In Greece and Italy ravens were sacred to Apollo, the great patron of augurs, who in a pet turned this bird from white to black—and an ill turn it was, for black feathers make black birds; and in this blackness of coat lies, in my opinion, the root of their sinister repute.
The “jumbie-bird,” or “big witch,” of the West Indian region, for example, is the dead-black ani, a kind of cuckoo. Spenser speaks of “the hoarse night-raven, trompe of doleful dreer,” but his “night-raven” was not a raven at all, but the bittern.
It is only in an earlier day and under a brighter sky that we find these corvine prophets taking a more cheerful view of the future. Of course they are among the “rain-birds”:
Hark
How the curst raven with his harmless voice
Invokes the rain.
So the “foresight of a raven” became proverbial, as Waterton[[73]] illustrates by an anecdote: “Good farmer Muckdrag’s wife, while jogging on with eggs to market, knew there was mischief brewing as soon as she had heard a raven croak on the unlucky side of the road:
“That raven on the left-hand oak,
Curse on his ill-betiding croak,
Bodes me no good!”