The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Thrushes, Larks and Nightingales IF I HAD nothing else to do, I would write a book about the poets and the birds. I suppose I could begin with Homer, but being...
...He called on the skylark to inspire him with gladness and harmonious madness...
...Birds are not as unvariable and automatic as people have thought...
...The greater sophistication of later writers seems not to have given them any advantage over him: Chaucer found it perfectly natural to picture men and women living cheerful lives among birds and flowers...
...He pictured this palpitating world in as lovely a fashion as any other master of words and music...
...Now and then I read an article about bird migrations...
...I suppose I could begin with Homer, but being fundamentally opposed to labor of any sort, my impulse is to jump to the conclusion that Geoffrey Chaucer would furnish the natural starting point...
...As I dig in my garden, I am often accompanied by a pair of busty robins...
...So there we are, the robins and I, day after day, year after year—all of us talking and no one understanding a word...
...His smale fowles making melodye may not have been bound on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, but they had much to do with cheering up the merry company which set forth from the Tabard Inn...
...Our richest and most varied musician is the thrush, who has not yet arrived for his 1960 concert season...
...One observation about this migration business I can make on my own authority...
...we have our thrushes...
...Even the tiniest of them, the hummingbirds, make the long flight over the Gulf of Mexico to their winter home in Brazil...
...Often they seem to be eyeing me with a knowing look...
...But they have no cause to object to us as impudent intruders...
...But we need not envy anyone...
...Shakespeare, too, must have had a sharp ear for the songs of larks, nightingales and every other sort of tuneful winged creature, for time and again he used them to set his scene or furnish symbols of beauty and cheer...
...He was, after all, our first great English poet and in virtually every way he was tops...
...But any evening now his notes will rise from the deep woods, and I shall continue my old argument: '"Yes, you are quite right...
...We now have these handsome and lively visitors with us during the summer well north in Ohio and Delaware...
...Keats imagined his nightingale was heard in ancient times by emperor and clown, or by Ruth amid the alien corn...
...From time to time they chirp little remarks which I, never having learned robin language, fail to understand...
...For him the lark forever sang at heaven's gate...
...Now that spring has really come, he starts his roundelay before the dark has been scattered...
...I think of my eight or 10 sorts of birds and of my squirrels and rabbits as going back much further than that...
...They may well be the very same birds year after year...
...And Shelley, the most melodious and inspiring of our later poets, thought of our aerial songsters as his chief teachers and inspiration...
...Our advance has greatly increased their supply of food...
...I have had explained to me various theories about how they find their way for thousands of miles...
...It is exasperating to be so close to all of these different birds and have so little real knowledge of them and so little satisfactory contact with them...
...What puzzles me is the identity of these sharp little operators...
...Their songs may be in the nature of payment...
...Our white-throated sparrow surely sings one of the sweetest, most heart-searching lyrics...
...Robins and cardinals go farther north in summer and stay farther north in winter than they used to do...
...There are many more of them now than there were in more primitive days...
...I have no skylark and no nightingale in my garden, but there are tuneful songsters aplenty...
...Perhaps they recall this little patch of ground where they fared well in the past and have every reason to believe they will be treated well in the future...
...Within my time there have been considerable changes in bird tourists...
...Even the fledglings, only recent masters of flight, find their way over land and sea without assistance from their elders...
...For years I have been followed up and down the garden rows by two hearty feeders who look forever the same...
...The thing about birds which chiefly fascinates me is the problem about their memories...
...It was their place long before it was ours...
...Keats thought of his nightingale as instructor: "No hungry generations tread thee down...
...we Americans have no skylark and no nightingale...
...Now and then I turn up a fat worm or some other inviting morsel and my winged friends, keeping as near as they dare and never missing a trick, manage to gobble up a substantial meal...
...Their ancestors occupied this wide continent long before any Indians, or any sort of humans, came this way...
...This year he remained with us practically all winter long and began to sing in the deep cold of February...
...What an engine they must have...
...All these supreme lyricists considered birds chiefly as music-makers, and did most to celebrate their part in the lives of us comparatively earth-bound humans...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 17
