2063. POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE
them in a kind of dialogue (theme and variations) with the songs of other birds (136–
40), which is not unlike how humans learn to speak.
- Elizabeth A. Lawrence, “Melodious Truth: Keats, a Nightingale, and the Human/
Nature Boundary,” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 6,
no. 2 (1999): 21–30.
- John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1982), 279–82.
- Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 78.
- William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 533–34.
- John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David
Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 346.
- John Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 213.
- Ibid., 214–15.
- John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 5, 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David
Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 391. Gilbert
White’s letter of August 7, 1778 (number 42), is very similar: “A good ornithologist
should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and
shape.... For, though it must not be said that every species of birds has a manner
peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight dis-
criminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some
certainty.” He then lists several dozen species and some identifying characteristics of
their flight. In the next letter he says the same thing about bird vocalizations, which he
describes as “language... adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feel-
ings.” White, Natural History of Selborne.
- Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Birds” is very similar—a short compendium of observa-
tions of multiple species of raptors, “for a poem / Needs multitude, multitudes of
thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous.” The Selected Poetry of Rob-
inson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002), 103.
- Clare, Major Works, 159.
- Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 26.
- For a good account of the importance of birdsong to Clare, see Stephanie Kuduk
Weiner, “Listening with John Clare,” Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 3 (2009): 371–90.
- Jonathan Skinner, “Birds in Dickinson’s Words,” Emily Dickinson Journal 20, no. 2
(2011): 107.
- Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 271.
- Aaron Shackelford, “Dickinson’s Animals and Anthropomorphism,” Emily Dickin-
son Journal 19, no. 2 (2010): 59.
- It was standard practice for ornithologists to shoot the birds they were studying so
that they could describe them in detail, a practice that probably contributed to the
extinction of such birds as the ivory-billed woodpecker.
