The swinging ‘60s. Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Birds! No not the mini-skirted ones hanging out, downtown, in parks and city streets, nor the collared dove, though I was seduced for a while. And a pretty girl can still turn my head today, much to my wife’s annoyance. Think Felise in the novel – ‘The Dewy Morn’ by Richard Jefferies.
The Dewy Morn – 1948
“Felise walked up out of the water on to the turf and sat down at the edge of the shadow of the trees. … She thought of nothing but the sun and wind, the flowers and the running stream. She listened to the wind in the trees and began herself to sing – singing of ‘the woven embroidery of the earth’ threaded into her very being …”
Pure beauty (of imagination). And nothing to do with sex! Well maybe it is. I don’t know but that’s all you’re going to get. Now back to birds.
I saw plenty of birds on the local allotments – the only bit of green anyways near a stones throw of our new home. It became my ‘local patch’. I ticked off most of the commoner birds – blackbird, song thrush, woodpigeon, dunnock blue and great tits, chaffinch, goldfinch, whitethroat – and yellowhammers. It was also on my way to school – well sort of. I was often late!
But there were distractions at school too. No not girls. Well maybe!
daydreaming waiting for the bell my piano tutor
I had a sort of crush on my music teacher – she was kind and beautiful. I imagined her a bit like Felise. She seemed to know how I pined for the woods and fields of my early childhood. Even today, on the rare occasions I hear the song of a yellowhammer, the memories come flooding back.
humming along to Beethoven’s fifth
Grass Meadows – Coate
[…] ‘There is sunshine in the song – and whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the sky, has never faded from my memory. His [Yellowhammer] plumage gives a life and tint to the hedge, contrasting so brightly with the vegetation and with other birds. His song is but a few bars repeated, yet it has a pleasing and soothing effect in the drowsy warmth of summer.’ […]
Wild Life in a Southern County (1879)
There was a lake too, a short cycle ride away, where in the summer hols, I would go to watch birds. And think! At one end there was an old church idyllically located on it’s own Island with a little stone bridge over the moat …
still waters a fish jumps … through my reflection
Colin kindly commented – “This is, dare I say, ‘perfect’ (as perfect as these things ever are) where ‘reflection’ means two things at the same time – something on the water and meditation interrupted by the conceptual fish that often disrupts ordinary thinking in everyday life.”
And on days when midsummer clouds scudded across the sky, I would sit under some willows and read Richard Jefferies – a kindred spirit who seemed to think and feel the way I did.
coot skitter among lily pads summer rain
They say that schooldays are the best days of your life. I’m not so sure. But they were a hell of a lot better than the following years.
‘… long, long time ago, I can still remember …’ go the lyrics to American Pie (“The Day the Music Died”) by Don Mclean. I remember watching the news of the plane crash in 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper died. I used to sing along to Buddy Holly songs – well when I say sing that’s probably stretching it a bit. The Headmaster said I was tone deaf and banned me from the choir. You’ll just have to imagine my rendering of ‘Peggy Sue’!
My childhood home – 1950
But I digress, I remember because it also marked a huge change in my life as we had recently moved from the country to the suburbs of Bath. I hated change and couldn’t handle the move at all for years after … Even now, especially in spring, just like mole I get a hankering to revisit my old home. Long gone now, replaced by an ‘architect designed des res’ but still it pulls me.
waking up the sounds of the day waking up
I was at home playing in the woods and fields. Sometimes I’d be out all day; waking with the birds – sparrows, always sparrows chattering from under the eaves, and tree sparrows twittering from a nearby ash (and if I was lucky, a green woodpecker or cuckoo calling). And only coming in, reluctantly, as the owls began hooting, and the blackbird had sung his last song.
punctuating time a blackbird’s song
Going to bed had its own challenges. While the outdoors held no horrors even in the dark, my bedroom lit only by a single oil lamp, had lots of spooky corners. And a wardrobe. Scary! Even the patterns on the wallpaper seemed to move.
shadows on the wall chasing sleep
Was I lonely – I don’t think so. Or did I ‘learn to be lonely’ as in the Andrew Lloyd Webber’s song from Phantom of the Opera (covered here beautifully by my daughter Bea … Excuse the plug!)
‘Child of the wilderness’ … The lyrics say it all!
