Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

AT THE RISING OF THE MOON

‘The dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.’

With these words I ended my preceding article, ‘The Coming of Dusk.’ There was not space there to speak of other, of so many of those nocturnal things which add so much to the mystery and spell of the short nights of summer: the arrowy throw of the bat, a shadowy javelin flung by a shadowy hand against a shadowy foe; the nightjar, the dusky clans of the owl, moonrise at sea or among pinewoods, the dance of the moths round certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the wheeling gnat-columns, the sudden scream of the heron or the wailing of seafowl, or the mournful noise of the moon-restless lapwing, wind in the grass, wind in the hollows of woods, wind among the high corries of the hills. These and a hundred other sounds and sights fill the summer-darkness: the hill-fox barking at the moonshine, the heather-cock in defiance of alarm, deer panting among the bracken, the splash of herring or mackerel on the moonlit breast of the bay, dogs baying a long way off and from farmstead to farmstead. One could not speak of all these things, or of the hundred more. In the meadows, in woods, on upland pastures, from beech-thicket to pine-forest, on the moors, on the hills, in the long valleys and the narrow glens, among the dunes and sea-banks and along wave-loud or wave-whispering shores, everywhere the midsummer-night is filled with sound, with fragrance, with a myriad motion. It is an exquisite unrest: a prolonged suspense, to the dayworn as silence is, yet is not silence, though the illusion is wrought out of the multitudinous silences which incalculably intersperse the continuous chant of death, the ceaseless hymn of life.

Everywhere, but far north in particular, the summer night has a loveliness to which the least sensitive must in some degree yield, creates a spell which must trouble even a dulled imagination, as moonlight and the faintest rippling breath will trouble unquickened pools into a sudden beauty. It is a matter of temperament, of mood and circumstance rather, where one would find oneself, at the rising of the moon, in the prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a pinewood shelving to a calm sea breaking in continuous foam: or among mountain solitudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening to a green darkness, till the sudden moon rests athwart one hill-shoulder like a bronze shield, and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an amber glow along all the heights: or on great moors, where one can see for leagues upon leagues, and hear nothing but the restless crying of the curlew, the screech of a heron, the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive sounds and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal solitudes. Or, again, on a white roadway passing through beech-woods: or on a gorse-set common, with the churring of a nightjar filling the dusk with the unknown surge and beat in one’s own heart: or on the skirts of thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger, with perhaps the loud breathing and trampling of cattle: or in a cottage-garden, with mignonette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or dew-fragrant with musk and southernwood: or in an old manor-garden, with white array of lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and damask and tea-rose in odorous profusion, with the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among tall thickets of sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs, or under mossed and brackened rocky wastes: or on a river, under sweeping boughs of alder and willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech. But each can dream for himself. Memory and the imagination will create dream-pictures without end.

Of all these midsummer-night creatures alluded to here or in the preceding article there may be none more allied to poetic association than the nightjar, but surely there is none more interesting than the owl itself, that true bird of the darkness. That phantom-flight, that silent passage as from the unseen to the unseen, that singular cry, whether a boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a prolonged too-whoo, how blent they are with one’s associations of the warm husht nights of summer. But is not the nightjar also of the same tribe? Fern-owl is a common name; also jar-owl, heather-owl. I have heard it called the heather-bleat, though probably that name commonly indicates the snipe. How well I remember from childhood that puzzling riddle

“The bat, the bee, the butterflee, the cuckoo and the gowk,
The heather-bleat, the mire-snipe; how many birds is that?”

I was never ‘taken-in’ by the first three, but as I had been told or had somehow discovered that the cuckoo was often companioned by the meadow-pipit I thought the latter must be the ‘gowk.’ So I guessed ‘four,’ taking the heather-bleat to be the nightjar: and it was long before I discovered that the answer was two, for only the cuckoo and the snipe were really named.

