Date: Fri 15-May-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SUZANN

Quick Words:

birds-Burroughs-poetry

Full Text:

When Birds Inspire Poets To Take Flight

(with cuts)

BYSUZANNA NYBERG

Spring is a great time to rediscover the essays of 19th century American

naturalist John Burroughs. Harmony with nature is both desirable and possible

for the modern artist and the modern man, according to Burroughs, who

celebrates the affinity of poetry and the natural world.

For Burroughs, the influence of birds on Western poetry has been more constant

and conspicuous than that of any other animal. As he points out in his essay,

"Birds and Poets," birds have always flourished in poetry. For him, as for

Wordsworth, birds are part of the revelation of the truth and beauty in

nature.

In "Birds and Poets," Burroughs listens to the music in the song of the birds

and attempts to define the nature of poetry. He concludes no poem is as fine

as a bird's song and no poet is as wonderful as a bird.

Here's what he says about the mockingbird:

...in a state of freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and

various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and there is a dash

of the clown and the buffoon in its nature which too often flavors its whole

performance, especially in captivity; but in its native haunts, and when its

love-passion is upon it, the serious and even grand side of its character

comes out.

And the skylark:

Its life affords that kind of contrast which the imagination loves, -- one

moment a plain pedestrian bird, hardly distinguishable from the ground, the

next a soaring, untiring songster, reveling in the upper air, challenging the

eye to follow him and the ear to separate his notes.

Birds, Burroughs stresses, are central to our experience of poetry. Without

the nightingale, Keats would not have written his ode; without the

mockingbird, Whitman could not have composed "Out of the Cradle Endlessly

Rocking." We would never know from Burroughs's essay that "The Ode to the

Nightingale" is about the desire for death and that "Out of the Cradle" is

about a young boy's poetic genius. All we learn from both poems is that it is

the bird who gives the poet his most intense human experience.

Burroughs intimates that it is from birds that we learn the art of living. The

prime essential of bird life is its intensity, and of all creatures in the

natural world, birds seem the most spontaneous and the most free from bondage

and convention. He writes:

A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his

life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot ecstatic, his frame charged with

buoyancy and his heart with song. The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every

grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds, -- how many human

aspirations are realized in their free, holiday lies, and how many suggestions

to the poet in their flight and song!

For Burroughs, Walt Whitman is the bird's truest pupil. The mockingbird speaks

for himself in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." The poem's chief power

comes from the rising and falling rhythms of the bird. The mockingbird's song,

which can come only from sorrow, is stirring:

Loud! loud! loud!

Loud, I call to you, my love!

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves:

Surely you must know who is here, is here;

You must know who I am, my love.

In "Birds and Poets," Burroughs is preaching a message. The loss of birdlife

is as disturbing in our time as it was in Burroughs'. In his day, hunting left

the bobolink population damaged, just as today's habitat loss affects the

songbird population. Burroughs' essay shows the power of a literary

conscience.