Of Bobolinks, Orioles and Hummingbirds
Of Bobolinks, Orioles and Hummingbirds
In Audobon’s Birds of America, the Baltimore Orioles have built their pendulous nest, woven out of moss, in the branches of a flowering Tulip Tree. A female claws the side of the nest, interacting with a male perching on a branch beneath her. Above them, another male displays the full glory of his plumage, cavorting in front of his mate. His head, nape and back are velvety black, his wings are pied, and the colour on the rest of his body is every shade from a pale yellow to the colour of egg yolk – yolk, that is, from a hen which has been permitted to scavenge in the garden for a few days: a rich, honeyed amber. He is depicted in the act of dropping from one branch to another, his wings partially spread. To complement this glorious image, Audobon asks us to imagine a traveller in the wilderness who “might feel pleased with any sound, even the howl of the wolf, or the still more dismal bellow of the alligator,” but who, on hearing “thousands of musical voices” from a tree full of Orioles, is led “first to the contemplation of the wonders of nature, and then to that of the Great Creator himself.”
Then, there is his illustration of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird – or ten of them to be precise – males and females, perching with tiny feet, drinking nectar, airborne, with their beaks down trumpet-flowers, twisting their necks to touch bills. He has taken care to capture some of the males with the gemstone-bright iridescence at their throats, and he asks, “where is the person… who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator?”
Finally, we should consider his illustration and discussion of the Bobolink. He tells us that they are called Bobolinks, an onomatopoeic name imitating their voices, in the State of New York, but are elsewhere known as Meadow-birds, Reed-birds and Rice Buntings. He calls them Rice Birds. In his illustration, the Bobolinks sit in branches of the maple tree. It is autumn, because claret-coloured key-shaped seeds dangle from the twigs. The twig on which the female sits has snapped under her weight, and she is staring fixedly at something which has attracted her attention far beneath her. The male is clambering imperiously up a branch above her, his throat extended in the act of calling, showing no apparent interest in the female. His wings are held low, his tail splayed, and it is hard to resist describing his expression as haughty or even arrogant. Unusually for a picture by Audobon, the colours do not do justice to the living bird. Audobon admits that “their song… is extremely interesting, and emitted with a volubility bordering on the burlesque”. He does not go so far, however, as to suggest that the song and spectacle must inevitably lead every observer to rapt contemplation of the glory of the Creator.
Instead, he turns his discussion to the damage Bobolinks do to crops, and to the “profitability” of shooting them in large numbers. “At the discharge of a gun, a flock sufficient to cover several acres rises en masse, and performing various evolutions, densely packed, and resembling a sultry cloud, passes over and near the sportsman, when he lets fly, and finds occupation for some time in picking up the dozens which he has brought down at a single shot. One would think that every gun in the country has been put in requisition. Millions of these birds are destroyed, and yet millions remain… Their flesh is extremely tender and juicy.”
*
It might have come as a surprise, therefore, to any of Emily Dickinson’s friends who happened to read what would become one of her most famous poems, that Bobolinks were not excluded from her private garden liturgy, but were considered by her to be foremost amongst avian worshippers of the divine.
“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -
I keep it, staying at Home -
With a Bobolink for a Chorister -
And an Orchard, for a Dome -”
With a Bobolink for a chorister, Dickinson’s garden sacraments would have been by turns joyful, melodious and raucous. The song of the Bobolink is an extraordinary torrent of extemporised sparrow-like chirps, flinty chips, resonant, metallic squawks with a deeper, blackbirdish undertone, chinking chortles and piercing whistles. A Bobolink can sound by turns delighted, comically bossy and transported with hilarity. There is nothing Puritanical in a Bobolink’s worship.
“Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -
I, just wear my Wings -
And instead of ringing the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton - sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman -
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -
I’m going, all along.”
