POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE93Many of the most famous poems of the English romantic period
reflect responses to a particular species, mostly birds. Indeed, poems
about or addressed to birds, like John Keats’s iconic “Ode to a Nightin-
gale,” are commonly understood to reflect something essentially roman-
tic, as well as the period’s excesses—Billy Collins avoids including any
famous romantic poems in his recent anthology of bird poems because
he thinks they are “flighty.”^20 The reasons for the flourishing of the bird
poem in the romantic period are myriad. For one thing, watching and
identifying birds was already a popular British pastime by the late eigh-
teenth century, in part as a productive response to the Linnaean taxo-
nomic project.^21 And because birds had been symbolic of poets and poetry
since the invention of poetry, poems about birds offer self-reflective
poets a means of naturalizing their own activities even as they reveal
poetry’s necessary obligations to convention.^22 The paradox of bird
poems—that they can seem to be about poetry and its artifice even as
they dwell on the naturalness of birdsong—is a paradox inherent in
birdsong itself and another reason it is such a productive subject for
poetry. Birdsong is meaningless because it comes from another species
and because it is merely music, and meaningful because like language it
is intentional and patterned, and we feel the effects of music as sponta-
neous meaning. Moreover, because birdsong is normally apprehended
not as the song of a single bird but as that of a particular species, it can
be understood as conventional (something merely repeated, whether by
instinct or learning) even as it appears deeply imbedded in the natural
world, specific to a single bird singing in the particular moment. It is
possible, in other words, to recover the bird and its song from the his-
tory of conventions that has evolved from our continual, panhistorical
fascination with birds and our history of reading these poems as only
about poets, poetry, and humans.
The desire to perceive and translate actual birdsong is explicit in
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Nightingale,” although the poem
also demonstrates how this desire must always be frustrated. The seem-
ing lyric moment of the poem is a scene of sensory deprivation (“no
cloud, no relique of the sunken day,... no obscure trembling hues,... no
murmuring”), against which the song of the nightingale is even more