Birdsong and Poetry, a Springtime Ramble

On mockingbirds, nightingales, and onomatopoeia

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
      Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
—"Spring, the Sweet Spring" by Thomas Nashe

mockingbird on a wire

The Mockingbird Sings at Midnight

Recently our neighborhood mockingbird has been perching in the juniper tree in front of our house or on the power lines across the street. His loud songs start early and fill the house— all the windows are open day and night because it is glorious spring.

all morning mocking-
bird sings loud from the wire all
birds' songs but his own

He cycles through his repertoire, imitating all the neighborhood birds. He’s an excellent mimic and you can absolutely tell whose songs he’s stolen, but there’s something rushed and impatient about how he sings them, a little speeded up, a little too hasty.

now he's doing robin
now he's doing wren
now he's doing titmouse
our mockingbird's at it again

I love his jaunty tail, which tends to stick up at an angle when he’s perched. I love the brilliant black and white display of feathers when he suddenly throws himself into the air. Sometimes he just flutters up and then descends into the tree again, sometimes he flits from tree to power lines, from the pole to the wire, from the lower wire to the upper. He’s restless as well as rowdy.

And the other night when I came home late from adoration,I heard him singing at oe in the morning. I couldn’t believe he was still going, competing with the neighborhood screech owl. (I’m pretty sure it was the screech owl and not the mockingbird because I heard them singing at the same time.)

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Birding by Ear

My oldest daughter is a natural birder and through careful observation she’s learned to tell bird by birdsong even when she can’t see them. I don’t have her native ability to hyperfocus and so I’ve been using an app to help train myself to listen to birdsong more carefully and to identify birds by ear as well as by sight.

The Merlin app is an amazing gift to birders. You can set it to recording and it will helpfully suggest possible matches for any bird it hears. It’s not always right— the other night it identified a barking dog as a great blue heron and it has told me that we have tropical birds in the neighborhood that I absolutely do not believe are here. But for the most part it is accurate and I’ve learned song sparrow’s beautiful trills and a large variety of cardinal’s calls and robins’s territorial songs and warning chirps and I can identify the songs and calls of wrens and tufted titmice. In short, I am getting quite good at identifying more birds than I can possibly list here without boring even my most patient readers.

The other day I was listening to the mockingbird sing and a jay flew by, calling, jay, jay. Immediately the mockingbird answered back: jay, jay. The interesting thing about the mockingbird is that the Merlin app always knows it’s a mockingbird and not the bird it’s imitating. Even before I learned to identify the various neighborhood birds by ear I could usually identify the mockingbird by the cadence and quality of his song. But now that I’ve been training my ear, I can usually tell which bird’s song the mockingbird is imitating.

And as a poet and a person fascinated by words I am also constantly challenging myself to try to record the birdsongs I hear with some kind of approximate combinations of letters and words. I suppose in that sense I, too, am a mockingbird. I imagine this is a thing humans have done since we’ve learned to write. Even before the invention of writing, I am certain that people have listened to birds and tried to imitate what they heard, but there’s a special challenge in transliterating those melodious sounds into a system of writing that was created to imitate and contain human speech.

Onomatopoeia

“Onomatopoeia” is the delightful Greek word that we use to describe a word that imitates the sound that it names. Words like “buzz” and “bang,” and “drip” sound like the sounds they describe. Onomatopoeia can be real words or made-up words or simply strings of letters that attempt to transcribe a sound.

Some birds’ names are themselves onomatopoeia: the jay is named after his sharp call, the whippoorwill is likewise named after his song as are cuckoos and curlews, crows and owls. The list of birds whose names probably are rooted in sounds is quite long.

Additionally, there are many standard words that we use to describe bird sounds: chirp, cheep, chip, tweet, twitter, croak, are all real words. But if I wanted to try to capture a sound more accurately I might write something like “tchiiip” or “crrronkkk” or “tssssiippp” —making up my own words by stringing together letters to imitate the sounds I’m hearing.

And there are other ways to try to capture bird songs with phrases or even sentences instead of single words.

Beatrix Potter illustration from Timmy Tiptoes

In Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Timmy Tiptoes the author uses whole phrases to capture birdsongs, which then are taken as taunts by the squirrels:

There were several sorts of little birds, twittering different songs.

The first one sang—"Who's bin digging-up my nuts? Who's-been-digging-up my nuts?"

And another sang—"Little bita bread and-no-cheese! Little bit-a-bread an'-no-cheese!"

Birders often use phrases like these as a kind of mnemonic for birdsongs: wrens are often described as singing “teakettle, teakettle”. Robins sing “cheerio, cheerio”. There are some more of these listed in Laura Erikson’s For the Birds Radio Program: Onomatopoetic Bird Calls and Mnemonics— the audio recording lets you compare the birdsong to the mnemonic word or phrase.

