Bird Songs in Literature

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology - Bird Songs in Literature

Usually nature sounds/environmental sounds are posted on Sundays. Instead, I am posting today what would have been posted next Sunday. I am going to be out of town for the next few days to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with the family to eat, be merry, and probably watch football and go shopping. I'll likely be mostly offline as well during the next few days. I'll be back with more posts next week. Enjoy the holiday or the next few days even if you're not celebrating anything.
LP released in 1967

Prepared by Joseph Wood Krutch
Narrated by Frederick G. Marcham

The songs of birds have been an inspiration to poets since before the days of Chaucer. Shelley's skylark, Keats's nightingale, scores of other birds - some familiar, some little known - are celebrated throughout English and American literature. Now, for the first time, thanks to modern techniques, we can hear on one record both the words of the poem itself and the song of the bird that inspired it.
How many of us who have read about the skylark and nightingale since our schooldays have ever heard their famous song? And vice versa, how many of us realize the extent to which birds have appeared in the work of leading English and American poets? This latest addition to the Sounds of Nature series has been prepared with running commentary by the distinguished author and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch. Songs and calls of almost 50 of the more common birds of England and North America are heard. They are identified by the narrator, Frederick G. Marcham, Professor of English History at Cornell University and ornithologist and naturalist as well. The editing and composition of the recording was under the expert direction of Peter Paul Kellogg, Professor Emeritus of Ornithology and Bio-Acoustics. Dr. Kellogg and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology spared no effort in obtaining the best recorded songs of the birds available to supplement those taken from the Library of Natural Sounds at the Laboratory.
A significant achievement of this recording is the presentation of the songs in the light of their influence on the imagination and creativity of poets such as Shakespeare, Pope, Milton, and Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot - to name only a few. This has resulted in some of the most beautiful tributes to nature in English literature. A third dimension is added to the appreciation and enjoyment of each listener, as one who knows these birds immediately will discover: this richer background gives the songs fresh meaning and interest. The listener who is not as familiar with the songs will perhaps find them easier to learn and recognize in the future.
As is illustrated throughout this record, the singing bird has not only been an inspiration to man but a companion, protector, and friend as well. It can chastise and comfort, induce sorrow and pain, love and joy. Thus, each song achieves here its own immortality within the immortal lines of these poems. The final effect on the listener is an intensified awareness of the essential harmony between man and nature. (from the liner notes)

The bird songs and poems are listed below in the sequence heard.

Side 1

INTRODUCTION: HERMIT and SWAINSON'S THRUSHES
TAWNY OWL: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel
COCK: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel
John Gay, The Beggar's Opera
Chaucer, The Nun's Priest's Tale
SKYLARK: Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
CUCKOO: Anonymous, Sumer is icumen in
Edmund Spenser, Amoretti
Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis
Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost
ROADRUNNER
YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOO
WHIP-POOR-WILL: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
EUROPEAN SONG THRUSH ("THROSTLE"): Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Throstle
Robert Browning, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
HERMIT THRUSH: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
SWAINSON'S and WOOD THRUSHES: T. S. Eliot, Marina
AMERICAN ROBIN: Emily Dickinson, The Robin
EUROPEAN ROBIN: William Wordsworth, The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly
Sir Walter Scott, Proud Maisie from The Heart of Mid-Lothian
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Anonymous, The Robin and the Wren
EUROPEAN WREN: Shakespeare, Macbeth
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Cornish Folk Rhyme, Hunt a Robin or a Wren
HOUSE WREN: Edward Howe Forbush, Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States
WINTER WREN
CAROLINA WREN
CANON WREN
CACTUS WREN

Side 2
EASTERN MEADOWLARK: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Poet's Tale: The Birds of Killingworth from Tales of a Wayside Inn
EASTERN BLUEBIRD: Henry David Thoreau, The Bluebirds
Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau's Flute
BALTIMORE ORIOLE: Emily Dickinson, The Oriole's Secret
RED-EYED VIREO: Henry David Thoreau, "Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays"
VEERY: Henry David Thoreau, The Cliffs and Springs
OVENBIRD: Robert Frost, The Oven Bird
EASTERN WOOD PEWEE: John Townsend Trowbridge, The Pewee
BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEE: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Titmouse
Mark Van Doren, The Chickadee
CEDAR WAXWING: William Matchett, Cedar Waxwing
YELLOWTHROAT: Henry van Dyke, The Maryland Yellow-Throat
BOBOLINK: William Cullen Bryant, Robert of Lincoln
BOBWHITE, RUBY-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD, WHISTLING SWAN, and LAUGHING GULL: Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
MOCKINGBIRD: Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
COMMON CROW
COMMON RAVEN: Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
ENGLISH ROOK
JACKDAW: William Cowper, The Jackdaw
WOOD PIGEON and MOURNING DOVE: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess
TURTLE DOVE: Old Testament, The Song of Songs
CANADA GOOSE: Henry David Thoreau, Conclusion to Walden
VARIOUS SEABIRDS: Anonymous, The Seafarer
WHIMBREL (HUDSONIAN CURLEW): Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall
COMMON LOON: Edward Howe Forbush, Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States
John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-Bound
Paul Brooks, Roadless Area
NIGHTINGALE: John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
William Wordsworth, "O Nightingale! Thou Surely Art"
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon
Matthew Arnold, Philomela
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Bird Songs in Literature {20:29}

Side 2

1. Bird Songs in Literature continued {21:42}

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