We may tend to think of a Sexton primarily as a gravedigger, but in fact, the word shares its root with “Sacristan”, the facilitator of worship in a church, and literally, “the custodian of sacred objects”. Sextons cut lawns, order supplies, wear a cassock and surplice not dissimilar in colour and form to a male Bobolink’s plumage, and most importantly from Dickinson’s point of view, they make sure that the church is lit, decorated and dusted for the principal events of the liturgical calendar. Bobolinks set the seasonal calendar in Dickinson’s Amherst, beginning to arrive in late March or early April, breeding throughout the central and eastern portion of the North American continent, and leaving for central South America – northern Argentina and southern Brazil - between late July and late September. They are birds with predictable migratory habits, following the same route as their ancestors north through the Greater Antilles, on up the Florida peninsula to their breeding grounds and back again every year. Their services in Dickinson’s orchard were timed to coincide with the flowering of the trees and the maturation of their fruit.
The poem is, of course, a refusal to go to the local church built by Homo sapiens, in preference for the domed grandeur of a garden shimmering not with stained glass, but with birdsong and sunlight. Whilst the sight of a flock of Bobolinks made Dickinson’s contemporaries reach for their guns, it made her feel as though she, too, was wearing their wings. We will return to the Bobolink shortly - Dickinson is by no means finished with delighting in him – but first, we should see what she has to say about the birds Audobon implicitly prefers.
*
Dickinson’s poem inspired by the Baltimore Oriole’s song presents the perception of its beauty as a subjective and emotional decision on the part of human beings, just as our response to a poem itself is dependent on our own personalities. Once again, the bird gives her a reason to distance herself from the normal attitudes of the churchgoing public:
“To hear an Oriole sing
May be a common thing -
Or only a divine.”
Few of her contemporaries would have preferred a “common thing” to something they had identified as “divine”, but Dickinson was a lover of common things, whether Bobolinks or butterflies. The Baltimore Oriole’s song is purer, or more obviously melodic, than a Bobolink’s, but considerably less inventive or unpredictable. Perhaps it is “only” expressive of a rather solemn form of natural worship.
“It is not of the Bird
Who sings the same, unheard,
As unto Crowd -
The Fashion of the Ear
Attireth that it hear
In Dun, or fair
So whether it be Rune -
Or whether it be none
Is of within.
The “Tune is in the Tree -”
The Skeptic - showeth me -
“No Sir! In Thee!” ”
Assuming that R.W. Franklin is correct in the chronological arrangement of the poems, we can go some way toward reconstructing Dickinson’s train of thought in arriving at this one. Five poems earlier, she was writing about a bird singing at a funeral, who “trilled, and quivered, and shook his throat/ Till all the churchyard rang.” In this poem, she concludes that the bird sang “To say good bye to men”, but in the next, when birds are singing in chorus “The Morning after Wo”, she reaches the opposite conclusion: “Nature did not Care - / And piled her Blossoms on - / The further to parade a Joy / Her Victim stared opon –”. The birds’ voices are “Like Hammers”, and “they fell / Like Litanies of Lead -” The birds are still singing in the language of worship, but their notes are on the “Crucifixal Clef”, and in “some key of Calvary”.
Perhaps the funeral was that of Frazar Stearns, whose body was brought back to Amherst from the battlefield of New Bern in the spring of 1862, just when the Orioles would have been singing. The birds, of course, do not care. They would sing “the same, unheard”, and it is merely the emotional state of the human listener that determines whether the song is “common” or “divine”, “Dun” or “fair”, “Rune” or “none”.
*
Seventeen years later, Dickinson returned to the subject of the Oriole, but her focus had shifted to its plumage, its eating habits, and its migratory status.
