Bird Imagery I: Song
Throughout the poetry of Eliot references to birds occupy strategic positions. Here we shall consider those bird references which form a part of the auditory imagery of the poems, leaving the discussion of wings / flight references and its distinct symbolism for the subsequent section. Given the limitation of auditory imagery, the bird references (and some related figures) are still quite numerous and suggestive. The pattern of references are illustrative of the developing poetic values in the poetry.
"Preludes" III of the Prufrock volume (1917) contains the cluster sparrows/ gutters / vision / street which ironically juxtaposes urban and cosmic realities:
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands,
(p. 13, ll. 31-34).
Each line is organized anti-climactically. The punctuation throughout is ironic: "all the world" concludes with "came back" (regression to urban reality), "light" (mode of spiritual comprehension, cf. "vision") is reduced to the stealthy, animal-like movement of "creeping between shutters" and the "vision" (suggestive of mystical or prophetic insight, a revelation of the supernatural, or a sight of unusual beauty, etc.) is finally only "of the street" which even the "street" (the commonality) "hardly understands." Central to this pattern is the reference to the sound of "sparrows in the gutters." The sparrow is a common emblem of returning spring, regeneration. It is with this signification that eliot uses the sparrow in "Landscapes V: Cape Ann":
O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow
Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow
At dawn and dusk.
(p. 95, ll. 1-3)
The scene here is far from the sordid landscape of the "Preludes." Unlike the degenerative movement from "dawn to dusk" in the "Preludes," wherein the "sparrows" pattern with "gutters" (figurative of the lowest level of urban civilization), in "Cape Ann" the immediate verbal context of the "sparrow" is "quickness." The repetition of "quick" stresses its multiple denotation as imperative (partly elliptical for `be quick') and substantive for that characterized by life, feeling, later used, in a similar manner though in a more expansive context, in "Burnt Norton":
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner .
(p. 117, ll. 19-22)
The bird reference in "burnt Norton" is to a participant in a rich pastoralism of vitality. Here the bird is a harbinger of the intuitable still point, the ultimate reality. In contrast with the prophetic vision of "burnt Norton" is "Preludes's" "vision of the street," the view of "sparrows in the gutters." In this context the sparrows are finally, and ironically, symbolic of the entire process of physical and spiritual dissolution which is a recurrent motif of the early poetry.
Between the poles of the "Preludes" and "Burnt Norton" there is an entire range of bird references clustering with imagery of drought and water, (a symbolic pattern we considered in Chapter Two, "The Dry Season," above). For example, in "The Waste Land," section V:
But the sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water.
(p. 48, ll. 56-59)
Eliot's note on this is as follows:
This is Turdus aonalschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) `it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats. . . . Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.' Its `water-dripping song' is justly celebrated.
(p. 54, note on line 357)
In contrast to Eliot's own naturalist's interpretation is the exegesis of Grover Smith: ". . . the quester longs for even the illusion of dripping water, for the voice of the hermit-thrush which would symbolize the Hermit of the Grail legend and, thus, spiritual redemption. He longs for the pine trees, sacred to Attis, the hanged god. Now he is climbing up into the mountains, a place of thunder but no rain." 1 The symbolic value of the "hermit thrush's" "water dripping song" is ironic. The function of the designation "hermit" goes beyond that which the technical virtuosity of Eliot's note conceals as much as it conveys, as the word suggests not only the Hermit of the Grail legend, but, more generally, signifies a moral need (spiritual drought) and a mode of salvation ("the freeing of the waters"). The irony of the "water dripping song" of the "hermit thrush" is increased as we note that "hermit" is from the Greek eremos: desert, where "there is no water." The entire image cluster of drought and water suggest the symbolic value of, for example, Psalm 63: "O God. . . I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is."
A similar pattern of drought and bird's song forms a significant part of the psychic landscape of "Ash Wednesday." In a context of ritual death and rebirth, a phoenix-like emergence of new life from old is imagistically presented, as bird-like "chirping:"
And God said
Shall these bones live?. . .
. . . And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
(p. 61, ll. 45-8).
The "chirping" is later associated with that of the grasshopper:
. . . And the bones san chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper. . .
(p. 62, ll. 64-5).
Here recalled is Ecclesiastes 12:5: ". . . the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home." The scene is apocalyptic. The landscape is a surrealist vision of the ultimate rite of passage:
. . . the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert.
(pp. 62-3, ll. 89-93)
The desert in which the bones sing their song of dissolution is unlike the dry land in which the hermit-thrush sings its "water-dripping song." While the paradox remains, the irony is removed. The song of the "scattered bones" is joyous, for ultimate "quiet" of restoration is heralded:
. . . the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
(p. 64, ll. 145-7).
The quest for redemption is nearing its actualization. The bird and fountain prefigure salvation, are the tokens of eternal renewal. 2 The "blessing of sand" is that it leads to the promise of Isaiah 58:11: "And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: And thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not."
