Laura Erickson's For the Birds

There are almost as many kinds of birders as there are birders, but they fall into two basic categories—the travelers who wander all over the country or the world and have either a cursory or a good knowledge of a huge variety of birds, and the more sedentary birders who stay close to home, learning more intimately a smaller number of birds. Emily Dickinson probably never thought of herself as a birder, but she wrote so many poems about the birds she found near her home, and showed such an intimate knowledge of their habits and needs, that she would most certainly now be considered a great naturalist and a birder. But her understanding of birds went deeper than just what birds look like and do. As a poet, she showed us what birds mean to us.

Her poetry, written in the mid-1800s , still has a powerful resonance a century and a half later.

She never titled her poems or collected them into works. They were numbered after her death. I particularly like number 1102, about a pitiful dead bird:

His Bill is clasped—his Eye forsook—
His Feathers wilted low—
The Claws that clung, like lifeless Gloves
Indifferent hanging now—
The Joy that in his happy Throat
Was waiting to be poured
Gored through and through with Death, to be
Assassin of a Bird
Resembles to my outraged mind
The firing in Heaven
On Angels—squandering for you
Their Miracles of Tune—

My favorite of all Emily Dickinson’s poems is her number 254. It makes me think of the Mourning Dove, who, like her little Bird, sings an ethereal song that warms our hearts while asking so little in return.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers­—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard­
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird—
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity—
It asked a crumb—of Me.