I wonder how many names the Owl has! Those alone which, like the archetypal name, derive from the old root-word ul (to howl or hoot or screech), must run to some thirty to forty at least, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘hule’ and later ‘ullet’ to the familiar ‘hoolet’ or ‘hoolit’ or ‘howlet,’ or, again, the still current south English ‘ullud,’ ‘ullot,’ or ‘ullyet.’ We have many Gaelic names also, as (for the snowy or barn owl) ‘cailleach-bhan,’ the white auld wife, or ‘cailleach-oidhche,’ the night-witch; or (for the tawny owl) ‘bodach-oidhche,’ the night-bogle; or (for the screech-owl) the onomatopœic ‘corra-sgriachaig,’ or several terms meaning ‘long-eared’ or ‘horned’; and three or four designations, either onomatopœic, as perhaps ‘ulacan’ (though both in sound and meaning it is the same as the southland ‘hooligan’), or adaptations of the Teutonic root-word, as ‘Olcadan’ or ‘ullaid.’ The name ‘yogle’ may be heard along the Lothian, Yorkshire, and East Anglian coast-lands, and is doubtless a ‘lift’ from the Danish ‘Katyugle’ or ‘Katogle’: indeed ‘catyogle,’ ‘catogle,’ and ‘catyool’ (with the quaint by-throw ‘cherubim’) occur in several parts of England. In Clydesdale I have often heard the horned owl called the ‘luggie’ (long-ears). Some names with probably only local meaning I do not understand, as for example, the ‘Wite’ (not the adjective, but possibly the old word for churchyard and even church); the ‘padge’ or ‘pudge’ of Leicestershire; the Jack-baker, billy-wix, and the eastland ‘will-a-wix.’ (Is this the cry of the young owl awaiting food?) The ‘jilly,’ which I heard once at or near Windermere, is probably a corruption of the Gaelic ‘gheal’ (white), as many north-Celtic names survive in that region. Our commonest name in the Highlands is ‘comhachag’ (co-achak) probably as onomatopœic a term as ‘cuach’ or ‘cuthag’ (coo-ak) for the cuckoo, or ‘fitheach’ (fee-ak) for the raven. It is said that the longest poem on the Owl in any language is in Gaelic. The Oran na Comhachaig or Song of the Owl was composed by an aged Highland bard named Donald Finlay somewhere about three hundred years ago—about 1590 says one local account, though I do not know on what authority: a rinn Domhnull Mac Fhionnlaidh nan Dan, sealgair ’us bard ainmeil Abrach, mu thiomchioll 1590 (done by Donald Finlay of the Songs, the celebrated Lochaber huntsman and poet, in or about 1590). I have again and again heard the second of its sixty-seven—in another version seventy—quatrains quoted in support of the theory that an owl lives at least a hundred years; some are credited with far greater age:

“’S co-aoise mise do’n daraig,
Bha na fhaillain ann sa choinnich,
’S ioma linn a chuir mi romham,
’S gur mi comhachag bhochd na sroine.”

(I am old as the oak ... lit. ‘the ancientness upon me is that of the oak’ ... whose mossy roots spread wide: many a race have I seen come and go: and still I am the lonely owl of Srona.)

In every country the owl is a bird of mourning. It is also the bird of night pre-eminently (what a pity the old-English owl-light as a variant for twilight has become obsolete); the bird of moonlight or the Moon; the bird of Silence, of Ruin, of the Grave, of Death. In some places a dead owl is still transfixed to the outside of a door, to avert lightning. Perhaps it is for the same reason that a caged owl is held to be a dangerous co-inmate of a house during a thunderstorm. A thousand legends have woven this sombre raiment of associations, though the owl’s only distinction from other birds of prey is that it can see in the dark and is nocturnal in habit. It loves solitary places, because there undisturbed, but is not all darkness solitary? In Syria the peasant calls the owl ‘the mother of ruins,’ which is poetically apt, as is the German ‘the sorrowing mother,’ but our northern ‘night-witch’ and the grim Breton ‘soul-harrier’ (surely a survival of the Greek idea of the owl as a soul-guide) are unjust to an inoffensive bird whose concern is not with souls and graves and ruins but with rats and mice. A German naturalist has even, I remember, written to prove that the owl is pre-eminently a bird of love, of single-hearted devotion, ‘the dove of the night’: and there is a Danish poem about ‘the Silver-Spinner’ weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk wherein to entangle and bring close the hearts of lovers. Old Donald Finlay of the Songs must have had some such idea in his mind when in his Song of the Owl he makes the bird say in effect, ‘I may be old and forlorn, but am not to be blamed for that: neither of rapine nor of lies have I ever been guilty: is there a grave anywhere that I have ever violated? and to the mate of my choice have I ever been faithless?’

