had an evil reputation.
It also mentions Edward Thomas' rather nice description of them, from Haymaking:
"As if the bow had flown off with the arrow."
It's taken over from swallows and martins as a symbol of summer, partly, I suspect, because it's now more visible - it feeds at high and low levels and above cities as well as open countryside, whereas the other two prefer more specialised habitat.

I have an amazing, '70s, second hand book called 'Falconry For You' that I'm sure a better poet would get no end of inspiration from. It's full of strange anecdotes about different birds of prey and their habits (you shouldn't bother trying to keep an eagle, apparently - the author's eagle killed his cat, maimed his dog and attacked his wife...serves him right for trying to tame it!).

Anyway, I've always found it far too interesting to inspire a poem - the work wouldn't do justice to the book.

I'm particularly interested in poems that give birds a sinister quality, like Ted Hughes' Thrushes, 'more coiled steel than living', or Jacob Polley's owls -

I hear the owls in the dark yews
behind the house - children out late
or lost, their voices worn away.
They've forgotten their names and wait (...)

One of the scariest bird poems I've ever encountered is by Gerard Woodward in his collection 'After The Deafening': straight out of Hitchcock.

Any other sinister bird poems I should read??

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...one of mine. Narrative poems are getting a bit boring though aren't they? Combination of birds AND narrative probably extremely tired. It is on-thread and very sinister, I guess, so what the hell...

P.S- Is your Dad Graham?

Thank you! Very sinister. I've seen melancholy magpie poems before ('one for sorrow' is too much to resist, it seems) but not many scary ones.

Graham isn't my dad but my uncle!

I'm halfway through his New and Selected at the moment, Helen, and enjoying it a lot.

Aha...actually Matt, come to think of it, there's at least one sinister bird poem in Graham's New and Selected - 'Advertising Executive With Sparrowhawk' isn't a barrel of laughs....! I know he has a poem about an RSPB Sanctuary as well, but that one isn't as dark.

I think Graham and I are meant to be giving a reading together in Grimsby at some point this year, I've never heard him read before (or vice versa) so it'll be really interesting!

So much for my catalogue of sinister bird poems, I hadn't even thought about Hughes' 'Crow' yet - the most glaring omission there could ever be!

I'm a big fan of Polley's 'Owls' too, Helen; perhaps the best poem in Little Gods given the strength of its extended metaphor.

If I might also offer up a few other recent faves of mine, Armitage's short, RSPB Birdwatch poem (in T Rex) is a good 'un (though more ecologically-minded than sinister), and sticking with Polley, his excellent little poem about seagulls (from The Brink) is very memorable ('their flight suddenly akin / to dangling on a coat hook / by the back of the coat you're still in').

I also think that Maurice Riordan's 'Badb' is a great bird poem, as Riordan (in his trademark, subtlely descriptive narrative style) really brings the crow to life in documenting its subtle movements and mannerisms (the poem was written for Ted Hughes's sixty-fifth birthday and appears in Riordan's second book, Floods (2000))... he's also a poet who I feel deserves much greater recognition than he seems to have received for his work, but that's another issue and not for this thread.

Yes, that was one of the titles that intrigued me when I picked the book up, Helen, now I come to think of it. It doesn't disappoint, either.

I'd like to recommend Chelsey Minnis's 'A Speech About the Moon'. You can read it in her excellent 'Zirconia' or I also found it on this blog Chelsey Minnis

Birds often turn up in my poems, but when I set out to write about them specifically my efforts are unconvincing. I think Wikipedia is to blame for getting me too excited about all the different types of hummingbirds and their highly appealing, glamorous names.