Onomatopoeia, Interiority, and Incorporation

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A largely unnoticed volume published in 1832 appears to have TV been the first work on birds to include nonce-transcriptions of their calls as an aid to identification. This adaptation of an ancient poetic technique for the purposes of natural history and pedagogy remains familiar today in birders’ field guides and in stories and verse for children.² As well as seeing the first syllabic representation of birdsong in a work of natural history, the first half of the nineteenth century was also the period when teaching animal sounds became a function of children’s literature.³ The 1832 volume was titled The Minstrelsy of the Woods, or Sketches and Songs Connected with the Natural History of . . . British and Foreign Birds; it combines the two genres, since it is explicitly addressed to young readers, both in its dedication to the anonymous author’s “beloved young relatives” and in the introductory poem “To my Brother’s Children.” The book’s introduction states its debt to Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797–1804) and to Georges Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom (published 1807 as Le Règne Animal). Cuvier and Bewick are indeed major sources for the Minstrelsy’s descriptions of birds’ appearance and habit; it also draws from them fundamental principles of organization. The basic object of study in the Minstrelsy, as in Bewick and Cuvier, is the species, and the work’s aim is to teach its readers to identify the species of birds they encounter in the wild. Its organization is thus modeled on that which Bewick made standard for field guides to this day, with the work being divided into sections grouping birds by families, and within these sections a chapter devoted to each species.

To the taxonomic markers of habit, plumage, and so forth that it adopts from Bewick and Cuvier, the Minstrelsy adds phonetic transcriptions of birdcalls. In some cases these transcriptions are traditional, as when the cry of the tawny owl is described as “well imitated by the syllables tee-whit or too-whit, and the hollow shuddering kind of note too-whoo.”⁴ The book’s title points two ways; as well as a handbook on identifying birds by their song, it is also a miscellany of poetry about birds. While it includes long passages from other poets including James Thomson and Charlotte Smith, much of the Minstrelsy’s poetry is original. Each of the birds it treats has a poem dedicated to it, in many of which the birds speak for themselves, with the syllabic transcription of their songs making a refrain. Thus, “The Song of the Wood-Grouse”:

You must look for meOn my mountain tree,Where the hardy pine uncultured grows,Where the foaming torrent wildly flows,There look for me,On my mountain tree,With my clarion note he-de-he-de-he.⁵

There may be earlier texts to use phonetic transcriptions of birdcalls as species markers, though I have not found any; I suggest in any case that in its assumption that animals of a given species always say the same thing, and its setting of their utterance in verse, Minstrelsy is an artifact of its historical moment.

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We know the poetic technique employed by the Minstrelsy as onomatopoeia, and this essay will consider two different kinds of animal onomatopoeia in Romantic poetry. In the examples to be discussed, I will argue that onomatopoeia is treated as a poetic error, incorporating animal utterance in the poem only to reject it, or to make the animal itself an object of sacrifice.

Onomatopoeia’s foundational theorist was Quintilian, in whose late first century Institutio Oratoria the term refers—as its etymology implies—to any new creation of a word. The examples Quintilian gives, however, are all of what would be termed onomatopoeias in our time, words coined to refer to a sound while also mimicking it: they are “mugitus, lowing, sibilus, a hiss, and murmur.”⁶ For the Elizabethan rhetorician George Puttenham, onomatopoeia is “the New namer”;⁷ Puttenham is explicit that the newly-minted word should be “consonant” to...