“One of the ones that Midas touched
Who failed to touch us all
Was that confiding Prodigal
The reeling Oriole -
So drunk he disavows it
With badinage divine -
So dazzling we mistake him
For an alighting Mine -”
The golden feathers of the Oriole are a likely subject for a poet, and the reference to Midas a conventional one, but Dickinson mixes a Classical comparison with a Biblical one to suggest a closer natural observation. The bird is a “Prodigal”, “reeling” and “drunk”. During the last part of their stay in the eastern states, Orioles gorge themselves on orchard fruits. They prefer the darker-coloured, mature berries, grapes and cherries, and are particularly fond of mulberries, all of which become mildly alcoholic in the warmth of late summer – and mulberries can be psychoactive. The Oriole likes to stick its closed beak into the larger, softer fruits, open it wide to tweezer a gash in the skin, and then mop up the bleeding juice with its tongue. Perhaps this is why Dickinson reaches for that delicious oxymoron, “badinage divine”. “Badinage” is sometimes defined as witty or humorous conversation, but it also connotes the opposite of benediction, bad language and usury. The lines that follow are perhaps a little comically unfair on the Oriole, who is also an avid predator of the forest tent caterpillar moth, widely regarded as a pest species which strips deciduous trees of their leaves. Dickinson portrays him as greedily absconding with the fruits and fragrances of summer as he prepares to migrate south:
“A Pleader - a Dissembler -
An Epicure - a Thief -
Becomes an Oratorio -
An Ecstasy in chief -
The Jesuit of Orchards
He cheats as he enchants
Of an entire Attar
For his decamping wants –”
He is becoming a metaphor, of course, for the departure of summer itself, and simultaneously, Dickinson’s assonances make reference to his virtuoso singing, its magical qualities, and his reputation for thievery: “cheats… enchants”. She cheekily plays on the prejudices of her Puritan contemporaries, who saw Jesuits as dangerous, gluttonous deceivers, and also, perhaps, on a certain xenophobia that held the exotic in suspicion and astronomical phenomena in superstitious awe:
“The splendor of a Burmah
The Meteor of Birds,
Departing like a Pageant
Of Ballads and of Bards –”
Dickinson might be referring to Burma (Myanmar) itself, a byword in her time for colourful exoticism, but there is another, enticing possibility. Given her fascination with ocean voyages and shipwrecks, she may be comparing the bird to the passenger liner Burmah, which disappeared en-route from England to New Zealand in 1859-1860, probably sunk by an iceberg – sunk when, like the Oriole, it was flitting south. And it is time for Dickinson’s poem, too, to turn and flit from one mythological reference to another:
“I never thought that Jason sought
For any Golden Fleece
But then I am a rural Man
With thoughts that make for Peace –
And if there was a Jason,
Tradition bear with me
Behold his lost Aggrandizement
Opon the Apple Tree –”
Finally, we have Dickinson’s affirmation of the bird. The story of the Prodigal Son, the myths of Midas and of the Argonauts, are not to be believed, but the stunning, vivid reality of a Baltimore Oriole, perched in one’s own orchard in the last moments before taking flight for thousands of miles, perhaps makes it worth bearing the wanton pillage of those last fruits after all. Its riches are beyond price.
*
And the very next poem she wrote turns to the subject of Audobon’s favourite – that fourth migratory bird that shared her garden with the Robin, the Bobolink and the Oriole – a bird still more exotic, though less of a danger to the orchard:
“A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel -
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal -
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head -
The Mail from Tunis - probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride -”
The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is the only one of the 338 known species of the family Trochilidae to visit the eastern portion of the United States, migrating to Mexico for the winter, negotiating the whole of the Gulf of Mexico on a single top-up of nectar and insects, after assiduously building up a layer of subcutaneous fat by feeding from blossoms throughout the summer months. The feathers on its back do indeed resonate with an emerald colour, not because they are pigmented, but because they are iridescent, reflecting light at particular frequencies, and the male’s gorget flashes a dazzling, metallic cochineal when viewed from particular angles. The average weight of a male is 3.4 grams. Dickinson’s hummingbird is hovering at a flower, keeping his body static in relation to the bloom as it waves in the breeze, flying backwards if necessary, picking insects from inside the corolla and drinking a gift of nectar, holding himself aloft at a rate of up to eighty whirring wing-beats per second. That is why his wings are almost invisible to the human eye, like the spokes of a “revolving Wheel”. Not much less than a third of his body weight is composed of flight muscles. He may not fly as far as Africa, as Dickinson proposes, but scientists were long confounded as to how his body could take on sufficient fuel to fly non-stop to Panama.