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Jug Jug

There’s a long poetic tradition in English of using onomatopoeia bird calls in poetry. Last week

Sally Thomas

of

Poems Ancient and Modern

wrote about a Thomas Nashe poem, “Spring, the sweet spring” which has the refrain “Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!”that captures respectively the songs of the cuckoo, the nightingale, the lapwing, and the owl. Do go read Sally’s beautiful discussion and analysis of the poem.

Nashe’s use of “jug, jug” for the nightingale’s song jogged my memory, reminding me of something I had read a while ago. I wrote in the comments: “This reminds me of an essay I read at some point about the tradition of onomatopoetic bird songs in English. I'm pretty sure the primary focus of the essay was on T.S. Eliot—though I might be misremembering because my own interest in the essay was Eliot. But there was a question as to how accurate the songs are at capturing the sounds of birds.”

I couldn’t remember who the essay was by or the title, but I vaguely remembered a book with a red cover sitting on the shelf in the living room. I also remembered that I bought that book specifically for that essay because I couldn’t find the whole essay online. The image of the red book was haunting me, so last night I went hunting. It only took me a minute to move aside a stack of paperbacks sitting in front of the upright hardcovers, one of which was indeed the red-covered book titled A Noel Perrin Sampler. I love it when my visual memory is actually helpful. I’m also delighted to find a real-world example of the red cover book that is the bane of bookstore clerks and librarians. You know: the customer who comes in and can’t recall the title or the name of the author but remembers the color of the cover.

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Nightingales Sing at Midnight Too

Perrin’s 1957 essay, "The Nightingale Song," was exactly as I remembered it. (It's available on the New Yorker site, but it's behind a paywall, which must have been the reason I bought the book.) In it Perrin, when a graduate student at Cambridge, gets into an argument with his supervisor about what sound a nightingale makes: does it say "Jug Jug" or "tsoo tsoo"?

Perrin argues that T.S. Eliot is accurate in his descriptions of nature and his supervisor disputes him, calling into question the "jug jug" of the nightingale in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, saying: “no nightingale ever made the noise ‘Jug Jug in his life” and arguing that Eliot should leave English birds to English poets. Which comment then sends Perrin on a quest. He begins by going birding in Madingly Wood, but doesn't hear a nightingale.

Then he hits the library, starting with a Dictionary of Birds, which says the sound is “indescribable”. He tries Shakespeare and Shelly and Keats, who aren't any help. Then his roommate points him to Edward Thomas whose nightingales sing “tsoo tsoo.” While he’s consulting Thomas, a librarian points him to Coleridge, whose bird does say "Jug Jug."

And murmurs musical and swift jug jug,
And one low piping sound more sweet than all—

But Perrin’s supervisor says that the jug jug sound is just a warming up sound, comparable to the “squeak squeak” of violins tuning up. It’s not the real song of the nightingale. (He seems at this point to have shifted the goal-posts a bit, no?)

Then thanks to a sympathetic don, who rejects the idea that the nightingale’s jug jug is warming up and insists that it’s an integral part of his song, Perrin finds John Lyly's "The Songs of Birds": "Jug, Jug, Jug, tereu she cryes". But even this is dismissed by the supervisor as “literary artifice”. (At this point the supervisor is just being an ass and refusing to concede the point that Eliot is clearly calling on a literary tradition. What! Eliot working within a literary tradition?!? Who’d have thought?)

And thus Lyly is countered by the supervisor with Barnsfield “fie, fie, fie.... teru, teru” and then with Tennyson’s "chirrupt".

Finally, Perrin discovers John Skelton:

Dug, dug 
Jug, jug, 
good year and good luck, 
with chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck.

And the supervisor comes back with Walther von Der Vogelweide, an early German minnesinger: " Tandaradi!"and the battle is over with the two combatants going out for a pint of beer in true Oxbridge fashion.

It's such a delightful literary battle, told with Perrin's charm and wit— I’ve hardly done it justice— and well worth the cost of the collection of essays. (I’d like to claim I’ve read the whole book, but I think I’ve maybe read one or two other essays. The book is practically pristine.)

Cape Ann Landscapes

I do think Perrin is right about Eliot's ear for birdsong, though. I especially love Eliot’s 'Cape Ann' section of "Landscapes" in which he describes the palaver of the New England birds.

O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow,
Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow
At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance
Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance
The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white
Dodging by bay-bush. Follow the feet
Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the flight
Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet
In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet
But resign this land at the end, resign it
To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull.
The palaver is finished.

