To return to birds, another dangerous one for the American poet is
the lark, and our singers generally are very shy of him. The term
has been applied very loosely in this country to both the meadow-
lark and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally understood now
that we have no genuine skylark east of the Mississippi. Hence I
am curious to know what bird Bayard Taylor refers to when he speaks
in his "Spring Pastoral" of
"Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the
bluebird."
Our so-called meadowlark is no lark at all, but a starling, and the titlark and shore lark breed and pass the summer far to the north, and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The shore lark has changed its habits in this respect of late years. It now breeds regularly on my native hills in Delaware County, New York, and may be heard in full song there from April to June or later.]
The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be accurate when they particularize. We expect them to see the fact through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the medium must not distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it, it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history. I doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this respect, except where he followed the superstition and the imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey- bee. His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer. For instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into the mouth of Banquo!—
"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does
approve,
By his loved masonry that the
heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze.
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but
this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and
procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt,
I have observed,
The air is delicate."
Nature is of course universal, but in the same sense is she local and particular,—cuts every suit to fit the wearer, gives every land an earth and sky of its own, and a flora and fauna to match. The poets and their readers delight in local touches. We have both the hare and the rabbit in America, but this line from Thomson's description of a summer morning,—
"And from the bladed field the fearful
hare limps awkward,"—
or this from Beattie,—
"Through rustling corn the hare
astonished sprang"—
would not apply with the same force in New England, because our hare is never found in the fields, but in dense, remote woods. In England both hares and rabbits abound to such an extent that in places the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the ground is undermined by their burrows, till they become a serious pest to the farmer, and are trapped in vast numbers. The same remark applies to this from Tennyson:—
"From the woods
Came voices of the well-contented
doves."