The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

Sweet Singer of the Pine Barrens

Sweet Singer of the Pine Barrens The song of the hermit thrush is exquisite, some say the most beautiful bird music there is. The time and place, the last light of day and the most solitary woodland, are an essential part of the appeal. We used to have a favorite spot in the Long Island pine barrens where, in the fading light of a spring evening, we would go to hear the hermit thrush sing. A highway came right through the spot. It is not easy to find singing hermit thrushes on Long Island anymore, but the beauty of the music, the rarity of the bird, and the need to preserve its pine barrens environment gave us compelling reasons to look. Catharus guttata, the spotted sweetsinger, is not a rare bird in most places, but it is usually noticed in migration or, on occasion, in winter. But if you want to hear the exquisite cantilena, you must go to its breeding grounds. In nesting season, the hermit thrush generally lives up to its name, preferring the great forests of the north and west, but it also summers in the pine barrens of Long Island and eastern Massachusetts, where small, relict populations survive , separated from the main centers of hermit thrushdom by many miles of swelling urban sea. Walt Whitman, who grew up in SuVolk County, used bird song in his work more than once. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is a poem about a lost mockingbird—a rarity on Long Island in his day (it is extremely common today). The poem follows the pattern of repetition and variation found in the mockingbird’s song; the eVect is both formal and emotional. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d incorporates the hermit thrush song in a similar way. Although everyone knows that this poem is an elegy to the martyred President Lincoln, the evocation of the hermit thrush and its song—an essential ingredient of the work—is now obscure to most people who have never heard of the bird. When Whitman was growing up, Long Island was certainly a more bucolic place than it is now, but it was hardly a wilderness. Most of its hardwood forests had been cleared for farming and grazing or cut over many times for [ 207 ] eric salzman ⢇ cordwood and charcoal to be shipped to the New York market. The pine barrens , too sandy to till, too barren to graze, and too piney to cut for cordwood, were considered worthless and were then, as now, a backyard wilderness. Whereas other American poets imitated the bards of Old England, Whitman was the first to hear a purely New World music; the prose of ordinary American speech, the hum and bustle of cities, the clash and clatter of enterprise and industry can all be heard in his singular verse. But he was not solely an urban poet; he heard the melodies and tunes of fields and woods as clearly as the percussion of the city. Let other poets write about Old World larks and nightingales ; Whitman heard the music of his native woodland and gave it life in his poetry. “It is,” he once said about the hermit thrush, “the sweetest, solemnest of all our singing birds.” It is through the song of the bird and its continuity in the landscape that Whitman comes to terms with the death of Lincoln: And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me, The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three And he sang the carol of death, and verse for him I love. From deep secluded recesses, From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still. * To the tally of my soul Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night. Loud in the pines and cedars dim, Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume . . . Passing over the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul, Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever altering song, As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, Sadly sinking and fainting, as warming and warming, and yet again bursting with joy, Covering the earth and filling the spread of heaven . . . Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird, 208 ] eric salzman Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from...