FEATURE: The Bard’s Birds - In praise of the lark...
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate
Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
IT’S often said that art thrives in adversity. Van Gogh, out of his mind, his ear hacked off, confined to the Saint-Paul-de Mausole asylum painting all those amazing psychedelic swirls. Picasso protesting the Spanish Civil War with his Guernica. The Sex Pistols railing against royalty, the government and just about everybody else and inventing punk rock. Geniuses all.
But still, it saddens me that the most beautiful music in the world is occasioned by me and Kip the cocker spaniel tramping across a local meadow and so alarming the larks that they take wing and sing to divert us from their nests. To the human (and presumably canine) ear there’s no audible distress to their song, though there is a certain sorrow in it as we shall see.
On the face of it, though, it’s a tuneful bliss, long and unbroken, a clear and bubbling warble delivered high in the air while the bird is rising, circling or hovering. Stand still and listen: each song lasts two or three minutes, but sometimes they can last up to 20 and we’re transfixed. Well, I am. The dog’s off bothering something in a bush.
It’s the male larks that sing, and they don’t only do it to distract us from their clutch of five-or-so eggs laid in a shallow scuff of a nest near our feet on the ground. They also do it to raise a warning to other larks that we’re coming near, and sometimes it’s just a show-off, part of a mating ritual to attract a mate and see off rivals.
Being of a vaguely superstitious persuasion, I make it a sacred point to never return home from a walk without sighting at least one of these songsters. This is not as easy as it sounds.
Part of the wonder of the lark is that it is so small and insignificant-looking that, were it not for the magic of its song, you’d barely notice it.
How such a mesmeric, mellifluous symphony emits from such an unremarkable creature – greyish brown with a buff white belly, not even the size of a thrush – is in itself sort of a symbolic lesson – y’know, looks aren’t everything, the error of judging books by their covers, amazing things come in small packages, that kind of thing.
But a further impediment to fulfilling my task is that larks can fly so incredibly high that, although you hear them loud and clear, you can barely see them at all.
Often they’re obscured by clouds or by the sun and in my experience there is no trick to getting better at spotting them. They are often mere specks and the longer you stare in the hope of a glimpse, the more the motes in your eye interfere with their discovery.
Not many birds actually sing on the wing, they usually perch, but up in the blue is the only time the lark lets loose with the vocals. They launch themselves upwards, like they’re swimming against a tide, spiralling up, piping forth a continuous bubbling stream of notes. Higher and higher they climb, ascending, sometimes up to 330 feet, and when they descend they waft at the beginning, like they’re on a parachute, and then, at the last moment, they plummet like a stone, presumably so we can’t catch where they land.
The lark has been celebrated copiously and enthusiastically in the various arts down the ages. Shakespeare mentions it in no less than 27 times in 15 of his plays, the bird evoked most frequently in Romeo and Juliet. In Act III, scene V, Juliet says: “It is the lark that sings so out of tune/ Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps/ Some say the lark makes sweet division/ This doth not so, for she divideth us.”
What’s happening here is that Juliet is cozied up with Romeo and is hoping the birdsong they’re hearing from outside is a nightingale, which means they have time left to canoodle, and not the lark which, signifying dawn, means Romeo will have to scarper before he’s detected.
She then continues to express her sweet sorrow by bringing up some weird folklore which insisted that the lark had at some point back in the ancient mists of time struck a deal to exchange its eyes with the toad: “Some say the lark and loathèd toad changed eyes/ O, now I would they had changed voices too/ Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray/ Hunting thee hence with hunt’s-up to the day/ O, now be gone. More light and light it grows.”
As if that wasn’t strange enough, larks were a popular pet back in Shakespeare’s time, and when they were caught and caged, they were often blinded as it was thought their lack of sight would make them sing all the prettier. They were also believed to be attracted to the colour red, which crops up in Henry VIII, Act III, scene II when the Earl of Surrey urges his peers not to pay heed to a corrupt cardinal and to spurn his red clothing.
