100POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEThe linnet’s song belies its camouflage and announces its presence.
That the bird is simultaneously difficult to see and easy to hear is what
draws the speaker’s attention (though this is true of many birds). Identify-
ing a species requires sustained attention, partial sightings, and then, as
this poem explicitly shows, a personal narrative of the meaning of the
species. The final product, if one might call it that, is the joy of recogni-
tion. That the green linnet “mocked and treated with disdain / The voice-
less Form he chose to feign” suggests that Wordsworth sees in the reality
of the animal a subtle counterallegory of his poetic project in “Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” for instance, in which
the poet seeks to find and speak for an invisible spirit that rolls through
the entire natural world. In announcing only itself, and distinguishing
itself from its surroundings, the green linnet becomes a symbol for the
meaning of the tangible and specific over the intangible and general.
No poet of the romantic period paid more attention to animals than
John Clare. He wrote at least a hundred poems on birds and other ani-
mals, almost all focused on individual species. Indeed, most of these
poems, like Wordsworth’s “Green Linnet,” reflect the experience of
observation and identification, and collectively acknowledge that the
process of recognizing species, translating the species-specific mean-
ing gleaned from observation, is a sufficient purpose for poetry. In the
poem “The Nightingale’s Nest,” Clare literally guides the reader to
the bird—“Up this green woodland ride lets softly rove / And list the
nightingale”—and repeatedly insists on the work it takes to see this
diminutive and cautious creature. That is, the most obvious function of
Clare’s bird poems is simply to record acts of identification by the poet,
which are offered to readers as field guides. The poem “The Blackcap” is
typical.
The blackcap is a singing bird,
A nightingale in melody;
Last March in Open Wood I heard
One sing that quite astonished me;
I took it for the nightingale—
It jug-jugged just the same as he—