I was, I suppose, a precocious child. I could read and spell, even quite difficult words like ‘intelligence’, before starting school, but struggled with writing and arithmetic.
I hated school! I didn’t fit. Had few friends. And thought and behaved differently. I spent an awful lot of time reading or staring out the window …
Hidden
I turned the page.
[…] “‘I have amazing news for you – and indeed for every bird-lover in the country,’”he whispered. […]
It was my first day at Junior (Primary) school and I had picked a book to read, from the library shelves.
“Bennett! What are you doing ?”
“Reading, Miss” (I hadn’t heard the Headmistress come into class). “We were told to”, Miss.
“What have I been talking about?”
“Dunno, Miss.”
“Come here!” (six raps on the knuckles for not paying attention and six more for answering back). “Write out, in your best handwriting, ‘I must not read in class’. Twelve times!”
Did she know that my writing was awful. I could read, and spell almost anything, but write – I couldn’t write for toffee.
I returned to my desk and stared out the window; a Green Woodpecker flew up into the trees bordering the grounds of the old Rectory. Overgrown and unkempt – a place of mystery and adventure. …
I sneaked a look at the next page.
[…] “‘As I suspected, the birds you saw and which I have been watching for fifteen minutes are Bee-eater.’”[…]
The bell rang …
morning assembly sparrows chattering in the playground
As told to my son many many years later. He ‘got it’ straight away! Made me think.
But it was this book ‘The Fourth Key’ by Malcolm Saville that inspired and fed my passion for watching birds … that was to last a lifetime.
A serialisation of my semi-autobiographical ebook of haiku. A sort of poetic memoir. A story of “inspirations illustrated with wonderful poems and writings” (Andrea Stephenson).
I’ve quoted Richard Jefferies rather a lot. He and I share an affinity with nature and the countryside, with my haiku often ‘found’ or intuited from his prose, an effective foil to his ‘gushing’ (R.H.Blyth) writing.
Oh and it also has the odd bit of music and occasional birdsong too.
The front cover and coloured illustrations are from woodblock prints by Ohara Koson (Ohara Hōson, Ohara Shōson Kanazawa 1877 – Tokyo 1945) who was a Japanese painter and woodblock print designer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the forefront of shinsaku–hanga and shin–hanga art movements.
Koson is known for his depictions of birds and animals, which were often set in naturalistic landscapes. His prints capture the essence of his subjects with delicate lines and intricate details. Koson was influenced by the work of the Kacho-ga artist Imao Keinen, and his prints reflect a similar interest in the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.
The black and white landscape photos were prepared by Miss Bertha Newcome and published in “Richard Jefferies A Study” by H S Salt 1883.
The birdsong recordings are used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs4.0 license. These and many more can be found at – Xeno-Canto – a website dedicated to sharing bird sounds from all over the world.
All rights reserved. This ebook, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Any errors, omissions or inaccuracies, grammatical or otherwise, are entirely my own.
[Suddenly] “… a lark starts into the light and pours forth a rain of unwearied notes overhead. With bright light, and sunshine, and sunrise, and blue skies the bird is so associated in the mind, that even to see him in the frosty days of winter, at least assures us that summer will certainly return.“ . . .
distant bells across the fields skylark song
(Out of Doors in February – Richard Jefferies 1882)
So how come I started writing haiku – I wasn’t a poet and didn’t read poetry. Not since school anyway although the line ‘we have no time to stand and stare’ (‘Leisure’ W.H. Davies), had somehow stuck with me. I wasn’t a writer either. But I loved reading. And had done from a very young age. Mum had lots of books. I discovered the North Pole, messed about on the river, travelled to the centre of the earth, followed Alice down the rabbit hole and walked with Richard Jefferies up Liddington Hill – countless times …
My Creative Muse – Richard Jefferies 1848-1887
It was quite by accident. I had picked up a book (more about that later) by Colin Blundell ’Something Beyond the Stars’ (Found Haiku from the Notebooks of Richard Jefferies). I didn’t know Colin from Adam (although I was to correspond with him subsequently – Colin that is).
Sadly I never got to meet him, but we shared a passion for the nature writing of Richard Jefferies. Colin believed that within Jefferies’ eloquent prose there were zen-like moments of ‘suchness’ which could be ‘teased out’ or ‘found’ and expressed as haiku. Moments Jefferies himself said he sometimes ‘lacked the words’ [Sic] to express.