How appropriate that Dickinson should celebrate him in a form favoured by ancient bards – the riddle. It is a distilled version of one she wrote in 1862, in which the wheel metaphor is already at work, and she marvels at the fact that he “partakes without alighting / And praises as he goes”. She reflects that his “Fairy Gig” (she toys with the adjective “microscopic”) will soon be departing for “remoter atmospheres”. She and her beloved Newfoundland dog, Carlo, stand perplexed as the blossoms vibrate.
In the twenty-first century, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is still regarded with such awe that special plastic feeding stations have been invented for it to use, feeding it sugar solutions through artificial flowers. Its conservation status is “least concern” because unlike many of its relatives, its population is actually increasing. It has the advantage that it is perfectly natural to see its flight as a form of praise, its reflective colours as a pinnacle of nature’s creativity, and its very being as nothing short of miraculous.
*
But what of the Bobolink? How has it fared?
It retained its place in Dickinson’s affections, because she loved its swagger. In 1883, she laments that there is nothing left but sobriety now that “the Rowdy of the Meadow” has migrated and only the “Presbyterian Birds” remain, so that the only being likely to swagger about in the fields now is herself. That poem is preceded by a longer meditation on his migratory habits from 1874 – one which, in the context of the depleted biodiversity of our own age, invites a sadder reading.
“The Way to know the Bobolink
From every other Bird
Precisely as the Joy of him
Obliged to be inferred.
Of impudent Habilment
Attired to defy,
Impertinence subordinate
At times to Majesty –
Of Sentiments seditious
Amenable to Law –
As Heresies of Transport
Or Puck’s Apostacy –”
We cannot doubt that Dickinson is delighted by his heresies, his impertinence and his impudence. He is defiant in his joy. Although Dickinson has the habit of writing about her birds as individuals, in the singular, we should bear her mind that in her time, as Audobon confirms, Bobolinks often sang in chorus. He tells us in The Birds of America that “it becomes amusing to listen to thirty or forty of them beginning one after another, after the first notes are given by a leader, and producing such a medley as it is impossible to describe…” A tree full of Bobolinks did indeed seem like something that might have been orchestrated by Puck himself.
“Extrinsic to Attention
Too intimate with Joy –
He compliments Existence
Until allured away
By Seasons or his Children –
Adult and urgent grown –
Or unforeseen Aggrandizement
Or, happily, Renown –
By Contrast certifying
The Bird of Birds is gone –
How nullified the Meadow –
Her Sorcerer withdrawn!”
Fast forward to the present day, and Bobolinks are showing signs of being in trouble. The “Sorcerer” has “withdrawn” for all the wrong reasons. The meadow is “nullified” not because the Bobolink has followed his fledgelings back to Argentina, but because the species is regionally in decline. In 2009, the Bobolink population that spends summer in Vermont had plummeted in numbers by 75 percent since the 1960s, with a projected further decline of 3.1 percent per year. Bobolinks are not yet an endangered species, because their decline is geographically uneven, but in New England, during the later twentieth century, the meadows began to fall silent. The birds nest on the ground in agricultural fields, and as with the Corncrake in northern Europe, changes in the time of harvest mean that the young are now often cut to pieces before they are fledged.
But there is cause for some optimism. Associate Professor Allan Strong of The University of Vermont, wondering whether “people are willing to pay for certain goods and services that are essentially provided for free – from nature”, has implemented The Bobolink Project, which organises for people who love Bobolinks to pay farmers to delay the harvest until the nests are empty. The divine is in short supply in the twenty-first century. If a bird can lead us to it, we might feel motivated to conserve it. Perhaps, at last, with the Bobolink in New England reduced to a forlorn shadow of its former population, the rest of humanity is catching up with Emily Dickinson, who only had to hear its song to touch the divine and grow imaginary wings.
