The Changing Dynamic of Poetry About Birds
(How Poetry About Birds Is Accessed Now as Opposed to How It Was Before Now, Say ‘Then’)
By Jayant Kashyap
The most basic and observable change, I’ve come to understand, has been in how they’ve been represented through the years: for example, Anne Bradstreet (then) writes about a bird that ‘fears no snares’ and ‘[f]eels no sad thoughts’, [1]implying in ways the idea of l’art pour l’art – that, as Blake believed, beauty of the arts is reason enough for pursuing the arts; and a bird was often employed as a metaphor – almost a twin word – for ‘freedom’ (notice Alice Jones’s birds having the ‘thoughtless / freedom to follow whim / and pleasure’);[2] and for ‘hope’ and faith [3] but probably not for much else. Linda Gregg later wrote about the presence of birds as a prize and reason enough for celebration, [4] making them into something which is more than a metaphorical painting; and Lyz Soto imagines them as an image of grief – the bird she talks about ‘once shook the forest with her color’. [5] Of course, the employment of birds in poetry as figures of beauty is not entirely an overexploitation (Yeats noted he’d ‘read somewhere that the birds of fairyland are white as snow’)[6] because, after all, they are also what make the Earth beautiful to look at – and if not just their appearance, the music they produce certainly adds to it further. What, however, has improved between ‘then’ and now is that, today, the poets writing about nature in some capacity have placed focus on birds not as things divided from their surroundings but as part of an ecosystem in a functioning manner to elevate the said institution to a better position, or at least to maintain it, and not merely serve as mannequins or statues as utopic images of a thing gradually wearing itself down. For example, Olivia Todd focusses on ‘tiny birds work[ing] with buffalo to warn them of the approaching wolves’ [7] and Hugo Williams on birds ‘scribbling their lives in the trees’ [8] – possibly as part of a daily act of life, or as merely a result of want: imagine a woodpecker pecking at a banyan tree bark for no apparent reason; but these relatively small things lead to greater things, each act magnifying itself: and now this abandoned pinhole – say ‘beak-hole’ – of a structure will soon become a home for insects and worms, breeding an ecosystem in itself, in a manner quite similar to how Shara Lessley illustrates whalefall:
from one carcass
emerges an ecosystem
that will thrive for a thousand years [9]
So, instead of just the beauty of what a creature a bird is, we’ve gradually moved towards what a creature a bird (literally) is, as bone and sinew and whatnot, and how it adds to its environment. And thereafter the mention of birds in poetry comes as a step to represent in ways our failure in caring for the said environment or ecosystem, or at least to not disturb it through and through, with Caroline Bird calling this world we’re bent on creating – if destroying is in any rare way a form of creation – the ‘goodbye world’; [10] and, in spite of everything, Linda Pastan observes they ‘are not fooled / by this odd November summer’ (that they’re driven by ‘instinct’ – how intelligent the birds!) [11] but, as it happens, in one of Danica Ognjenovic’s poems, the birds begin ‘to fall’ and she says a ‘prayer for them’, and one ‘for ourselves again’.[12]
Therefore, in truth, the question might still stand: what has changed for birds in poetry between ‘then’ – this arbitrary history of all the times before ‘now’ – and now? And the answer might still be ‘not much’, that the birds are not entirely images of ruin, but sometimes they are now ‘metaphors / for what is trapped / between buildings / and buildings’ and a sign (or, say, an omen) that we might be walking towards a ‘birdless city’, [13] and possibly towards no ‘more branches’ and ‘no more water’ and, therefore, no more ‘chattering or shrill world-songs’, so whose turn will ‘it [be] to open-throated sing?’ [14] Not us, or will it be? And while the answer might still be ‘not much’, there is somehow a consideration that sometime between ‘then’ and now, we’ve stopped making an effort to imagine the evolution of scarecrows in scaring the crows better and started wanting to home them instead – however selfish the reason – and, I think, that is what has changed: the understanding that humans cannot survive this (or any, if there is another) planet alone, and that we will need, among other creatures, birds. Birds that were once little things with flight, and now may be everything, and almost human (or perhaps something even better). Imagine, if nothing else, magpies ‘sulk[ing] / when they’re upset’; a blackbird incessantly ‘changing its mind / about what to do next.’ [15]
NOTES
1 Anne Bradstreet, “Contemplations,” The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, 1981
2 Alice Jones, “Birds,” Poetry Foundation, May 1996
3 Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Academy of American Poets
4 Linda Gregg, “Let Birds,” All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 2009.
5 Soto, “Today I Am Full of Birds,” Poem-a-Day on May 27, 2024
6 Patrick J. Keane, “11. Rose, Wind, and the Seven Woods”, Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover, Open Book Publishers, 2021b.
7 Olivia Todd, “No Ears,” The Poetry Society, 2018.
8 Hugo Williams, “Birdwatching,” The Poetry Society, 2016.
9 Shara Lessley, “Self-Portrait as (Super/Sub) Pacific,” Two-Headed Nightingale, New Issues Press, 2012.
10 Caroline Bird, “Stephanie”, The Poetry Society.
11 Linda Pastan, “The Birds”, The Imperfect Paradise, W.W. Norton, 1988.
12 Danica Ognjenovic, “Birdfall”, The Poetry Society, 2013.
13 Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here,” Poetry Foundation, February 2014.
14 Ari Banias, “No More Birds”, Academy of American Poets.
15 Hugo Williams, “Birdwatching”, The Poetry Society, 2016.
Jayant Kashyap is an Indian poet. His third pamphlet, ‘Notes on Burials’, won the New Poets Prize in 2024 (Smith|Doorstop, 2025). He’s also the author of a zine, ‘Water’ (Skear Zines, 2021), and has published nonfiction in The Hooghly Review, The Mersey Review and elsewhere.