BLOG 1 2025 February: Birds in Poetry
Dr Stephen Moss, Global Consultant, NETVUE Birdfy
Birds feature in English poetry more than any other wild creatures. I take a closer look at why our literary giants are so fascinated by them.
The first entry in the definitive poetry anthology, The Oxford Book of English Verse, is a short poem written anonymously, sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century.
It’s subject? The Cuckoo – or more specifically, its unique and unmistakable sound:
Sumer is icumen in [Summer has come]
Lhude sing cuccu! [The Cuckoo sings loudly!]
This is widely regarded as the earliest verse written in a language clearly recognisable as English. It is also the first recorded use of the word ‘Cuckoo’ in our language, because the name came into English after the Norman Conquest, from the Old French word ‘cucu’. This in turn derives from the Latin cuculus, still part of the cuckoo’s scientific name. Both of these are of course onomatopoeic: they mimic the sound made by the bird.
The verse also celebrates the role of the Cuckoo as a harbinger of the changes of the seasons in Britain and continental Europe, as does a traditional folk verse:
The cuckoo comes in April,
he sings his song in May,
he changes his tune in the middle of June
and then he flies away.
But not all authors of bird-related poetry are anonymous. Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes, John Keats and Edward Thomas, and American writers including Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot, were also frequently inspired by birds in their poetry.
But why are birds so dominant? Why are there so few poems about mammals, insects or fish? Partly it is for the same reason that birding is so popular: unlike many wild creatures, which are either shy or seasonal – and often both – birds are always with us. They can be seen – and often heard – during all four seasons of the year, at day or night, in urban, suburban and rural settings; and quite literally almost anywhere in the world.
Another reason is less pragmatic and more spiritual. As the great American bird artist and field guide pioneer Roger Tory Peterson once noted, ‘Birds have wings; they're free; they can fly where they want when they want. They have the kind of mobility many people envy.’ Birds symbolise freedom – and especially during most of human history, when we had not yet mastered the ability to take to the air ourselves, they were a powerful symbol of that freedom.
Geoffrey Chaucer, the fourteenth-century author of The Canterbury Tales, devoted a long, 700-line poem to birds. The Parliament of Fowls (note that at this time, ‘fowl’ was the word used for all kinds of bird), gathers together a host of different species for a debate. Interestingly, it also refers to St Valentine – and his saint’s day of 14th February – as a symbol for romance; this is thought to be the origin of today’s annual celebration of love on that particular day of the year.
Chaucer’s only real rival as the greatest English writer, William Shakespeare, also frequently referred to birds as symbols of love, power, and many other aspects of the human condition. Although he did so mainly in the blank verse of his plays, Shakespeare also wrote an allegorical poem centred on birds: The Phoenix and the Turtle. Modern readers may be puzzled by the title, so I should perhaps explain that the Phoenix is a purely mythological bird, with the ability to regenerate and be born again after death – a symbol of the daily return of the sun following the darkness of night.
The ‘turtle’ of the title refers not, as you might expect, to the aquatic reptile of that name, but also to a bird: the Turtle Dove. Long a symbol of fidelity and love (perhaps because of the convenient rhyme between ‘dove’ and ‘love’), this Old World species is the only long-distance global migrant of all the world’s almost 350 species of pigeons and doves. In Shakespeare’s poem, the Turtle Dove is contrasted with the immortal Phoenix as all-too-mortal: ironically today the species is a major cause for concern as its numbers are falling rapidly, due to a combination of habitat loss and hunting.
Neither The Phoenix and the Turtle or The Parliament of Fowls are read much nowadays. But the same cannot be said for the bird poetry of the Romantic era – the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Poems such as John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To a Skylark, and the many works of John Clare, are still hugely popular; even though, in the case of Keats and Shelley, the birds are primarily used a symbols of human thoughts and emotions.
Shelley’s poem has one of the best-known openings in the whole of English verse:
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert…
It goes on to celebrate the extraordinary aerial song of the Skylark – ‘a flood of rapture so divine…’ – which has made this little brown bird one of the most celebrated species of bird in English poetry.
A later poet, George Meredith, writing in the late nineteenth century, also celebrated the Skylark in what is perhaps the best-known poem in the English language, The Lark Ascending, in which he uses the rhythm and syntax of the verse to mimic the actual movement and song of the bird:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls…
The poem so inspired the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams that he set it to music. The Lark Ascending, first performed in 1920, used the rhythm of the various instruments – notably violins – to mimic the Skylark’s unique song. Today, it remains the most requested piece of music played by the popular radio station Classic FM.
With such a track record, you might imagine that the Skylark would be the most significant bird in English poetry. But it is rivalled by another fine singer – though a far more elusive one – the Nightingale. As with Shelley’s Skylark, John Keats’s famous Ode is more about him and his torrid emotions than the bird itself, as in the poem’s opening lines:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…
That charge cannot be made about the bird poetry of a contemporary of Keats and Shelley, John Clare. Long neglected, today Clare is widely celebrated as the finest bird poet in English, or as the writer and broadcaster James Fisher cleverly put it:
[Clare is] the finest poet of Britain’s minor naturalists [and] the finest naturalist of Britain’s major poets.
John Clare was writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, an era that saw many changes to rural Britain: notably the wholesale shift from an open, public field system to a landscape of enclosed, private fields – the ‘patchwork quilt’ of today’s farmed lowland countryside. Clare was a genuinely observant birder: able, without the use of optical aids we take for granted today, to identify almost all the bird species in his local area on the edge of the East Anglian fens.
Like George Meredith, Clare used the syntax and rhythm of his verse to mimic both the song and the movements of the birds about which he writes, as in this sonnet about the Common Whitethroat, entitled The Happy Bird, which I shall quote in full:
The happy whitethroat on the swaying bough,
Rocked by the impulse of the gadding wind
That ushers in the showers of April, now
Carols right joyously; and now reclined,
Crouching, she clings close to her moving seat,
To keep her hold; and till the wind for rest
Pauses, she mutters inward melodies,
That seem her hearts rich thinkings to repeat.
But when the branch is still, her little breast
Swells out in rapture's gushing symphonies;
And then, against her brown wing softly pressed,
The wind comes playing, an enraptured guest;
This way and that she swings till gusts arise
More boisterous in their play, then off she flies.
In another celebrated verse, The Progress of Rhyme, Clare virtually reproduces the bizarre and unmistakable song of the Nightingale:
Chee chew chew chew and higher still
Cheer cheer cheer cheer more loud and shrill
Cheer up cheer up cheer up and dropt
Low tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug…
Wew wew wew wew chur chur chur chur chur
Tee rew tee rew tee rew tee rew
Chewsit chewsit and ever new
Will will will will grig grig grig grig
Coming across this for the first time you might imagine it had been written by an experimental modern poet – and indeed in his epic verse The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot also uses the rhythm of his verse to mimic the song of the Nightingale:
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug…
Of all the many fine poems inspired by birds, however, perhaps the most powerful is a short verse written by a woman: “Hope” is the thing with feathers, by the nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson. Published in 1891, five years after her death, its title still resonates with all of us who love birds:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all …
At a time of deep uncertainty – for humanity as well as for the world’s birds – this simple sentiment shows why we should continue to read and enjoy bird poetry.