In Audobon’s Birds of America, the Baltimore Orioles have built their pendulous nest, woven out of moss, in the branches of a flowering Tulip Tree. A female claws the side of the nest, interacting with a male perching on a branch beneath her. Above them, another male displays the full glory of his plumage, cavorting in front of his mate. His head, nape and back are velvety black, his wings are pied, and the colour on the rest of his body is every shade from a pale yellow to the colour of egg yolk – yolk, that is, from a hen which has been permitted to scavenge in the garden for a few days: a rich, honeyed amber. He is depicted in the act of dropping from one branch to another, his wings partially spread. To complement this glorious image, Audobon asks us to imagine a traveller in the wilderness who “might feel pleased with any sound, even the howl of the wolf, or the still more dismal bellow of the alligator,” but who, on hearing “thousands of musical voices” from a tree full of Orioles, is led “first to the contemplation of the wonders of nature, and then to that of the Great Creator himself.”
Then, there is his illustration of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird – or ten of them to be precise – males and females, perching with tiny feet, drinking nectar, airborne, with their beaks down trumpet-flowers, twisting their necks to touch bills. He has taken care to capture some of the males with the gemstone-bright iridescence at their throats, and he asks, “where is the person… who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator?”
Finally, we should consider his illustration and discussion of the Bobolink. He tells us that they are called Bobolinks, an onomatopoeic name imitating their voices, in the State of New York, but are elsewhere known as Meadow-birds, Reed-birds and Rice Buntings. He calls them Rice Birds. In his illustration, the Bobolinks sit in branches of the maple tree. It is autumn, because claret-coloured key-shaped seeds dangle from the twigs. The twig on which the female sits has snapped under her weight, and she is staring fixedly at something which has attracted her attention far beneath her. The male is clambering imperiously up a branch above her, his throat extended in the act of calling, showing no apparent interest in the female. His wings are held low, his tail splayed, and it is hard to resist describing his expression as haughty or even arrogant. Unusually for a picture by Audobon, the colours do not do justice to the living bird. Audobon admits that “their song… is extremely interesting, and emitted with a volubility bordering on the burlesque”. He does not go so far, however, as to suggest that the song and spectacle must inevitably lead every observer to rapt contemplation of the glory of the Creator.
Instead, he turns his discussion to the damage Bobolinks do to crops, and to the “profitability” of shooting them in large numbers. “At the discharge of a gun, a flock sufficient to cover several acres rises en masse, and performing various evolutions, densely packed, and resembling a sultry cloud, passes over and near the sportsman, when he lets fly, and finds occupation for some time in picking up the dozens which he has brought down at a single shot. One would think that every gun in the country has been put in requisition. Millions of these birds are destroyed, and yet millions remain… Their flesh is extremely tender and juicy.”
*
It might have come as a surprise, therefore, to any of Emily Dickinson’s friends who happened to read what would become one of her most famous poems, that Bobolinks were not excluded from her private garden liturgy, but were considered by her to be foremost amongst avian worshippers of the divine.
“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -
I keep it, staying at Home -
With a Bobolink for a Chorister -
And an Orchard, for a Dome -”
With a Bobolink for a chorister, Dickinson’s garden sacraments would have been by turns joyful, melodious and raucous. The song of the Bobolink is an extraordinary torrent of extemporised sparrow-like chirps, flinty chips, resonant, metallic squawks with a deeper, blackbirdish undertone, chinking chortles and piercing whistles. A Bobolink can sound by turns delighted, comically bossy and transported with hilarity. There is nothing Puritanical in a Bobolink’s worship.
“Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -
I, just wear my Wings -
And instead of ringing the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton - sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman -
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -
I’m going, all along.”
