Understandably, birds represent transcendence–in literature they often represent the human ability to rise above earthly circumstances and overcome physical, intellectual, or spiritual difficulty. The title line this week comes from Matthew, but a similar thought could be plucked from almost any source, from Farid ud-Din Attar (whose masterpiece, Conference of the Birds, has already been touched on in an earlier blog post) or from Chaucer’s work on regeneration, The Parliament of Fowls. The question of life’s focus threads endlessly through literature as it does through the human psyche. From the question of mastery in the Conference of Attar of Nishapur to the the question of love in Chaucer, we are seekers all.
In full, the titular verse says:
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? (KJV, Matthew 6:26)
This comparison offers some consideration. Better, better off, more, greater? Recall that, in the great Persian epic, Attar’s birds eventually find their ruler in themselves. Chaucer’s fowls find regeneration as they mark it, in love and song:
“Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!
“Saynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte,
Thus syngen smale foules for thy sake:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake.
“Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte,
Sith ech of hem recovered hath hys make,
Ful blissful mowe they synge when they wake:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!”
(Chaucer, “Parliament of Fowls”, 680-92)*
Here, the birds herald renewal, with the first mention of St. Valentine as a patron of lovers and the coming of spring. The line “hys make” is often taken to include “his mate”, and the idea that one may find one’s ‘making’ in ‘mating’ may easily be read as harkening back to the ancient festival traditions of regeneration and renewal.
Not all of the bird renewals are necessarily so light. From the darker corners of Irish folk custom comes ‘Wren Day’ on St. Stephen’s Day, or the day after Christmas, where people (often young boys) would kill a wren and carry the dead bird about with them while begging/demanding money for its funeral. The sacrifice marked a transition, with the wren’s death representing the killing of the old year to herald the new year, often represented by the robin. This is really another version of the midwinter festival, and the symbolic killing of winter in order to usher in the new year, and the eventual return of sunlight the spring season, and new growth. Here is one set of lyrics for the “Wren Song” that was sung door to door on Wren Day (there are many variants of the song, but they remain mostly similar):
The wren, oh the wren; he’s the king of all birds,
On St. Stephens day he got caught in the furze,
So it’s up with the kettle and it’s down with the pan,
Won’t you give us a penny for to bury the wren!
(Irish traditional)**
So, while birds represent transcendence and renewal, akin to the ‘lofty’ or the celestial, they are not, in themselves, immortal, and their sacrifice may also be included in, or called for, as an element of regeneration. Birds and bees do die, and in many ways they represent the fragile nature of life, susceptible as they may be to weather or changes in atmosphere. The proverbial canary in a coal mine comes to mind–the canaries that miners would take down into the mines with them as a living gauge, because if carbon monoxide were to build up in the tunnels, the canary would succumb first, and if the bird died, the miners would still have a chance to get out before they died as well.
Yet, birds still represent a kind of gateway to immortality. Metaphors of the ascendent. Vehicles that, even though they resonate strongly with sky and freedom, remain fragile, and easily damaged or restrained.
In The Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess, whose marriage is opposed by her brothers, in contrast to the biblical sentiment, does not feel “better” (or better off) than the birds:
The birds that live
I’ th’ field on the wild benefit of nature
Live happier than we; for they may choose their mates,
And carol their sweet pleasures to the spring.
(Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, III.v.17-20)
The Duchess’s birds carol to the spring as Chaucer’s do, but even though the Duchess has married her love in secret, and has borne his children, the long term happiness that might be achieved by long term companionship with him is denied to her. Banished, imprisoned, and finally killed by her own brothers for marrying beneath her station, the Duchess nonetheless remains a strong and knowing character. When her maid, Cariola, asserts that the Duchess will survive her trials, the Duchess compares herself to a bird:
CARIOLA: Yes, but you shall live
To shake this durance off.
DUCHESS: Thou are a fool:
The robin-redbreast and the nightingale
Never live long in cages.
(Malfi, IV.ii.11-4)
The robin, symbolic of the spring is joined by the nightingale in the metaphor, the nightingale being a bird best known for its gorgeous song. (In fact, the ‘gale’ in the name ‘nightingale’ comes from an old English word, ‘galan’, meaning to sing and/or enchant.) The idea of song sorcery or enchantment, especially in terms of new or prolonged life, in the bird’s song is sustained. In the mines, when the canary’s song stops, the enchanted dream of life has come to an end. Death has arrived.
Just before she is murdered, the Duchess of Malfi converses with Bosola, a complex character whose sympathies and loyalties are not always in concert. This time, it is Bosola who returns us to the caged bird metaphor:
DUCHESS: Who am I?
BOSOLA: Thou are a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puffpaste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earthworms. Dids’t thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads, like her looking glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
(Malfi, IV.ii.125-37)
Of course, Bosola describes himself in this passage as much (or moreso) than he does the Duchess. A man feeling compelled to serve a master with whom he does not agree, Bosola describes an arc of difficult personal revelation and changing loyalty throughout the Duchess of Malfi. Of all the characters in the play, he seems to remain most aware of the “small compass” of his own prison.
Much more strongly than the Duchess does, in fact. To her executioners, who strangle her, she says her last words:
Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven up on me:
Yet stay; heaven gates are not so highly arch’d
As princes’ palaces; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees. [kneeling] Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet. [They strangle her]
(Malfi, IV.ii.233-40)
A grim ending for a vital character, who like the old year, ends as a kind of corpse festooned in ribbons and metaphorical ashes. Ropes and crowns. The queen of the old year brought down like a wren in the furze, or a lark soul in the body’s cage. One can almost taste the metaphysical parallels of the fertile Duchess, a character filled with lively passion, and her mad brothers, the cold Cardinal, and the feral Ferdinand.
But such is the way with old years. Seasons pass away and so do we. Yet somewhere in the midst of this canoe ride down the river towards the falls, these other moments assert themselves. Because as the old bird is buried, another bird will sing anew. Finally, here’s Shakespeare, with the concluding lines of the “Phoenix and the Turtle”:
Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
(Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, 62-7)
It is our oldest human truth that things do not endure, and it may be nearly as ancient a human undertaking to try to circumvent this. Finding ways to live longer, live better, make things last, to sustain those brief bright moments. Failing that, we assign these ideas to metaphysics and the attempt to endure to a kind of alchemy. Somehow, if our minds and bodies fail us, we can still polish the spirit in hopes that it may go on somewhere, somehow. About the precise workings of such mechanisms, things tend to get technical, but also more than a little vague.
However, perhaps “better” or “more” than the birds is a mistake. Ultimately, we are the same. We are the eternal phoenix, lighting fire to its own nest and perishing in the flames only to renew itself. And we are also the turtledove, mated with the phoenix for life and so in love that we perish upon that pyre with our beloved when it departs. Instead of beauty, maybe the ashes are the truth. Or, in the end, maybe the ashes are beautiful too. We are Cinderella slipping in and out of glass slippers, at once the metaphor for creation, and the very creation itself.
*Geoffrey Chaucer and Christopher Cannon, The Riverside Chaucer: Based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson and Fred Norris Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008):
Now welcome summer, with thy sun soft,
That has these winter weathers overshaken
And driven away the long night’s black!
Saint Valentine, who are full high aloft,
Thus sing small fowls for thy sake:
Now welcome summer, with thy sun soft
That has these winter weathers overshaken.
Well have they cause for to gladden often
Since each of them recovered has his make
Full blissful may they sing when they awake:
Now welcome summer, with thy sun soft
That has these winter weathers overshaken
And driven away the long night’s black.
**The Chieftans do a version of this song, and many many other individuals and groups do as well.