Shelley's famous "To a Skylark" begins:
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
The Romantics wrote countless songs about similarly unpremeditated bird-poets. The bird was thought of as the ultimate untrained artist, who sang whatever its "full heart" prompted it to. This notion is premised on the idea that birdsong is individualistic, random and fully innate.
The terribly un-Romantic truth, though, is that bird song is far more a learnt behaviour than one would imagine. Bird song is actually pre-set for each species, and very little individualistic variation goes into it. Baby birds that are raised away from any other birds of their species never learn to sing "properly", and end up unintelligable to other birds of their kind. These birds might be the only "unpremeditated" singers - but their song is more like the ungrammatical speech of feral children than like the creativity of the artist.
Actually, it all boils down to two messages that the bird might actually be saying: "fuck me" or "fuck off" - as birdsong generally relates to territoriality or mating (or, in fewer cases, warning of predators). The cynical side of me might suggest that most poets are expressing one of the same messages - but never mind ...
No comments:
Post a Comment