Poetry and Animals

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE99

plainly on description of the bird as an end in itself. William Word-
sworth’s “The Green Linnet” is a poem about species recognition, a
process made more simple, one suspects, when the species is not already
freighted with cultural meaning. Like his sonnet “With Ships the Sea
Was Sprinkled,” this poem reflects how perception singles out the one
from the many. What is it about the green linnet (also known as the
greenfinch, about the size of the North American house finch) that
catches the attention of the speaker, whose “sequestered nook” has
an array of “birds and flowers” to notice? Of all these, “one have I
marked... / far above the rest,” yet this distinction rests on paradox. On
the one hand, while the other “birds, and butterflies, and flowers, / Make
all one band of paramours,” the green linnet seems singular, distinct
from the bower: it is “sole in thy employment” and thus seems to make
the bower its “dominion,” “too blest with any one to pair; / Thyself thy
own enjoyment.”^29 On the other hand, the bird embodies the beauty of
the bower and actually does blend into it, reflecting the sun, shadow,
and greenness of the place and making it difficult to see.

The flutter of his wings

Upon his back and body flings

Shadows and sunny glimmerings,

That cover him all over.

My dazzled sight he oft deceives,

A brother of the dancing leaves;

In part, this paradox is resolved by the fact that the bird reveals itself in
song.

Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves

Pours forth his song in gushes;

As if by that exulting strain

He mocked and treated with disdain

The voiceless Form he chose to feign,

While fluttering in the bushes.