"Of all bird songs or sounds known to me, there is none that I would prefer than the spring notes of the curlew . . . The notes do not sound passionate; they suggests peace, rest, healing joy, an assurance of happiness past, present and to come. To listen to curlews on a bright, clear April day, with the fullness of spring still in anticipation, is one of the best experiences that a lover of birds can have.” Edward Grey in the Charm of Birds
I did not know that curlews were famous for their haunting, lonely cries at night. And I did not know the important place they have in the British poetic mind. From mournful to ominous? The two most often noted sounds of their call are the “curlee, curlee,” from which it gets it name, and the hauntingly beautiful call heard most often in the breeding season – a bubbling crescendo that ends in a long note. It inspired Yeats to write of lost love.
O CURLEW, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.
Alex Preston, in his book As Kingfishers Catch Fire, writes:
TWO OF THE THREE or four Western avian extinctions since the Great Auk in 1852 were curlews. Fred Bosworth’s 1955 novel, Last of the Curlews, is written from the perspective of the final remaining eskimo curlew on earth as he undertakes his migration from the Canadian Arctic to the Pampas of Patagonia. Bosworth does his best not to anthropomorphise the bird, but the passages in which the curlew briefly meets and then loses his mate, as they fly over the Andes and up across the plains of the Midwest, are a kind of tragic road- trip, the birds’ fragile, wind-buffeted union beautiful and doomed. Equally powerful is Horatio Clare’s Orison for a Curlew, which sees the author set off on a hopeless quest in search of the slender-billed curlew. 1 This slim book, written in lapidary prose, chases the ghost of the vanished bird ‘of delicate appearance and mysterious habits’ through Greece and the Balkans, with Clare speaking to ornithologists and environmentalists whose valiant actions were too little, too late. It seems fitting, somehow, that the melancholy curlew, whose eldritch cry has stirred fear and sown sorrow over the centuries, should be amongst the avant garde of the great Holocene extinction event, its sad call an unheeded warning of the wave of extinctions to come. In the Old English poem ‘The Seafarer’, written deep in the Dark Ages, the anonymous author looks back on his life amid waves and sea-birds, driving the ‘foam-furrow’ far from home. The poet is an outsider, frozen and friendless, exiled to roam the icy and unforgiving oceans. The curlew is the spirit bird of the poem, its long sorrowful call lilting down through the wretched lines: 2 Hwilum ylfete song At times the swan’s song dyde ic me to gomene, I took to myself as pleasure, ganotes hleoþor the gannet’s noise ond huilpan sweg and the voice of the curlew fore hleahtor wera, instead of the laughter of men, mæw singende the singing gull fore medodrince. instead of the drinking of mead. The curlew is a bird of desolate places, of moors and bleak estuaries, of winter dusk and dreich weather. W.H. Hudson describes the call, which is a rising and desperate one, as ‘uttered by some filmy being, half spirit and half bird.’ Dylan Thomas addresses a herd ‘Ho, hullabulloing clan / Agape, with woe / In your beaks.’ Memories seem to cleave to the curlew’s call, so I cannot hear it without a rush of unhappy recollections, dark visions and regrets. It’s a bird best appreciated alone and sad-hearted. In one of Yeats’s most beautiful lyrics, ‘He Reproves the Curlew’, the mythical figure of Red Hanrahan finds the bird’s song tilts him into despair for a lost love.”
Comments