This name of the Silver-Spinner, however, though often in Germany, Scandinavia, and our own country associated with the poetic legend alluded to, is really a romantic derivative from the ancient connection of the small owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who presided over spinning as one of her foremost womanly attributes. ‘The Woman’s Bird,’ as the small owl is sometimes called, deserves the name, for in almost every language ancient and modern, except English and Finnish, its name is feminine. The sacred bird of Athens or the Lesbian Nyctimenê is still ‘the woman’s bird’ among the Australian aborigines: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Icelandic, Vendish, German, French, Hungarian, all afford the same sex-indication. The great white owl, however, is the bird of heroes, wanderers, the night-foray, war, lightning, desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I know not how demonstrated or traced, that the name Ulysses is but the variant of the Etruscan Ulixé or Sikulian Oulixes, words supposed to indicate the ululation of the owl’s cry (in Italy I have heard the name of the sweet and plaintive little aziola or aziolo derived from the same source): and that it was given to the Homeric hero because he was the first to adventure sea-voyaging on moonlit nights, because he too was a night-wanderer. But unless Ulixé or Oulixes be older than the Greek name, what of Odysseus? In like fashion some speculative philologists derive ‘Pallas’ from the Turanian owl-name Pöllö.

I heard a singular fragment of owl-folklore once on the island of Arran. The narrator said the white owl had seven distinct hoots, but all I need recall here is that the seventh was when the ‘Reul Fheasgair’ ceased to be the Evening Star and became the ‘Reul na Maidne,’ the Day-Star. Was this a memory of some myth associating the owl with the otherworld (or darkness or moontide or Night) disclosed every eve at the opening of the Gates of Dusk?... the time of sleep and dreams, of strange nocturnal life, of silence and mystery, between the soft white fire of the Vesper Star, the star of Labour as the Bretons call it, meaning that with its advent the long day’s labour ceases, and its cold serenity when it has climbed the ramparts of the midsummer night, and, as Phosphoros, the Day-Star, Son of the Morning, flashes like a lance-point against the milky onflood of the dawn?

THE GARDENS OF THE SEA
(A MIDSUMMER NOON’S DREAM)

I recall a singular legend, where heard, where read, I do not remember, nor even am I sure of what race the offspring, of what land the denizen. It was to the effect that, in the ancient days of the world, flowers had voices, had song to them as the saying is: and that there were kingdoms among these populations of beauty, and that in the course of ages (would they be flower-æons, and so of a measure in time different from our longer or shorter periods?) satraps revolted against the dominion of the Rose, and tropical princes led new hosts, and scarlet forest-queens filled the jungle and the savannah with their chants of victory. And the end was a conflict so great that even the isles of the sea were shaken by it, and the pale green moss of polar rocks whispered of the great world-war of the peoples of Flowry. At last, after the shadow-flitting passage of an æon, the gods were roused from their calm, and, looking down into the shaken mirror of the world, beheld all their dreams and visions and desires no longer children of loveliness and breaths of song. In these æons while they had slept in peace the Empire of Flowry had come to a dissolution: race fought with race, tribe with tribe, clan with clan. Among all the nations there was a madness for supremacy, so that the weed in the grass and the flame-crowned spire of the aloe were at one in a fierce discontent and a blind lust of dominion. Thereupon the gods pondered among themselves. Kronos, who had been the last to wake and was already drowsy with old immemorial returning slumber, murmured: ‘A divine moment, O ye Brotherhood of Eternity, is a long time wherein to be disturbed by the mortal reflection of our dreams and the passions and emotions of our enchanted hearts.’

And as all the calm-eyed Immortals agreed, Kronos sighed out the mandate of silence, and turning his face to Eternity was again among the august dreams of the Everlasting Ones.