Moreover, I think Perrin’s supervisor is absolutely missing the point of the “jug jug” in The Waste Land, because Eliot is clearly more interested in making reference to earlier English poets than in rhapsodizing about the sound of the nightingale’s song. It’s another of the many allusions and quotations with which Eliot’s poem is liberally peppered. (There aren’t many lines in The Waste Land that aren’t allusions.) In fact, I suspect Eliot deliberately chooses the least melodious of the nightingale noises because in that section of the poem (A Game of Chess) he’s talking about the rape of Philomel— in fact the “dirty ears” is an important part of the phrase. It’s “jug jug” to dirty ears because the dirty ears aren’t listening for more beautiful notes. It’s also worth noting, that Eliot also does use the more musical “twit twit” and “tereu” later in the Fire Sermon section:

"Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu" 

Also, I can’t quite leave this topic without noting that in the final section of The Waste Land Eliot also uses the onomatopoeic call for the the cock on a rooftree: “Co co rico co co rico”. "Cocorico!" is the French onomatopoeia for the rooster crow, the equivalent of the English "cock-a-doodle-doo!"

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Tinuviel

While I was describing Perrin’s literary duel with his supervisor to my birding daughter, who is also a huge Tolkien fan, she was reminded of Tolkien’s story of Beren and Luthien. When Beren sees Luthien singing in the woods he names her “Tinuviel,” meaning “nightingale”— though literally it means “daughter of twilight.” Hearing the word Tinuviel next to “tereu” and “tandaradi” I suspect that Tolkien also means the name to be an onomatopoeia of the song of the nightingale. I have no proof of that, but it is a musical name and maybe it should be an onomatopoeia.

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The Bat Poet

The bat had always heard the mockingbird. The mockingbird would sit on the highest branch of a tree in the moonlight and sing half the night. The bat loved to listen to him. He could imitate all the other birds. He'd imitate even the way the squirrels chattered when they were angry, like two rocks being knocked together. And he could imitate the milk bottles being put down on the porch. And the barn door closing, a long rusty squeak. And he made up songs and words all his own that nobody else had ever said or sung.

And while I’m thinking about poetical mockingbirds, I can’t fail to mention one of my favorite books: The Bat Poet by Randall Jarrell. It’s a book about a bat who has insomnia and finds himself awake during the day. He hears a mockingbird and falls in love with music and poetry and starts to write his own poems— which no one else properly appreciates. The mockingbird is insufferably proud. The bat is utterly endearing. And the illustrations are by Maurice Sendak are perfection.

Until one day he thought: I could make up a song like the mockingbird's. But when he tried his high notes were all high, and his low notes were all high, and the notes in between were all high. He couldn't make a tune. So he imitated the mockingbird’s words instead. And first his words didn't go together. Even the bat could see that they didn't sound a bit like the mockingbird's.

But after a while, some of them began to sound beautiful. So that the bat said to himself. If you get the word right, you don't need a tune.

You can hear Randall Jarrell reading The Bat Poet here.

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A Few Final Thoughts about Mockingbirds

By the way, I keep typing “nightingale” when I mean “mockingbird” and vice versa. I’ve re-read this essay half a dozen times and have tried to fix all the instances, but I’ve probably missed at least one mixup. I suppose it’s because both words have the same number of syllables, the same rhythm. Also, both have an “ing” in the middle.

And now that I’ve said that, I think I want to write a poem that uses both nightingale and mockingbird. I wonder if any poet has written about both in the same poem?

Eliot does have a poem with a mockingbird in it. It’s the second part of “Landscapes”:

II. VIRGINIA

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still, Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

And one last last thing… (I cannot seem to land this essay, it’s becoming one of those conversations where you stand in the parking lot and talk for three hours instead of saying goodbye because there is always something more to say.) I don’t quite understand why Harper Lee says it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird because they can be quite annoying birds.

And I’ve never seen a nightingale but I wish that maybe someday I could see one and hear it sing. I might even be willing to imitate Perrin and stand in the damp woods at midnight waiting and hoping. Or maybe I’d actually just stay in my nice warm bed. In the meantime, there is at least YouTube.

Come to think of it I knew a song about mockingbirds even before I met the bird. My mother used to sing to me:

Hush little baby
don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you 
a mockingbird.

(Or maybe she’ll buy you a nightingale?)

Ok if you read this far and put up with my ramblings, you are an amazing reader. I’m sorry for not landing this essay, but I hope you at least had fun with this extended stream of consciousness about birds and bird songs and poetry.

Please do feel free to tell me about your favorite mockingbird or nightingale stories, or your favorite poems about birds, or your favorite onomatopoeias.