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Overview
Birdsong is woven into our culture, our emotions, our landscape; it is the soundtrack to our world. We have tried to capture this fleeting, ephemeral beauty, and the feelings it inspires, for millennia.
In this fascinating account, Richard Smyth asks what it is about birdsong that we so love. Exploring the myriad ways in which it has influenced literature, music, science and our very ideas of what it means to be British, Smyth's nuanced investigation shows that what we hear says as much about us, our dreams and desires, as it does about the birds and their songs.
At a time when our birdsong is growing quieter, with fewer voices, more thinly spread, A Sweet, Wild Note is a celebration of the complex relationships between birds, people and the land; it is also a passionate call to arms lest our trees and hedgerows fall silent.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783963157 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elliott & Thompson |
| Publication date: | 04/13/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
An Infinity of Possibilities
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.
– Edward Thomas, 'The Unknown Bird' (1915)
To the best of my knowledge, I've never heard a buck fart. But I have heard a cuckoo sing, if you can call it a song, so I have a rough idea of what the author of 'Sumer is Icumen in' had in mind. The song, also known as the Reading Rota, is about the arrival of summer – so it's about a singing cuckoo, a farting buck, a starting bullock, calves and lambs, 'springing' woodlands and sprouting seeds. It was written in the middle of the thirteenth century, and is the oldest known song of its kind (that is, the oldest known polyphonic round) in English. In translation from the Wessex dialect, it begins:
Summer is a-coming in Loudly sing cuckoo Groweth seed and bloweth mead and springs the wood anew Sing cuckoo!
Even back then – when Dafydd ap Llywelyn was rising up against the English in Wales, Roger Bacon was compiling his scientific masterpiece Opus Majus in Oxford and Paris, construction was beginning on the 'new' abbey at Westminster – the English were writing songs about the birds singing.
But it wasn't just us. At around the same time, for instance, the Persian-language poet Jalal al-Din Rumi was also celebrating birdsong: 'Birdsong brings relief / to my longing / I'm just as ecstatic as they are, / but with nothing to say!' And it all goes back a lot further than the 1200s: we find birdsong in the Bible – 'flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle* is heard in our land', says the Song of Solomon – and in the millennia-old poetry of the ancient world. This thing has deep roots.
Why? Why is poetry so noisy with birdsong?
Birdsong is a wonderfully malleable material. We can make of it what we like; it's putty for the poet. And like putty or paint or music or ink, it can be put to work as an artist's medium, as a means of expressing ourselves. What we hear in birdsong, in other words, is more often than not the resonant echo of our own feelings.
The end of the poem isn't the end of this process. Birdsong has shaped our poetry, yes – but poetry, in its turn, has shaped the way we listen to birdsong, and what we think it's saying to us.
*
I heard my first cuckoo in the early summer of 2016, at the RSPB Otmoor reserve, a little way north of Oxford (I heard my first turtle dove – like a sort of soft, woolly power-drill – there too, that same sunny day, almost as soon as I'd climbed out of the car; it was my first time birding south of the Peaks, and it felt as though Otmoor had parcelled up the lowland English pastoral tradition, just for me).
On hearing the cuckoo's call, I didn't exactly throw back my head and cry Lhude sing cuccu!, but I'm sure I cracked a smile. It was a bright, warm day; I had a summer's morning to myself, and I'd just heard my first cuckoo; what was more, I would be attending the wedding of our dear friends Sam and Jeremy later on (that was why I found myself at such a dangerously southern latitude). I was, in short, happy – as was that thirteenth-century songwriter, as he anticipated the shortening of the shadows, the warming of the days, the greening of the land and the flatulence of the male deer.
But these things are subjective; how I felt on hearing that June cuckoo depended on me being me. Someone else might have felt something different. And had I been a dunnock – or a reed warbler, or a pied wagtail, or a meadow pipit – I wouldn't have heard anything in that lowing cu-coo but threat and menace.
Cuckoos are, of course, brood parasites. Cuckoo nestlings, born in the nests of other birds, destroy the eggs and young of those birds, and grow fat – we've all seen the picture, at once ludicrous and heartbreaking, of a tiny parent bird perched on the shoulder of a fledgling cuckoo five times its size, feeding it caterpillars – on their scarce and hard-won resources. Cuckoos visit horror on their hosts. That's what a dunnock or a warbler hears in the cuckoo's call.
It's a curious noise, the call of the cuckoo. It has a slightly hollow, woodwindish quality, suggestive of someone blowing across the top of a bottle; it's unhurried, almost complacent – pretty rare in birdsong – and low in pitch. I can, without too much effort, detect a note of languorous menace in it; if I were a breeding dunnock, I'm sure I would hear it loud and clear. And yet at the same time it does, as in the Reading Rota, have a meadowy, sun-steeped joyousness about it, too – it is the sound of sumer icumen in. The fact is, it's a cipher. What we find in it depends on us: on who we are, where we are, what day it is, perhaps even the books we read or the music we enjoy. It's as variable as the weather; it can shift with the orbit of the earth, and the changing of the seasons.
