Explore "Birds and Poets" by John Burroughs on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"In summer, when the shawes be shene, / And leaves be large and long, / It is full merry in fair forest / To hear the fowles' song. / The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease, / Sitting upon the spray; / So loud, it wakened Robin Hood / In the greenwood where he lay."
It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully responds to them. So true is this, that all the great ornithologists -- original namers and biographers of the birds -- have been poets in deed if not in word. Audubon is a notable case in point, who, if he had not the tongue or the pen of the poet, certainly had the eye and ear and heart -- "the fluid and attaching character" -- and the singleness of purpose, the enthusiasm, the unworldliness, the love, that characterize the true and divine race of bards.