In that long moment—for there in the other world it was but a brief leaning on their elbows of the drowsy gods while the fans of Immortal Sleep for a second stayed the vast waves of Peace—the divine messengers, or were they the listening powers and dominions of the earth, fulfilled destiny. From every flower-nation, from every people by far waters, from every tribe in dim woods and the wilderness, from every clan habiting the most far hills beyond the ever-receding pale blue horizons, song was taken as stars are pluckt away from the Night by the grey fingers of the Dawn. The Rose breathed no more a flusht magic of sound; the Lily no more exhaled a foamwhite cadence. Silence was come upon the wild chant of orchids in old, forgotten woods; stillness upon the tinkling cymbals of the little hands of the dim, myriad, incalculable host of blossom; a hush upon the songs of meadow-flowers; a spell upon the singing of honeysuckles in the white dews at the rising of the moon. Everywhere, from all the green tribes, from all the glowing nations of Flowry, from each and every of the wandering folk of the Reed, the Moss, and the Lichen, from all the Clans of the Grass, the added loveliness of song was taken. Silence fell upon one and all: a strange and awful stillness came upon the woods and valleys. It was then that the God of Youth, wandering through the hushed world, took the last song of a single rose that in a secret place had not yet heard the common doom, and with his breath gave it a body, and a pulse to its heart, and fashioned for it a feather-covering made of down of the bog-cotton and the soft undersides of alder-leaf and olive. Then, from a single blade of grass that still whispered in a twilight hollow, he made a like marvel, to be a mate to the first, and sent out both into the green world, to carry song to the woods and the valleys, the hills and the wildernesses, the furthest shores, the furthest isles. Thus was the nightingale created, the first bird, the herald of all the small clans of the bushes that have kept wild-song in the world, and are our delight.

But in the hearts of certain of the green tribes a sullen anger endured. So the mysterious Hand which had taken song and cadence away punished these sullen ones. From some, fragrance also was taken. There were orchid-queens of forest-loveliness from whom all fragrance suddenly passed like smoke: there were white delicate phantoms among the grasses, from whom sweet odour was lifted as summer dew: there were nomads of the hillways and gypsies of the plain to whom were given the rankness of the waste, the smell of things evil, of corruption, of the grave. But to some, beautiful rebels of the peoples of the Reed, the Grass, and the Fern, the doom went out that henceforth their place should be in the waters ... the running waters of streams and rivers, the quiet waters of pools and lakes, the troubled waters of the seas along the coasts of the world, the ocean depths.

And that is how amid the salt bite of the homeless wave there grew the Gardens of the Sea. That is how it came about that the weed trailed in running waters, and the sea-moss swayed in brackish estuaries, and the wrack clung or swam in tangles of olive-brown and green and soft and dusky reds.

What a long preamble to the story of how the Seaweeds were once sweet-smelling blooms of the shores and valleys! Of how the flowers of meadow and woodland, of the sun-swept plain and the shadowy hill, had once song as well as sweet odours: how, of these, many lost not only fragrance but innocent beauty: and how out of a rose and a blade of grass and a breath of the wind the first birds were made, the souls of the green earth, winged, and voiced.

To-day I sit amongst deep, shelving rocks by the shore, in a desolate place where basaltic cliffs shut away the familiar world, and where, in front, the otherworld of the sea reaches beyond sight to follow the lifted wave against the grey skyline, or is it the grey lip of the fallen horizon? Looking down I can perceive the olive-brown and green seaweed swaying in the slow movement of the tide. Like drifted hair, the long thin filaments of the Mermaid’s Locks (Chorda Filum) sinuously twist, intertwine, involve, and unfold. It is as though a seawoman rose and fell, idly swam or idly swung this way and that, asleep on the tide: nothing visible of her wave-grey body but only her long fatal hair, that so many a swimmer has had cause to dread, from whose embrace so many a swimmer has never risen. In the rock-set pools the flesh-hued fans of the dulse indolently stir. Wave-undulated over them are fronds of a lovely green weed, delicate, transparent: above these, two phantom fish, rock-cod or saithe, float motionless.

Idly watching, idly dreaming thus, I recall part of a forgotten poem about the woods of the sea, and the finned silent creatures that are its birds: and how there are stags and wolves in these depths, long hounds of the sea, mermen and merwomen and seal-folk. Others, too, for whom we have no name, we being wave-blind and so unable to discern these comers and goers of the shadow. Also, how old sea-divinities lie there asleep, and perilous phantoms come out of sunken ships and ancient weed-grown towns; and how there roams abroad, alike in the flowing wave and along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls, an incalculable Terror that may be manifold, the cold implacable demons of the deep, or may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom men have called Poseidon and Mananan and by many names.

