POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE87characteristics, and poetry foregrounds the pleasure and power of this
act of naming. Poems can also reveal the tension between the reductive-
ness of the name of the type—its singularity—and an awareness that
this type might contain multiple and varied characteristics. Poems that
reflect animal types most explicitly reveal the work animals do for us,
the interest they hold for us, as well as the (mental) work that we per-
form on them.
As with all acts of classification, one needs to begin with empirical evi-
dence, samples of the type; in doing this, I hope I will not be like those
early naturalists—John James Audubon leaps to mind—who insisted
on killing individual specimens in order to study the species. An early
example of a poem that reflects attention to a particular species is the
anonymous thirteenth-century lyric “The Cuckoo Song.”
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu—
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu;
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu:
Ne swike thu naver nu;
Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!The lyric has been preserved because of its popularity as a folk song,
which is in turn a result of the happy resonance between the human song
and that of the bird it celebrates. The song expresses joy at the arrival
of spring by marking and imitating the distinctive sounds of the male
cuckoo’s mating call. The name of the bird is itself an onomatopoeic
intonation of the song, and the poem’s rhythm and rhymes mimic the
a ni ma l ’s voice, ma k i ng t he poem a k i nd of birdca l l—its si nger or spea ker