Secondary Resources
Romanticism's Singing Bird
Frank Doggett
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Vol. 14, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1974), pp. 547-561 (15 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/449753#metadata_info_tab_cont ents
547
Several well-known nineteenth-century poems are celebrations of bird song and have their central
figure a singing bird endowed with lyric powers transcending those of the human poet. By tradition
and connotation, the image of the bird at song embodied the poet’s idealization of his art.
550
Birds can be considered composing poets.
A significant implication for the Romantic conception of the image of the singing bird was given
when the bird was characteriencozed not only as a poet it in his own right, but a master of a superior
art that could inspire the human poet.
551
The personification of the idea of spontaneous creativity in the name of the muse lapsed, the
Romantic poets felt that they found a true creative source in their apprehension of the world within
them or of the world about them that they called “Nature.”
Saw in the figure of the singing bird an instance of creativity in the natural world, an image
illustrative of the creative act and more specific than the abstract word nature. Special value given to
spontaneous creativity. Presented as a creature, and instance and a voice of the natural world.
552
Wordworth who says that the cuckoo was ‘no bird, but an invisible thing,’ rather than a physical
creature, it is, he imlies, an essence or idea of a feeling that he assoiates with the image -like an
unbodied joy’-he says.
554
In An Ode to A Nightingale the poet is an auditor and longs to become one with the invisible bird.
The convention may present a meditation on a man’s weakness and mortality, as a contrast to the
idealization of the song of the bird, and through that idealization the bird’s implied ideal existence.
The import of keats singing bord-the essence of spirit of poetry, an idealization of the art of the poet
that he often calls ‘poesy ‘ – is evident only when the bird is realized as a transcendent and ageless
voice, never visualised or given physical embodiment. 23
560
Weather and scene in the Darkling Thrush are a kind of symbolic language repeating a theme often
implied in the poetry of Hardy-the idea that the human circumstance is so adverse that happiness is
possible only because the self is intent on the immediate and fails to realize the inevitable misery
and death.
, Hardy’s singing bird would follow the symbolic modes established by other Romantic poets
561
The image of the bird is synechdoche, an instance of animate being, and not a figure standing for the
idea of poetry.
Thinking Like a Leaf: Dinah Hawken, Romantic Ecopoet
Janet Newman
httpevokes://www.jstor.org/stable/90015303#met adata_info_tab_contents
9
Jonathan Bate argues that the natural world is more readily valued through poetry connecting
nature and consciousness. He suggests a broadening of the definition of ecopoetry to encompass
meditative poems including Romantic poetry that uses lyric subjectivity to reveal the natural world
through perception rather than exposition.
10
Hawkedefen departs from ecopolemic in favour of a more nuanced approach to the relationship
between people and the natural world. Her poetry explores the way in which people benefit from
the presence of nature not for ecological imperatives, but rather, for psychological restoration.
11
This underlying percept shifts Hawken’s poetics away from ecopolemic towards an exploration of
how nature affects human consciousness. As such, her work belongs to a minority strain of ecopoety
that links the genre to Romantic poetry.
12
Charles L Armstrong, for example, contends that ecopoetry can ‘combine excellent poetical
craftsmanship with an attentive curiosity about the natural world’ if the polemical attitude is
abandoned.
Jonathan Bate stresses continuity between contemporary ecopoetry and Romanticism, arguing that
subjective lyric connects us to nature in ways the polemic cannot. He states that the purpose of
ecopoetry is not to raise consciousness towards political or social action that might improve the
ecological outlook for the planet but rather to ‘concern itself with consciousness.’
This he says may lead to a sense of belonging, a valuing of nature and desire to defend it from harm
but such notons follow interconnection between human consciousness and the natural world, rather
than from scientific knowledge or political persuasion. Hence, Bate defines ecopoetry as an ‘afterlife’
of Romantic poetry. Accordingly, he suggests a broadening of definition of the term ecopoetry to
demarcate meditative, non-polemical poems, and expansion to encompass poets from the
14
In these poems, the presence or lack of nature has profound effect on the poet speaker’s
consciousness, describing changes in their subjectivity due to the presence of memory of nature.