Consider the robin. The robin sings all year round, give or take a few embarrassed weeks of moulting in midsummer. Its music has long been well thought of: 'It is the opinion of some', wrote Nicholas Cox in 1674, 'that this little King of Birds for sweetness of Note comes not much short of the Nightingale.' The robin has, to my ear, a musical song – perhaps I think that because of the rather stately pauses the robin leaves between phrases, just like you hear in 'proper' music. You can hear robin-song in December as well as in May; there's some uncertainty, however, as to whether the song you hear is the same from one month to the next. Does the robin change the way it sings, or do we change the way we listen?
David Lack, author of the landmark 1943 study The Life of the Robin, states definitively that the 'autumn song', performed from September to late December, is 'thinner and less rich' than the 'spring song', which the robin uncorks around New Year and sings until mid-June.
Edward Grey, though, wasn't sure. Grey – properly 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon – served as Foreign Secretary for nine years before the First World War. In 1927, towards the end of a life that had been busy with birdsong and much else, he published The Charm of Birds; it has hardly been out of print since. It's an idling and delightful book. Grey makes it clear right from the off that song is, if not the one thing that birds do best, then certainly the one thing that they do better than anyone else (except us, of course).
Of the robin's autumn song, Grey agrees with Lack that it has 'something thin and acid in its tone'. But he wonders if, hearing the robin amid the greys and browns of autumn, 'our own minds are attuned to a minor key, and we hear it in the robin's song'. Perhaps on a warm day in April, 'when sap is rising and we are full of anticipation, with ears a-tiptoe [what a turn of phrase] for the first note of a blackcap', we hear it differently.
'We used,' said a Conservative who was cutting my hair soon after the war, 'we used to think Mr Lloyd George was everything that was bad. Now we admire him. Is it he or is it we that have changed?' And so I ask, listening to a robin in spring and comparing the impression remembered of the autumn, 'Is it the song or is it I that have changed?'
*
Traditions in poetry and folklore can influence our perceptions of birdsong just as much as a wintry turn in the weather. Often, these traditions can persist for many generations. Sometimes, though, they break, or are broken; time-worn ways of thinking are flipped on their heads, and we find new ways of listening, and thinking, and feeling – we hear a new sort of music.
The work of one of England's most celebrated Romantic poets offers a good illustration of how this happens.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's first nightingale poem, 'To the Nightingale', appeared in 1796. It's a work that seems to establish the poet in a direct line of literary nightingale-worship that ran back through Milton and Sir Philip Sidney to the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch* and beyond – into the ancient world, where the nightingale was said to be Philomel, daughter of an Athenian king, raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law Tereus and transformed by the gods into a bird (the Greeks said it was a swallow, the Romans a nightingale). The bird's song – Philomel's lament – pervades ancient literature: Sophocles wrote of the 'sweet, sojourning nightingale', singing in the sacred grove; Aeschylus had the prophetess Cassandra speak sadly of the 'shrill-voiced nightingale'; the song of the musician Orpheus for his lost wife Eurydice is compared by Virgil to 'the nightingale grieving in the poplar's shadows' (though in Virgil the nightingale mourns not her own ordeal but the loss of her chicks, stolen by a ploughman).
So impossibly sad was the nightingale's song to the ears of these ancient listeners that it came to be believed that the bird pressed its breast up against a thorn when singing, so as to get an additional throb of anguish into her music. Richard Barnfield, in Shakespeare's day, wrotethat the nightingale 'all forlorne, / Lean'd her Breast up-till a Thorne; / And there sung the doleful'st Ditty'.
Coleridge, in his 1796 poem, sticks dutifully with the same tradition: he addresses the bird as 'Philomel', and assumes that it is female (though female nightingales, unlike female robins, seldom sing); he even offers a quotation from Milton's Il Penseroso: 'most musical, most melancholy!' He heard the same sorrow in Philomel's song as all the other poets had – or perhaps he heard what he'd been told to hear.
Coleridge's second nightingale poem appeared in 1798, by which time he'd gone off that idea completely. Coleridge was a wildly curious poet, forever plunging – metaphorically speaking – into thickets in search of nightingales (he described himself as a 'library-cormorant', a wonderful allusion to the rakish seabird's reputation for diving deeply and devouring gluttonously). He knew his literary history, of course – but nightingales built from ink and sentiment weren't enough for him.
Coleridge's relationship with real-life nightingales is knotted up with his relationship with Dorothy Wordsworth. He'd fallen in with the Wordsworths – Dorothy and her older brother William – in the late 1790s. On one occasion, the essayist William Hazlitt described visiting the trio at Alfoxden in Dorset and finding 'Coleridge explaining the different notes of the nightingale to [ Wordsworth's] sister' (scholars have suggested – pretty plausibly – that it was attentive, clever Dorothy who is more likely to have been doing the explaining, assuming that she could get a word in edgeways); later, in the spring of 1802, the pair went walking to nearby Stowey: 'Heard the nightingale; saw a glow-worm,' reports Dorothy's journal. Coleridge, with Dorothy's help, was learning a little more not only about nightingales but about nature.
