The modern poet finds in the varied notes of the birds not the bodings and portents, superstitiously associated in the olden time with such cries as those of the raven and the owl, but high and solemn thoughts of death and the hereafter. Shelley wrote of his Skylark:
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
And Keats found his heart attuned by the voice of the Nightingale to the contemplation of his own dissolution:
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,