Poetry and Animals

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE101

So creeping through the mossy rail

I in the thicket got to see:

When one small bird of saddened green,

Black head, and breast of ashy grey,

In ivied oak tree scarcely seen,

Stopt all at once and flew away;

And since, in hedgerow’s dotterel trees,

I’ve oft this tiny minstrel met,

Where ivy flapping to the breeze

Bear ring-marked berries black as jet;

But whether they find food in these

I’ve never seen or known as yet.^30

The poem is rich with precise descriptive detail and, like lyric poems in
general, implicitly does work for both the community of readers and
the individual speaker. One of the speaker’s goals is to define the species,
which includes the bird’s placement in the class of songbirds. The speaker
identifies many seemingly essential features—informing readers how we
too might find and identify the bird—by song, size, colors, behavior, and
habitat. The poem is proof that Clare has seen and studied the blackcap,
an expression of allegiance with it (signaling that the speaker under-
stands something about it), and a generous account that inspires readers
to also mark the blackcap (which is the work of a field guide). But the
poem also has explicit ambiguities—the described bird is not just a
representative but a specific bird, here unusually of “saddened grey,”
at first misidentified as a nightingale by its song. (In “The Nightingale’s
Nest” the speaker misidentifies the singing bird as a female, presum-
ably because he sees it near the nest and because male and female are
nearly identical in appearance.) Because the speaker is concerned with
the process of identification, he is largely focused on resemblances and
differences—between kinds of birds and their likely habitats (in ivy,
oak, and hedgerows), between the bird and the speaker, and in his lan-
guage: “dotterel,” for instance, is at once a kind of bird, a fool, and slang
for a decayed or headless tree. The poem translates specific experience