We may tend to think of a Sexton primarily as a gravedigger, but in fact, the word shares its root with “Sacristan”, the facilitator of worship in a church, and literally, “the custodian of sacred objects”. Sextons cut lawns, order supplies, wear a cassock and surplice not dissimilar in colour and form to a male Bobolink’s plumage, and most importantly from Dickinson’s point of view, they make sure that the church is lit, decorated and dusted for the principal events of the liturgical calendar. Bobolinks set the seasonal calendar in Dickinson’s Amherst, beginning to arrive in late March or early April, breeding throughout the central and eastern portion of the North American continent, and leaving for central South America – northern Argentina and southern Brazil - between late July and late September. They are birds with predictable migratory habits, following the same route as their ancestors north through the Greater Antilles, on up the Florida peninsula to their breeding grounds and back again every year. Their services in Dickinson’s orchard were timed to coincide with the flowering of the trees and the maturation of their fruit.
The poem is, of course, a refusal to go to the local church built by Homo sapiens, in preference for the domed grandeur of a garden shimmering not with stained glass, but with birdsong and sunlight. Whilst the sight of a flock of Bobolinks made Dickinson’s contemporaries reach for their guns, it made her feel as though she, too, was wearing their wings. We will return to the Bobolink shortly - Dickinson is by no means finished with delighting in him – but first, we should see what she has to say about the birds Audobon implicitly prefers.
*
Dickinson’s poem inspired by the Baltimore Oriole’s song presents the perception of its beauty as a subjective and emotional decision on the part of human beings, just as our response to a poem itself is dependent on our own personalities. Once again, the bird gives her a reason to distance herself from the normal attitudes of the churchgoing public:
“To hear an Oriole sing
May be a common thing -
Or only a divine.”
Few of her contemporaries would have preferred a “common thing” to something they had identified as “divine”, but Dickinson was a lover of common things, whether Bobolinks or butterflies. The Baltimore Oriole’s song is purer, or more obviously melodic, than a Bobolink’s, but considerably less inventive or unpredictable. Perhaps it is “only” expressive of a rather solemn form of natural worship.
“It is not of the Bird
Who sings the same, unheard,
As unto Crowd -
The Fashion of the Ear
Attireth that it hear
In Dun, or fair
So whether it be Rune -
Or whether it be none
Is of within.
The “Tune is in the Tree -”
The Skeptic - showeth me -
“No Sir! In Thee!” ”
Assuming that R.W. Franklin is correct in the chronological arrangement of the poems, we can go some way toward reconstructing Dickinson’s train of thought in arriving at this one. Five poems earlier, she was writing about a bird singing at a funeral, who “trilled, and quivered, and shook his throat/ Till all the churchyard rang.” In this poem, she concludes that the bird sang “To say good bye to men”, but in the next, when birds are singing in chorus “The Morning after Wo”, she reaches the opposite conclusion: “Nature did not Care - / And piled her Blossoms on - / The further to parade a Joy / Her Victim stared opon –”. The birds’ voices are “Like Hammers”, and “they fell / Like Litanies of Lead -” The birds are still singing in the language of worship, but their notes are on the “Crucifixal Clef”, and in “some key of Calvary”.
Perhaps the funeral was that of Frazar Stearns, whose body was brought back to Amherst from the battlefield of New Bern in the spring of 1862, just when the Orioles would have been singing. The birds, of course, do not care. They would sing “the same, unheard”, and it is merely the emotional state of the human listener that determines whether the song is “common” or “divine”, “Dun” or “fair”, “Rune” or “none”.
*
Seventeen years later, Dickinson returned to the subject of the Oriole, but her focus had shifted to its plumage, its eating habits, and its migratory status.
