With Andrew Marvell in “The Garden”:

“Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,

Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,

Casting the body’s vest aside,

My soul into the boughs does glide;

There like a bird it sits, and sings,

Then whets and combs its silver wings;

And, till prepared for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.”

Or with Shakespeare as, in a moment of despair, it is the thought of his beloved that makes his spirit rise like the soaring song of the skylark:

“Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee – and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” (Sonnet #29).

Staying with Shakespeare’s magic, it is the dueling songs of the lark and the nightingale that accompany what is surely one of the sweetest, and saddest, duets between lovers ever conceived:

Juliet: “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly he sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo: “It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”

Romeo goes along with Juliet’s “Yon light is not daylight, I know it,…”

“Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat/The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:”

But Juliet, her heart breaking, speaks the truth that they both wish not to be so, that the lark is heralding the dawning day and they must part:

“It is, it is: hie hence, begone, away!

It is the lark that sings so out of tune,

Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.”

Act 3: sc.V

Of course, for us, the nightingale will always call to mind Keats’ Ode:

“The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;”

In Keats’ miraculous turn of phrase, it is the song that is, here, the active agent, finding “a path/ Through the sad heart of Ruth” just as the poem finds a path through the heart of every reader.

Keats composed this Ode in 1819, calling the nightingale “Darkling,” and it was on the last day of that century, when the threat of war was already looming, that Thomas Hardy wrote his lyric “The Darkling Thrush.” In a landscape where “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/like strings of broken lyres” he found “Some blessed Hope” in the “evensong of “An aged thrush”:

“At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.”

But back to Keats and a letter where he wrote that “if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” These words remind me of the 17th century Welsh metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan, and his tender lyric “The Bird.” With echoes of the Psalmist, “the sparrow hath found a house and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young” (Ps. 84), we have Vaughan as he imagines the little bird, taking “part in its existence:”

“Hither thou com’st, the busie wind all night

Blew through thy lodging, where thine own warm wing

Thy pillow was. Many a sullen storm

(For which coarse man seems much the fitter born,)

Rain’d on thy bed

And harmless head.

And now as fresh and cheerful as the light

Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing

Unto that Providence, whose unseen arm

Curb’d them, and cloath’d thee well and warm -”

Here is a two-fold simplicity - the poet, identifying with the little bird while seeking for himself that “unseen arm” of Providence to guard him also until the light of dawn appears.

Some 300 years later, Elizabeth Bishop put a life-time of observation and love of birds into her poems - “thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward/ freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets” (“Cape Breton”).

And in “North Haven”, her heart-wrenching elegy for her dear friend Robert Lowell - “The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,/ and the White-throated Sparrow’s five note song,/ pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.”

As she says in “Poem,” “— the little that we get for free,/ the little of our earthly trust. Not much./ About the size of our abidance…” “Not much” maybe, but in these and all her poems, it is her seeing eye and hearing ear that makes that “little” so abundantly rich. But it is her last published poem, “Sonnet,” with its “rainbow-bird”, with its truncated lines, its reversed sestet and octet, that we carries us back to “The Garden” of Marvell, where, “casting the body’s vest aside/ My soul into the boughs does glide”:

Here is the octet from “Sonnet” with its “joy illimited” -

“Freed—the broken

thermometer’s mercury

running away;

and the rainbow-bird

from the narrow bevel

of the empty mirror,

flying wherever

it feels like, gay!”

Belinda de Kay is director emeritus of Stonington Free Library.