Interleaves
On the Wing
Our “little brothers of the air,” have you named them all without a gun, as Emerson asks in “Forbearance”? Shy, glancing eyes peer from nests half-hidden in leaves; the forest is vocal with melody, the air is tremulous with the whirr of tiny wings.
Poet-singers have written undying lines about their brother minstrels of the wood, and the “blithe lark,” especially, has a proud place in poetry, apostrophized as he is by Shakespeare, Shelley, Frederick Tennyson, Wordsworth, and The Ettrick Shepherd.
As the skylark’s note dies away we hear the saucy chatter of Cranch’s Bobolink, the twitter of Keats’s Goldfinches, the mournful cry of Celia Thaxter’s Sandpiper, and the revolving wheel of Emily Dickinson’s Humming-bird, with its resonance of emerald, its rush of cochineal. The feathered warblers, Robin, Bluebird, Swallow, speed their southern flight, but there are other songs of summer, voices of sweet and tiny cousins, heard at the lazy noontide; chirpings, rustlings of the green little vaulters in the sunny grass. And if the wee grasshoppers and those warm little housekeepers the crickets, have served as themes for Keats and Leigh Hunt, so has the humble bee provoked his tribute from the poets:
“His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast a single onyx
With chrysophrase inlaid.”
Come within earshot of his drowsy hum, his breezy bass,—Father Tabb’s publican bee,
“Collecting the tax
On honey and wax,”
or Emerson’s yellow-breeched philosopher,
“Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet.”