Why Do Birds Sing?

‘The same nightingales sing the same trills, / and in different tongues it is the same song.’ (Darío, “The Swans”, 7–8)

Today, amidst the silence, I heard a single bird practising a melody. I wonder if it knew that the world was now listening - that the streets had fallen silent and the people had retreated to listen from the inwards out. I wonder if it had sung that tune every day for years and I had heard it only now, when the world had fallen silent. 

The sound was refined, as though it had long been sharpened for this moment, to cut through the silence. In literature, birdsong has often been likened to the creative principle - Plato imagines that the soul of the poet Thamyras chooses the life of a nightingale, Shelley writes ‘A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’ (Defence of Poetry), and Baudelaire likens the poet to the clipped wings of his albatross when he writes, ‘poets are like these lords of sky and cloud’ (“Albatrosses”, Flowers of Evil, trans. Jacques LeClercq). The poet, meaning not only the creative, but the ancient bard, the keeper and teller of history.

Perhaps, as the cacophony of everyday sounds diminishes, we each can refine our voices to cut through the silence. To be, for now, the solitary bird that practises the same melody each day. I will only say that today I very much felt Woolf’s sentiment when she writes, ‘How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself." (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

Thought of the Day

Amidst the silence, I heard a single bird practising a melody. I wonder if it knew that the world was now listening - that the streets had fallen silent and the people had retreated to listen from the inwards out.

-Gabriela Milkova