Surrey mocks the cardinal for flashing his red hat to his followers as though they are larks because, back then, it’s said hunters would tempt the birds close with a scarlet cloth then catch them in a net: “Can you endure to hear this arrogance? And from this fellow? If we live thus tamely/ To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet/ Farewell, nobility. Let his Grace go forward/ And dare us with his cap, like larks.”
The Bard was by no means the first scribe to bang on about our bird. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale refers to “the bisy lark, messenger of day”, in 1430 the poet monk John Lydgate coined “an exaltation of skylarks” as a collective noun and in his 1578 romance Euphues John Lyly invented the popular phrase, “up with the lark”.
Inevitably the romantically-inclined poets were drawn to the lark. The early 19th century East Anglian ‘peasant’ poet John Clare, who apparently suffered with mental health issues, wrote that watching a skylark in flight – “As free from danger as the heavens are free/ From pain and toil” – lifted his spirits for a while. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also enraptured by our feathered pal, “so brimful of gladness and love/ The green fields below him, the blue sky above /That he sings, and he sings; and forever sings he - /‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’” He wrote that in 1802’s Answer To A Child’s Question.
Not to be outdone, Wordsworth then dipped in with not one, but two lyrical pieces, To A Skylark, written in 1805 (published in 1815). This one describes the lark thus: “Ethereal minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky…” The second effort was To The Skylark, published in 1825. This one goes: “I have walked through wildernesses dreary/ And to-day my heart is weary/ Had I now the wings of a Faery/ Up to thee would I fly/ There is madness about thee, and joy divine/ In that song of thine…”
Percy Bysshe Shelley got in on the act with his much-vaunted To A Skylark in 1820. At 105 lines this one goes on a bit but is nonetheless considered by verse boffins to be a work on par with Keats’ Ode To A Nightingale. Noel Coward nicked the opening line – “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” – for his comic masterpiece Blithe Spirit in 1941. Thomas Hardy was also impressed. So impressed, in fact, that he wrote his own poem in tribute. 1887’s Shelley’s Skylark mourns the death of the bird that inspired the original – “Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell/ A little ball of feather and bone” - which is now a, “tiny pinch of priceless dust.”
Arguably the most popular example of the lark in the arts is Vaughan Williams’ celebratory The Lark Ascending, a musical piece some 15 minutes long composed in 1918 and first performed by violin and piano on 15th December 1920, at the Avonmouth and Shirehampton Choral Society Hall near Bristol. The first big performance took place on 14th June the next year in London’s Queen’s Hall, then the home of the Proms.
The British Symphony Orchestra was conducted by 32-year-old Adrian Boult while the solo performer was the leading violinist of the day, Marie Hall, playing her Viotti Stradivarius. The composition had been inspired by a poem of the same name George Meredith wrote in 1881 which referred to the bird’s melody as, “silver chain of sound”.
VW’s piece is not particularly faithful to representing the lark’s song but in its spiralling trajectory isn’t too bad in mapping out musically how the bird gets airborne. There’s a tale, possibly apocryphal, that just after the outbreak of the First World War, Vaughan Williams was walking along the cliffs overlooking the Channel, and sat down to write a tune he had thought of.
He was absorbed in his music notebook scribbling down what was to become The Lark Ascending when a diligent boy scout walking by took him for an enemy spy making maps, told him he was under arrest and insisted on escorting him to the local police station, where the manuscript was scrutinised and the composer eventually cleared of all suspicion.
Nonetheless, it’s pertinent that The Lark Ascending was written just as the nation was getting involved in the First World War which debuted airborne combat on a large scale, German Zeppelins casting deadly shadows over British towns, fields and villages, the lark’s song a balm and angelic throwback to an era of peaceful skies never to be reclaimed.