“One of the ones that Midas touched
Who failed to touch us all
Was that confiding Prodigal
The reeling Oriole -
So drunk he disavows it
With badinage divine -
So dazzling we mistake him
For an alighting Mine -”
The golden feathers of the Oriole are a likely subject for a poet, and the reference to Midas a conventional one, but Dickinson mixes a Classical comparison with a Biblical one to suggest a closer natural observation. The bird is a “Prodigal”, “reeling” and “drunk”. During the last part of their stay in the eastern states, Orioles gorge themselves on orchard fruits. They prefer the darker-coloured, mature berries, grapes and cherries, and are particularly fond of mulberries, all of which become mildly alcoholic in the warmth of late summer – and mulberries can be psychoactive. The Oriole likes to stick its closed beak into the larger, softer fruits, open it wide to tweezer a gash in the skin, and then mop up the bleeding juice with its tongue. Perhaps this is why Dickinson reaches for that delicious oxymoron, “badinage divine”. “Badinage” is sometimes defined as witty or humorous conversation, but it also connotes the opposite of benediction, bad language and usury. The lines that follow are perhaps a little comically unfair on the Oriole, who is also an avid predator of the forest tent caterpillar moth, widely regarded as a pest species which strips deciduous trees of their leaves. Dickinson portrays him as greedily absconding with the fruits and fragrances of summer as he prepares to migrate south:
“A Pleader - a Dissembler -
An Epicure - a Thief -
Becomes an Oratorio -
An Ecstasy in chief -
The Jesuit of Orchards
He cheats as he enchants
Of an entire Attar
For his decamping wants –”
He is becoming a metaphor, of course, for the departure of summer itself, and simultaneously, Dickinson’s assonances make reference to his virtuoso singing, its magical qualities, and his reputation for thievery: “cheats… enchants”. She cheekily plays on the prejudices of her Puritan contemporaries, who saw Jesuits as dangerous, gluttonous deceivers, and also, perhaps, on a certain xenophobia that held the exotic in suspicion and astronomical phenomena in superstitious awe:
“The splendor of a Burmah
The Meteor of Birds,
Departing like a Pageant
Of Ballads and of Bards –”
Dickinson might be referring to Burma (Myanmar) itself, a byword in her time for colourful exoticism, but there is another, enticing possibility. Given her fascination with ocean voyages and shipwrecks, she may be comparing the bird to the passenger liner Burmah, which disappeared en-route from England to New Zealand in 1859-1860, probably sunk by an iceberg – sunk when, like the Oriole, it was flitting south. And it is time for Dickinson’s poem, too, to turn and flit from one mythological reference to another:
“I never thought that Jason sought
For any Golden Fleece
But then I am a rural Man
With thoughts that make for Peace –
And if there was a Jason,
Tradition bear with me
Behold his lost Aggrandizement
Opon the Apple Tree –”
Finally, we have Dickinson’s affirmation of the bird. The story of the Prodigal Son, the myths of Midas and of the Argonauts, are not to be believed, but the stunning, vivid reality of a Baltimore Oriole, perched in one’s own orchard in the last moments before taking flight for thousands of miles, perhaps makes it worth bearing the wanton pillage of those last fruits after all. Its riches are beyond price.
*
And the very next poem she wrote turns to the subject of Audobon’s favourite – that fourth migratory bird that shared her garden with the Robin, the Bobolink and the Oriole – a bird still more exotic, though less of a danger to the orchard:
“A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel -
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal -
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head -
The Mail from Tunis - probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride -”
The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is the only one of the 338 known species of the family Trochilidae to visit the eastern portion of the United States, migrating to Mexico for the winter, negotiating the whole of the Gulf of Mexico on a single top-up of nectar and insects, after assiduously building up a layer of subcutaneous fat by feeding from blossoms throughout the summer months. The feathers on its back do indeed resonate with an emerald colour, not because they are pigmented, but because they are iridescent, reflecting light at particular frequencies, and the male’s gorget flashes a dazzling, metallic cochineal when viewed from particular angles. The average weight of a male is 3.4 grams. Dickinson’s hummingbird is hovering at a flower, keeping his body static in relation to the bloom as it waves in the breeze, flying backwards if necessary, picking insects from inside the corolla and drinking a gift of nectar, holding himself aloft at a rate of up to eighty whirring wing-beats per second. That is why his wings are almost invisible to the human eye, like the spokes of a “revolving Wheel”. Not much less than a third of his body weight is composed of flight muscles. He may not fly as far as Africa, as Dickinson proposes, but scientists were long confounded as to how his body could take on sufficient fuel to fly non-stop to Panama.