In "Marina" (1930) the song of the "woodthrush singing through the fog" (P. 72, l. 3) fits into a similar pattern of death and resurrection as that which organizes "Ash Wednesday." In "Marina" the context of the bird's song is that of a spiritual journey symbolically presented as a sea voyage in a ship of "broken images" ("Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat," l. 22) through a night filled with the "scent of pine" (l. 3) and obscured by fog. The psychic landscape of "Marina" is far removed from the drought-torn land of the hermit-thrush singing through the pines, which the wood-thrush amidst the scent of pines recalls. The song of the woodthrush, rather than being the vehicle for the illusion of water, functions positively as a guide "calling through the fog" (l. 34). The scene in "Marina" is of "grace dissolved in place" (l. 16), of not only the scent but the "breath of pine" (l. 15) emphasizing the life-giving or spiritual value of the pine. (As Grover Smith has noted, "Pine" is sacred to Attis and hence is associated with the mythology of ritual sacrifice and redemption, death and resurrection. 3) Medially, even the bird "dissolves in place" as the woodsong fog" replaces the initial auditory image of the "woodthrush singing through the fog." But the woodthrush, like the lost daughter of Pericles, reemerges, at the conclusion of the poem, and thus repeats the pattern of loss and recovery which structures the poem. No longer simply singing, the bird finally calls, acts as a beacon through the fog, so that the less clear becomes "clearer" (l. 17), the distant "nearer" (l. 19), leading ultimately to the hope, of renewed life ("new ships," l. 32), which "Marina" envisions.
The thrush functions significantly in another of Eliot's poems relating to the theme of loss and recovery: "Burnt Norton." Here the bird signals a landscape which is neither desert nor sea. Rather, it is the rose-garden which, for now, exists only as a "perpetual possibility" (p. 117, l. 8) caught between memory (l. 11) and desire that forms the context of the bird:
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner.
(ll. 19-22)
As we noted earlier, the bird here participates in a pastoralism impossible in "The Waste Land." The scene is far removed from the vision of the street, with its sparrows in the gutters, images of the earlier poetry. The bird's "echoing" call of "quick. . . find them, find them." 4 explicitly relates to the recovery motif, central to the spiritual quest which forms the dominant mythology of so many of Eliot's poems. So too the garden is a complex symbol of a psychic and mythic landscape recurring strategically in the major poems. But the ambivalence of the speaker towards bird and garden is developed with the identification of the bird as thrush:
Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
(pp. 117-8, ll. 22-4)
The thrush is now neither the hermit-thrush of "The Waste Land" nor the woodthrush of "Marina," although in its "deception" it is like the illusion-evoking thrush of "The Waste Land" and in its function as spiritual guide it recalls the woodthrush of "Marina." Eliot uses the bird in each case as a psychic correlative of changing valuation in the three evocative contexts. In "Burnt Norton" the journey to which the bird is "guide" is one of retrogression, a movement back into the psychic and spiritual past "into our first world:" the Eden garden or Paradiso of innocence, which, while it is idyllic and much desired is also an illusion (a "deception") in its denial of experience. (Cf. "East Coker," p. 125, l. 76: "Had they deceived us / Or deceived themselves, the quiet voiced elders.") "Our first world," preeminently beautiful, is, finally, a "lost garden," prefigured in the imagery of death: The rose-garden, which has a "door never opened," becomes transposed into "dust on a bowl of rose leaves," as the garden is entombed in Fall, has but "dead leaves, / In the autumn heat," (II. 26-7). It is this "fallen realm" which is the setting of the next cry of the bird:
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
(ll. 28-43)
The coming to experience is suggested with a comprehension which flattens time. Simultaneously invoked is the guilt of the Fall and its consequences throughout the generations ("for the leaves were full of children") and in the crucifixion of Christ ("the unseen eyebeam crossed"). This consciousness devoid of "deception" brings with it the theme of departure: "Go, said the bird" (l. 42), recalling the repeated use of "Let us go" throughout the poetry. With incantatory insistence the bird proclaims the necessity for "turning" in response to revelation:
go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
(ll. 44-5)
The "heart of light" (l. 39) is unbearable to all but saints; human kind must live in deception of time, passage, not the fully realized moment: "Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness. / To be conscious is not to be in time," (ll. 85-7) yet "only through time time is conquered (p. 120, l. 92).
Notes
1. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, (Chicago, 1965), p. 93.
2. See the discussion of "Ash Wednesday," Chapter Three, below.
3. J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans., Jack Sage (New York, 1961), p. 244.
4. Cf. language of birds as a prominent folk motif, often as "a medium of warning, advice, prophecy, or aid to those human beings endowed with the gift of understanding them . . . . The bird language motif (B215.1) is common in Celtic and in European folktale from Iceland to Arabia, and is equally frequent in Slavic, Hindu, and Hebrew story. . . A typical use is Grimm's `The White Snake' #17, Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, ed., Maria Leach (New York, 1950), p. 141.
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