In his 1798 poem, 'The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem', it's clear that Coleridge is seeing the world – and hearing the nightingales – differently. He bemoans the poets who spend all their time 'building up the rhyme' when they ought to be stretching their legs in the countryside and immersing themselves in the 'shapes and sounds and shifting elements' of wild nature (both specialities of the Wordsworths; few writers of the time can have been as robustly outdoorsy as Dorothy was).
He again deploys his Milton quote ('most musical, most melancholy bird!') but this time he's setting up Milton only to knock him down: 'In Nature there is nothing melancholy,' Coleridge insists. There's nothing mournful about the nightingale's song; we only think that there is because some unhappy 'night-wandering man' said so, and 'many a poet' – Coleridge is grinning here, knowing full well he was one of them – 'echoes the conceit'.
And so Coleridge kicks aside the shop-worn story of Philomel and reinvents the nightingale as 'the merry Nightingale / That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates / With fast thick warble his delicious notes' (it's a 'he', now, note). When he writes of 'a most gentle Maid' who dwells beside a grove of nightingales and 'knows all their notes' –
And she hath watched Many a nightingale perch giddily On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze,
– it's hard not to think that he's writing about Dorothy Wordsworth.
Nightingales didn't change between 1796 and 1798. Coleridge did. It would be too glib to say that 'To the Nightingale' is about the nightingales he'd read about in books and 'The Nightingale' is about the nightingales he'd heard in the woods, but there's definitely a tension here between the literary tradition and what Coleridge feels when – perhaps walking with the Wordsworths in the wooded foothills of the Quantocks – he hears a nightingale begin to sing.
This isn't about Coleridge being right and everyone else being wrong; it isn't that those earlier poets were insincere, or weren't listening properly. There is a note of tragedy in the nightingale's song, for those who are inclined to hear it. But there's joy, too, in the very same music, the very same phrases.
That wretched night-wandering man, Coleridge says, 'filled all things with himself, / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow'.
The sounds of birds tell us back our own tales.
*
In Nature there is nothing melancholy, Coleridge decided, in the end. This is a familiar idea for us: the natural world as a thing of perfect beauty, as unspoilt, ideal, something to which humankind should aspire. It's an idea that took some heavy hits in the Victorian age – think of Darwin and the 'wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature', or Tennyson's 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' – but it's still with us, recognisable and influential. Back then, though, it was radical. Nature, before the Romantics, was for most people a thing to resist – a thing that could starve you, freeze or flood you, kill your livestock, plunder your crops, infest your home. Civilisation was salvation; nature was the enemy.
The Romantics – William Blake, John Clare, the Wordsworths, Keats and Coleridge among them – changed that. The Romantics were on nature's side. When you think about what 'civilisation' looked like at the start of the nineteenth century – the filth and noise of industry, the misery of the city slums, the sufferings of the urban poor – it's not hard to see why. Nature was a sanctuary from all that: an asylum for over-worked, over-stressed, over-civilised man. Looking at the world this way transformed not only what we saw in nature, but what we heard in it, too. Not least among the achievements of the Romantics was the extent to which they reinvented birdsong.
The best known of all English skylark poems is 'To a Skylark' (1820), by another Romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley. On the page, the poem has something of the shape of a lark's flight: tall, wavering, sometimes halting but unbroken to the end (the display-flight, in case you're not familiar with it, is a fluttering climb into the blue, shivery and near-vertical, like a ping-pong ball being carried upwards on an intermittent stream of air; the lark can keep it up for as long as an hour, and may reach a height of 300 metres). Flight, of course, has a lot in common with birdsong: they both, in their different ways, put the birds beyond us, out of our reach; they both speak to us of escape and freedom, and they both, throughout history, have made us long to emulate the birds, and live as they live – or rather, as we like to think they live.
But Shelley's poem is more about the song than the flight. And it's not about what the lark is saying; it's about what Shelley is hearing: a 'flood of rapture', a 'happy strain', 'shrill delight', 'unpremeditated art'. Addressing his lark, Shelley declares that 'Shadow of annoyance / Never came near thee' (nonsense, from an ornithological perspective: male skylarks are extremely tetchy in the singing season, and will fly fiercely at intruders on their turf); by contrast, our songs, human songs, are always compromised by melancholy ('Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought'). The lark, in its flight and song, embodies for Shelley something divine, something painfully and impossibly beyond our reach. Shelley longs for uncomplicated happiness, and so he hears it in the skylark's song.
Skylarks aren't divine, of course, or anything like it. They have muscles and blood and skulls and lungs and hard-beating little hearts; they live in a fast muddle of fear and rage and lust and, maybe, joy, too, of a sort. They're not really all that different from us. But that's a hard thing for a Romantic poet to take.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Sweet, Wild Note"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Richard Smyth.
Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
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Table of Contents
Prologue,
1. An Infinity of Possibilities,
2. A Song of Many Parts,
3. Coming Home,
4. An Elusive Song,
5. A Captive Melody,
6. A Hush Descends,
Further Reading,
Acknowledgements,
Index,