The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed;
and his companion of the Winter’s Tale, wheeling between daffodils and violets. Keats’s line is among the most expressive that have been written on the bird:
Swallows obeying the south summer’s call.
Hood’s simile is also fine:
Summer is gone on swallow’s wings.
Gay, in The Shepherd’s Walk, has the swallow do graceful duty as a weather-prophet:
When swallows fleet soar high and sport in air,
He told us that the welkin would be clear.
Athenæus has referred as happily to the bird as any of the old Greek poets in a fragment, The Song of the Swallow:
The swallow is come, she is come to bring