A gentleman called John Street was killed at the first Battle of the Somme in 1916, his stunning Lark Above The Trenches published posthumously. It’s so moving, you should really check it out. Here’s a sample: “Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!; Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky /Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy/ His lyric wild and free-carols a lark/ I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar…”
Another soldier, Edward Thomas, wrote Good-Night, reminiscing that, “the skylarks are far behind that sang over the down.” On 9th April 1917 he was killed by a shell blast in the first hour of the Battle of Arras at an observation post whilst directing fire. Then there was Isaac Rosenberg who wrote Returning, We Hear The Larks which, again, is mortifyingly beautiful: “Sombre the night is. /And, though we have our lives, we know / What sinister threat lurks there… But hark! Joy–joy–strange joy/ Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks/ Music showering on our upturned listening faces/ Death could drop from the dark/ As easily as song/ But song only dropped…”
Rosenberg was killed on the night of 1st April 1918 with another 10 soldiers from the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment in a town called Fampoux, north east of Arras.
Even if you’re not into poetry, you will surely recognise the legacy of a lament written on 3rd May 1915 by a Canadian doctor, Lt-Col John McRae. It’s called In Flanders Fields and it goes like this: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row,/ That mark our place; and in the sky/ The larks, still bravely singing, fly/ Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved and were loved, and now we lie/ In Flanders fields…”
A friend of McRae’s, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, had just been killed during the second Battle of Ypres. and was buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross. McRae wrote the words in his memory, sat on the back of a medical field ambulance near an advance dressing post at Essex Farm, just north of where the battle had taken place. Apparently, there was an abundance of poppies growing in the wrecked soil of the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front.
On 28th January, 1918, McCrae died of pneumonia with extensive pneumococcus meningitis at the British General Hospital in Wimereux, but his poem lived on, first published anonymously in Punch. As it gained in popularity, it was discovered by an American called Moina Michael who likened it to a spiritual experience and was inspired to write, “And now the Torch and Poppy Red, we wear in honour of our dead…”.
She campaigned to make the poppy a symbol of remembrance for those who had died in the war and the gesture caught on. Artificial poppies were first sold in Britain in 1921 to raise money for the Earl Haig Fund in support of ex-servicemen and the families of those who had perished in the conflict. They were supplied by Anna Guérin, who had been manufacturing the flowers in France to raise money for war orphans. Selling poppies proved so popular that in 1922 the British Legion founded a factory – staffed by disabled ex-servicemen – to produce its own.
The roll call of lark-focused literature goes on and on, way too long to cover completely here but Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1877 poem The Sea And The Skylark deserves a mention, as does Cecil Day-Lewis’ The Ecstatic from 1935 (“Be strong your fervent soaring, your skyward air! / Tremble there, a nerve of song!”) and Ted Hughes’ characteristically more sinister 1967 composition Skylarks (“Scrambling/ In a nightmare difficulty/ Up through the nothing/ Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,/ As if it were too late, too late/ Dithering in ether”).
In April 2020 the Royal Mail issued a postage stamp illustrating Shelley’s piece as part of a series of 10 stamps commemorating the Romantic Poets and, in 1973, the prog rock band King Crimson named their fifth studio album Larks’ Tongues In Aspic referencing the fact that back in the days of the Roman Empire, the lark’s oral appendage was considered a delicacy. It’s claimed to make a single pie required the tongues of at least a thousand larks.
These, apparently, were caught by slaves though how they could possibly have managed it I’ve no idea. The process, though, was pretty gruesome, the slaves opening the bird’s beak, snapping its neck, and cutting off its tongue before the chefs marinated them in red wine, minced ’em up, and baked ’em. In medieval times, together with doves and plovers, larks were roasted with their innards in place.
The bird’s antics have also been appropriated by the English language – skylarking or larking about meaning to behave a bit silly. This usage originated in the 18th century with the Royal Navy when a ship’s captain could command a crew “all hands to dance and skylark”, an exercise which was meant to exercise and amuse a listless crew after a period of inactivity, including racing to see who could fastest ascend the rigging.
On a final note, you know how people seem to delight in compiling playlists to be rolled out at their funerals. Personally, it’s never appealed to me. But if there must be music as I’m reduced to ash, let it be a tape of lark song to herald my arrival at the heavenly portals.