How appropriate that Dickinson should celebrate him in a form favoured by ancient bards – the riddle. It is a distilled version of one she wrote in 1862, in which the wheel metaphor is already at work, and she marvels at the fact that he “partakes without alighting / And praises as he goes”. She reflects that his “Fairy Gig” (she toys with the adjective “microscopic”) will soon be departing for “remoter atmospheres”. She and her beloved Newfoundland dog, Carlo, stand perplexed as the blossoms vibrate.
In the twenty-first century, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is still regarded with such awe that special plastic feeding stations have been invented for it to use, feeding it sugar solutions through artificial flowers. Its conservation status is “least concern” because unlike many of its relatives, its population is actually increasing. It has the advantage that it is perfectly natural to see its flight as a form of praise, its reflective colours as a pinnacle of nature’s creativity, and its very being as nothing short of miraculous.
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But what of the Bobolink? How has it fared?
It retained its place in Dickinson’s affections, because she loved its swagger. In 1883, she laments that there is nothing left but sobriety now that “the Rowdy of the Meadow” has migrated and only the “Presbyterian Birds” remain, so that the only being likely to swagger about in the fields now is herself. That poem is preceded by a longer meditation on his migratory habits from 1874 – one which, in the context of the depleted biodiversity of our own age, invites a sadder reading.
“The Way to know the Bobolink
From every other Bird
Precisely as the Joy of him
Obliged to be inferred.
Of impudent Habilment
Attired to defy,
Impertinence subordinate
At times to Majesty –
Of Sentiments seditious
Amenable to Law –
As Heresies of Transport
Or Puck’s Apostacy –”
We cannot doubt that Dickinson is delighted by his heresies, his impertinence and his impudence. He is defiant in his joy. Although Dickinson has the habit of writing about her birds as individuals, in the singular, we should bear her mind that in her time, as Audobon confirms, Bobolinks often sang in chorus. He tells us in The Birds of America that “it becomes amusing to listen to thirty or forty of them beginning one after another, after the first notes are given by a leader, and producing such a medley as it is impossible to describe…” A tree full of Bobolinks did indeed seem like something that might have been orchestrated by Puck himself.
“Extrinsic to Attention
Too intimate with Joy –
He compliments Existence
Until allured away
By Seasons or his Children –
Adult and urgent grown –
Or unforeseen Aggrandizement
Or, happily, Renown –
By Contrast certifying
The Bird of Birds is gone –
How nullified the Meadow –
Her Sorcerer withdrawn!”
Fast forward to the present day, and Bobolinks are showing signs of being in trouble. The “Sorcerer” has “withdrawn” for all the wrong reasons. The meadow is “nullified” not because the Bobolink has followed his fledgelings back to Argentina, but because the species is regionally in decline. In 2009, the Bobolink population that spends summer in Vermont had plummeted in numbers by 75 percent since the 1960s, with a projected further decline of 3.1 percent per year. Bobolinks are not yet an endangered species, because their decline is geographically uneven, but in New England, during the later twentieth century, the meadows began to fall silent. The birds nest on the ground in agricultural fields, and as with the Corncrake in northern Europe, changes in the time of harvest mean that the young are now often cut to pieces before they are fledged.
But there is cause for some optimism. Associate Professor Allan Strong of The University of Vermont, wondering whether “people are willing to pay for certain goods and services that are essentially provided for free – from nature”, has implemented The Bobolink Project, which organises for people who love Bobolinks to pay farmers to delay the harvest until the nests are empty. The divine is in short supply in the twenty-first century. If a bird can lead us to it, we might feel motivated to conserve it. Perhaps, at last, with the Bobolink in New England reduced to a forlorn shadow of its former population, the rest of humanity is catching up with Emily Dickinson, who only had to hear its song to touch the divine and grow imaginary wings.
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