What a mysterious world this Tir-fo-Tuinn, this Land-Under-Wave. How little we know of it, for all that wise men have told us concerning the travelling tides, of currents as mysteriously steadfast in their comings and goings as the comets that from age to age loom briefly upon the stellar roads: how little, though they have put learned designations to a thousand weeds, and given names to ten thousand creatures to whom the whole world of man and all his hopes and dreams are less than a phantom, less than foam. The Gaelic poet who said that the man who goes to Tir-fo-Tuinn goes into another world, where the human soul is sand, and God is but the unloosened salt, tells us as much as the scientist who probes the ocean-mud and reveals dim crustacean life where one had believed to be only a lifeless dark. Above the weed-held palaces of Atlantis, over the soundless bells of Ys, above where Lyonesse is gathered in a foamless oblivion, the plummet may sink and lift a few broken shells, the drag-net may bring to the surface an unknown sea-snail or such a microscopic green Alga as that Halosphoera viridis which science has discovered in the great depths beyond the reach of sunlight: but who can tell, perchance how few who care to know, what Love was, long ago, when there were poets in Lyonesse: what worship was served by white-robed priests among the sunken fanes of Ys: what dreams withstayed and what passions beset the noble and the ignoble in drowned Atlantis, what empires rose and fell there, what gods were lauded and dethroned, and for how long Destiny was patient.

Even in the little pools that lie shoreward of the Gardens of the Sea what beauty there is, what obscure life, what fascinating ‘other-world’ association. This piece of kelp is at once Fucus vesiculosus and the long fingers of the Cailliach-Mhara, the Sea-Witch. This great smooth frond is ... I do not know, or forget: but it is the kale of Manan, in sea-groves of which that Shepherd pastures his droves of uncouth sea-swine. This green tracery has a Greek or Latin name, but in legend it is called the Mermaid’s Lace. This little flame-like crest of undulating wrack has a designation longer than itself, but in tales of faerie we know it to be that of which the caps of the pool-elves are fashioned.

In the Isles seaweed has many local names, but is always mainly divided into Yellow Tails, Dark Tails, and Red Tails (Feamainn bhuidhe, feamainn dubh, and feamainn dearg). The first comprise all the yellowish, light-brown, and olive-brown seaware; the second all the dark-green, and also all green wrack; the third, the red. The common seaware or kelp or tang (Fucus vesiculosus) is generally called propach, or other variant signifying tangled: and the bladder-wrack, feamainn bholgainn or builgeach, ‘baggy-tails.’ I have at times collected many local names of these weeds, and not a few superstitions and legends. Naturally, the most poetic of these are connected with the Chorda filum or Dead Man’s Hair, which has a score of popular names, from ‘corpsy-ropes’ to the occasional Gaelic gillemu lunn, which may be rendered ‘the wave’s gillie’ or ‘servant of the wave’: with the drifted gulf-weed, whose sea-grapes are called uibhean sìthein, fairy eggs, and are eagerly sought for: and with the duileasg, or dulse. Even to this day, in remote parts, an ancient seaweed-rite survives in the propitiatory offerings (now but a pastime of island children) to the Hebridean sea-god Shony at Samhein (Hallowmass). This Shony, whose favours were won by a cup of ale thrown into the sea in the dark of the night, is none other than Poseidon, Neptune, Manan; for he is the Scandinavian sea-god Sjoni, viking-brought from Lochlin in the far-off days when the Summer-sailors raided and laid waste the Gaelic Isles.

It is singular how rarely seaweed has entered into the nomenclature and symbology of peoples, how seldom it is mentioned in ancient literature. Among our Gaelic clans there is only one (the M’Neil) which has seaware as a badge. Greek art has left us a few seaweed-filleted heads of Gorgons, and to sea-wrack the Latin poets have once or twice made but passing and contemptuous allusion. In the Bible (‘whaur ye’ll find everything frae a bat to a unicorn,’ as an old man said to me once) there is one mention of it only, in Jonah’s words: ‘The depths closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’