Bird Songs in Literature: Bird Songs and the Poems They Have Inspired

This rare treat for the nature lover, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a special collection of over forty bird songs and the beloved poems they inspired.The songs of birds have been an inspiration to poets since before the days of Chaucer. Shelley’s skylark, Keats’s nightingale, and 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 recording 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 school days 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 of 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 fifty 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 were under the expert direction of Peter Kellogg, profession emeritus of ornithology and bioacoustics. 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.The field records of bird songs were made by a dedicated team of more than thirty people.Some ofthe poems here, among fifty-six in all, include “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oriole’s Secret” by Emily Dickinson, “An Essay on Man” by Alexander Pope, “Roadless Area” by Paul Brooks, “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Jackdaw” by William Cowper, “The Birds of Killingworth” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Princess” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost, “Thoreau’s Flute” by Louisa May Alcott, “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot, and “The Song of Songs” from the Old Testament.