The Bird Connection

Ever since I was a little kid, birds have held a special fascination for me dating back to the days when my father used to take me out on the east side of our barn every first day of spring—my birthday--, to listen for and whistle replies to the first meadowlark. And much later, as a literature teacher, I still found myself gravitating toward stories and poems in which birds were featured as major symbolic elements.

Our recent visit to my son Brett's place in Roseville, Ca. brought me into contact with white-crowned sparrows of the variety that I used to hear singing on spring nights outside my window near Lebanon Oregon. Hearing those beautiful silvery notes issuing out of the blackness of the early spring nights nearly always brought a thrill of wonder as to how such a miracle could be.

Seeing the white crowns brought to mind the climax of Faulkner's monumental short story, “Barn Burning”--about a boy whose Satanically revengeful father would continually get sharecropping jobs from rich plantation owners only to get offended by their rules and use that offense as an excuse to sneak back at night and burn their barns. In Faulkner's story, the hero, Sarty, hearing the gunshots in the dark that put an end to his father and brother, runs for his life on a dirt road toward the glimmer of a dawn –symbolic of a glimmer of hope for his tormented young soul. The accompaniment of that scene is the choiring of whippoorwills whose liquid, silvery, notes intensify as the light of day increases. I can never read that page without the kind of chills of wonder that inspire one to major in English--just in the hope of experiencing more such mind-blowing arias.

Those sparrows also brought to mind an unforgettable happening I had out hiking up on Peterson's Butte back in Oregon. It was a drizzly, weird kind of late winter afternoon. I was making my way down a deer trail near my home, when out of the gloom came this silvery cascade of absolutely beautiful, bubbling notes. I froze, and looking up, spied a tiny Seattle wren. 'Please, one more time', I thought. And Glory of Glories he sang it again, several times. I took it as a special blessing-- just for me, personally, for braving the gloom to hear it.

That experience prepared me to appreciate the great poem Thomas Hardy wrote about one of his hikes through the rainy Wessex heights: He's walking through a similar kind of gloom when he hears “The Darkling 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-be ruffled plume

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom”

… That I could think there trembled

Through his happy, good-night air

Some blessed thought whereof he knew

But I was unaware.”

And one cannot speak of soul-stirring bird songs without citing perhaps the greatest poem ever written about them, Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale'. The young poet, dying of T.B., deems the silvery flow of the nightingale's song a fitting river by which to leave this world of pain, torment, and disillusionment. “Darkling I listen, and for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death/Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme/ To take into the air my quiet breath/ Now, more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain/ While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy/ Still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain/ To thy high requiem become a sod'.

And Robert Frost, in his poem “Come In” is also tempted into the dark by a thrush: “Far in the pillared dark thrush music went/ Almost like a call to come in to the dark and lament/ But no, I was out for stars/ I would not come in, even if asked/ And I hadn't been.”

Then, there's Eudora Welty's masterpiece, “The Worn Path”, in which the main character is figuratively a mythological bird. Her name is Phoenix Jackson, a 100 year old daughter of slaves, and the whole story dramatizes the flaming human Spirit hiding within the aging members of a person more heroic than words can express. But one most of the people around her consider sub lower class. That story should be required reading for everyone—especially those harboring racism. Remember, the phoenix was a mythical bird of fire that lives 500 years and then is reborn out of its own ashes. The story of the myth is the story of Phoenix Jackson. I beg you all to look or Google it up and read it over and over. It is a life-changer.

And, while I'm at it, let me include Percy Shelly's “To a Skylark”, a poem in which a self-confessed atheist demonstrates he is anything but:

“Hail to thee Blythe Spirit,

Bird thou never wert

That from Heaven or near it

Pour-est thy full heart

In profuse strains of un-premeditated art

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know

Such harmonious madness from my lips would flow

The World should listen then

As I am listening now!

Surely God gave us birds not just as auditory decorations for our idle hours, but as living, soaring, beautifully singing proof that there are divine things, higher things for us “to stay our minds on and be stayed.” Paul says in Philippians Ch. 4. “Whatever things are true . . . whatever things are lovely . . . whatever things are of good report—Think on those things.” And that's why I think a lot about birds.

                                                  Gene Pinkney – 1/8/20 - For the Daily News