88POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEis urging the cuckoo to sing, perhaps to speed up the coming of sum-
mer.^7 The speaker addresses both a particular cuckoo and the species,
so easily identified by its call and whose meaning is closely associated
with spring, rebirth, sexuality, dance, and the body. The poem also
notes and compares how several other species mark the arrival of spring
through distinctive behavior (“bulluc sterteth,” or the bull leaps) as
well as distinctive sounds (the ewe bleats after her lamb, the cow lows
after her calf, and the buck farts—the Oxford English Dictionary’s fi rst
recorded use of the word).^8 That is, the poem focuses on identifying
traits of species and acknowledges that these signs are also how these
species express their joy at the arrival of spring. The poem reflects as
natural and unproblematic the idea that species have modes of commu-
nication specific to themselves, and that humans can make sense of, and
repeat, these signs.
In his book Infidel Poetics Daniel Tiffany obliquely refers to “Cuckoo
Song” in discussing an argument made by Virginia Woolf about how
the first lyric poem must have been a response to birdsong. Tiffany
argues that we find in this symbolic origin of poetry an account also of
lyric obscurity—that is, of lyric as a mode that includes something alien
and alienating. That the first poems were anonymous is in part because
authorial identity was a nonissue—a poem was preserved (orally and
later in writing) because of audience interest in the poem itself. Woolf ’s
origin myth interests Tiffany because it so neatly aligns the condition
of anonymity with the content and form of the poem: “Anonymity as a
human (and lyrical) condition has its origin therefore in the transfer-
ence of a bird’s ‘voice’—an alien tongue—into human language. The
character of birdsong thus prefigures the nature of lyric anonymity: a
bird’s song is a proper name of sorts, an impersonal signature express-
ing the singular fact of existence ad infinitum. Indeed, the bird sings its
tune again and again, like an automaton, unto death. Pleasure, for both
the singer and the listener, appears to be an effect of the boundless rep-
etition of ‘cant,’ conditioned by anonymity.”^9 This seductive argument
depends, however, on the idea that the birdsong, the “inhuman voice,”
is marked by “placelessness and aimlessness”—in short, that it marks
nothing, at least to human listeners. While the song of any bird must