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CHAPTER III

TENNYSON AS ORNITHOLOGIST

No class of living creature occupies so much of the poet's attention as the birds. They are of course songsters like himself; "he pipes but as the linnets sing". The nightingale and the lark for long monopolised poetic idolatry—a privilege they enjoyed solely on account of their pre-eminence as song-birds. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley's Ode to a Skylark are two of the glories of English literature; but both were written by men who had no claim to special or exact knowledge of ornithology as such. When Wordsworth wrote his Ode to the Cuckoo he showed himself more of an observer, although he thought it necessary to ignore some of the more obvious and least pleasing characteristics of this peculiar bird. Even Pope once wrote a fine description, in the Popian kind, of a cock-pheasant. Here again, however, as compared with other poets, Tennyson claims the same

superiority in minuteness and accuracy of detail as he has earned in other fields. It was his good fortune to live through a period when an impetus was given to the study of feathered life, and in this as in other things he was influenced by the spirit of his age. He was not a strikingly original genius fated to make new departures; he rather owes his success and popularity to his adaptability, to the facility with which he adopted the thoughts and fell in with the habits of his time. Many persons are observers of bird life, when they observe and record nothing else zoological; having made a beginning in this department they often extend their studies in other directions. Bird life is fascinating; it is on the whole easy to observe; the plumage, the nest, the song, the flight, the migratory habit, combining to make this study one of widespread interest.

Tennyson, like the three great poets above mentioned, has devoted individual poems to certain birds-The Blackbird and The Throstle-but he knows the habits or the notes of the robin, the linnet, the ptarmigan, the partridge, the rook, the kingfisher, the owl, the heron, the kestrel and others; he has studied the migration of birds and makes many striking references to that side of their life

he is quite familiar with the evolutionary exposition of the struggle for existence which, potent everywhere, is equally operative here. Let us illustrate some of these points.

In The Blackbird the poet informs us that he encourages such birds to frequent his garden, being in this respect a contrast to his neighbours who shoot these fruit thieves. He does not protect his black-heart cherries with a net, only he expects in exchange for granting this privilege to have song, and humorously hints that the bird's good feeding has atrophied his vocal powers. He does not make the mistake many of his predecessors have made, of supposing that the female bird sings. He has observed, too, that after the spring lovemaking is over, the blackbird is silent and uses the gold dagger of his bill for more prosaic purposesnamely "to fret (i.e., eat) the summer jenneting" (a species of early apple).

A golden bill! the silver tongue
Cold February loved is dry,

Plenty corrupts the melody

That made thee famous once, when young.

And in the sultry garden-squares

Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse,
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse

As when a hawker hawks his wares.

It is quite correct that as summer advances, the mellow, flute-like notes of the blackbird become harsh and coarse.

The Throstle (which is only a more poetic name for the thrush) is devoted to reproducing and interpreting the delightful song of this bird, as if answering his own question which he put in The Gardener's Daughter: "Have the birds any sense of what they sing?" The poet has listened to the song of the thrush till he has caught its every note, and is able to translate it into English. Nothing could be sweeter, truer or more happy. "Summer is coming, summer is coming,

I know it, I know it, I know it,

Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,"
Yes, my wild little poet.

The "new, new, new, new

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and "Here again,

here, here, here, happy year are a perfect facsimile of the song, and at once bring before us a picture of a leafless tree in March on which is perched, facing the sinking sun, a speckle-breasted thrush, pouring forth his characteristic warbles. This passage throws light on a line in Maud :

Maud is here, here, here,

In among the lilies,

and points to the thrushes singing "in our wood".

Compare with this Browning's fine passage :
That's the wise thrush he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture.

It is not surprising that a poet with Tennyson's endowment of word-music should make much of birds' notes, consequently we have many beautiful passages dealing with this theme. In Lancelot and

Elaine occurs

Then as a little helpless, innocent bird

That has but one plain passage of few notes,
Will sing the simple passage o'er and o'er
For all an April morning, till the ear
Wearies to hear it, so the simple maid

Went half the night repeating, "Must I die?"

Here he does not condescend on the particular kind of bird. Was it a young canary, caged in the poet's own home?

There is another passage, which though long, must be quoted because it hits off the poet's ways so felicitously.

And as the sweet voice of a bird

Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,

Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form ;
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint ;
And made him like a man abroad at morn

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