Richard Jefferies, widely considered the father of English nature writing, was perhaps the most brilliant observer of nature of the 19th century. I’d read a lot of his work but this was something new, different and exciting. I didn’t think anyone had looked at his life in this way before. Indeed, as Colin argues “his whole philosophy could be said to be built upon such haiku-moments.” I would go further and say that much of his writing is prose written in the manner of haiku. Now there’s a thought!
So what better than to find my own haiku in his writing …
Here’s a favourite passage of mine from ‘The Story of my Heart’ (1883) – his spiritual autobiography.
“There were grass-grown tumuli on the hills to which of old I used to walk, sit down at the foot of one of them, and think. Some warrior had been interred there in the ante-historic times. The sun of the summer morning shone on the dome of sward, and the air came softly up from the wheat below, the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed by to the thyme and heathbells.” . . .
summer grasses dreaming the dreams of warriors
Similar, perhaps too similar, to Bashō’s ’Summer Grasses’, my intuited haiku (monoku) is meant not as an allusion, though it is that, albeit a weak (in content) one, but more an example of how Jefferies approached what he saw in the world around him with a sensibility akin to Bashō.
Summer grass the only remains of soldiers’ dreams
(translated by Jane Reichhold)
Here’s another favourite …
“‘There’s the cuckoo!’ Everyone looked up and listened as the notes came indoors from the copse by the garden. He had returned to the same spot for the fourth time. The tallest birch-tree—it is as tall as an elm—stands close to the hedge, about three parts of the way up it, and it is just round there that the cuckoo generally sings. From the garden gate it is only a hundred yards to this tree, walking beside the hedge which extends all the way, so that the very first time the cuckoocalls upon his arrival he is certain to be heard. His voice travels that little distance with ease, and can be heard in every room.”
The Hills and the Vale (1909)
sunshine filling every room the cuckoo’s call
There is a spirituality in his writing suggestive of an ‘animist’ approach to nature. He clearly felt that all things—plants, animals, stones, even weather—are sentient and alive. And once described the downs as being ‘alive with the dead’.
“… there was magic in everything, in the blades of grass and the stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground”
(Bevis, 1882)
All of which of course lends itself to haiku which too has its roots in animism.
Coate Farm – Richard Jefferies’ Birthplace
I’ve always felt at one with nature (and the wider Universe). The warrior buried in the mound is as real to me now as it was to Richard Jefferies then. And so my haiku storey begins. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it all really started way back in childhood all those years ago.
It’s 4.30! Waking up I look out onto a mascara smudged sky riven with pink glow lipstick – the aftermath of last nights storm. Starlings whistle and fizz from the chimney pot. And Sparrows chirp from under the eaves. A song thrush sings ‘Sweetheart’ ‘Sweetheart’ ‘Sweetheart’, or ‘Cherry B’ ‘Cherry B’ ‘Cherry B’ as the sun breaks through. A wren scolds …
….. listening to the goldfinches …; listening to the swallows as they twitter past … the chaffinches ‘chink, chink;’ thrushes, and distant blackbirds in the oaks; ‘cuckoo, cuckoo;’ `crake, crake;’ buzzing and burring of bees, coo of turtle-doves, now and then a neigh to remind you that there are horses, fulness and richness of musical sound; a world of grass and leaf, humming like a hive with voices ….*
waking up the sounds of the day waking up
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Create your own (virtual) Dawn Chorus from the playlists. Cue them in at differing times to get the full effect. Perhaps starting with the song thrush which has the longest playing time.
Tip: If you’ve come to this post via my ebook “always sparrows” open both the blog post and the book in separate windows. You can flip between the two and your choice of birdsongs will continue to play. It’s even easier if you have a device which can operate in split screen mode.
punctuating time
a blackbird’s song
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This post is the first in a proposed series of posts in support of my interactive semi-autobiographical ebook of haiku – ‘always sparrows’ – with over 60 haiku, and other Japanese short-form poetry. Please leave a comment, or drop me an email if you’d like a free downloadable copy.
Copyrights
The birdsong recordings are used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs4.0 license. These and many more can be found at – Xeno-Canto a website dedicated to sharing bird sounds from all over the world.
* An extract from the nature essays of Richard Jefferies
