We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought. ibid.
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then – as I am listening now. ibid.
A widow bird sat mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles the First 5:9
O blithe new-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice:
O Cuckoo! Shall I call the bird,
Or but a wandering voice? William Wordsworth, To the Cuckoo, 1807
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred point of heaven and home! William Wordsworth, To a Skylark
The largest bird that ever lived – the twelve-foot high Moa. Excavations all over South Island produce the massive bones of the Moa. Flocks of their skeletons dominate New Zealand’s museums. The Moa certainly seems to have been seen as late as 1860. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World
Birds are part of the heritage we are fighting for. James Fisher, preface Watching Birds
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead. John Keats, On the Grasshopper and Cricket, 1817
I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving. John Keats, I Had a Dove, 1819
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown. ibid.
There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see. Nat Burton, The White Cliffs of Dover
The lark now leaves his wat’ry nest
And, climbing, shakes his dewy wings. William D'Avenant, 1606-68, The Lark, 1638
Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men. John Webster, The White Devil
We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry. ibid.
On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang, ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow!’
And I said to him, ‘Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing, Willow, titwillow, titwillow?’ W S Gilbert, The Mikado
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, 1845
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’. ibid.
The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo’s note,
The untaught harmony of spring. Thomas Gray, Ode on the Spring, 1748
Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people's gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I know why the caged bird sings! Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906, adopted by Maya Angelou for title of autobiography
The carrion crow, that loathsome beast,
Which cries against the rain. George Gascoigne c.1534-77
Those little nimble musicians of the air that warble forth their curious ditties with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art. Izaac Walton, 1593-1683
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection! William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice V I 104
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. William Shakespeare, Hamlet V ii 202-203
As the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came. Daphne du Maurier, The Birds
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds. Aesop, The Jay and the Peacock
One swallow does not make a summer. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes. Charles Lindbergh, 1974
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
And a good south wind sprung up behind,
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus! –
Why look'st thou so?’ – ‘With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Even the blackest of them all, the crow,
Renders good service as your man-at-arms,
Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail.
And crying havoc on the slug and snail. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn
The Birds of America. John James Audubon
The little owls call to each other with tremulous, quavering voices throughout the livelong night, as they sit in the creaking trees. Theodore Roosevelt
You see, we’ve got two very rare birds nesting right over here. Tawny Pipit 1944 starring Bernard Miles & Rosamund John & Niall MacGinnis & Jean Gillie & Lucie Mannheim & Christopher Steele & Brefni O'Rorke & George Carney & Wylie Watson & John Salew & Marjorie Rhodes et al, directors Bernard Miles & Charles Saunders, Miss Broome to army bloke
Save The Sparrow: It was once a common or garden bird. Now it’s not common or in your garden. Why? The Independent offers £5,000 for the first scientific evidence that explains why decline is so widespread. The Independent appeal