Bye Bye Birdie

One of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language is about a talking bird. No, it’s not a parrot or a mynah – and I don’t mean Edward Lear’s accomplished Owl who eloped with a Pussy-Cat, and could sing and play the guitar while operating a sailboat. The particular bird I am referring to was remarkable in having a vocabulary apparently limited to a single word.

By now you’ve probably guessed that I’m thinking of Edgar Allen Poe’s mournful masterpiece The Raven, and its title character, an uninvited guest who insists on repeating the gloomy utterance “Nevermore,” which the despondent host/narrator assumes must refer to himself and to his unhappy circumstances, particularly his recently and irretrievably lost love, Lenore.

But what if this bird, merely seeking a warm perch for the nonce, has no interest whatever in the resident mourner? What if his “Nevermore” refers rather to his own private griefs, or indeed those of his entire avian species? Perhaps he is a relative of those four-and-twenty blackbirds who were cruelly baked in a pie. Or is he thinking of his murdered friend Cock Robin, whose confessed killer, the Sparrow, has apparently never been brought to justice?

There are indeed many reasons for any bird to be sad when contemplating the lore of his species. It’s no wonder that the song of the Nightingale, by its very beauty, brought to the poetic mind of John Keats unhappy thoughts of his own sad plight, “the weariness, the fever and the fret,” in a world “where but to think is to be full of sorrow.”

Then we have the somber story of the albatross whom the “Ancient Mariner” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge superstitiously kills with a crossbow (thinking thus to influence the winds) but is then punished by having the dead bird hung around his neck.

But we need not look only to fiction and poetry for tales to make any bird sigh “Nevermore!” The true historical record is replete with shameful episodes. There were, for example, the huge flightless Moa birds which dominated both islands of New Zealand for eons, until they were discovered by humans, and wiped out in less than two centuries, leaving us today with only a few reclusive little Kiwis as their pitiful evolutionary cousins.

Then of course, on another island, Mauritius, there was the Dodo bird, whose name has become a symbol of both stupidity and extinction – the one apparently having led to the other – since the creatures allowed themselves to be so easily caught and eaten. Almost incredibly, from the first reported sighting of a living Dodo (by Dutch sailors in 1598) to the very last one, was a period of only about 60 years.

Even more stunning a story, and one much closer to home, both in place and time, was that of the Passenger Pigeon of North America, whose numbers, even as recently as the mid-Nineteenth Century, were said to be so vast that migratory flocks, flying over a given spot, could block out the sun for hours at a time. But alas! The bird was not only so prolific, but so succulent, that it too was hunted to extinction in a few short decades. Well-documented accounts tell us that the last Passenger Pigeon, (whose name was Martha), died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.

In case I have not yet persuaded you that Poe’s Raven had plenty of his own reasons to sigh (or croak) “Nevermore!” let me remind you of the ongoing breeding and butchery of birds for their plumage, their willingness (in some varieties) to fight each other, and most of all, of course, for their “finger-lickin’” flesh. The turkey ranches and poultry farms which are so much a part of our economy, if comparisons were in order, would give some modern human death-camps a bad name. (The Raven itself is lucky that its own flesh is so unappealing that anyone contemplating such a meal would have to be truly RAVENOUS.)

But don’t forget the poor canaries, carried by miners down deep beneath the earth, whose sole purpose was not, as you might think, to cheer the workers with their singing, but simply to die, as a first indicator of the presence of any toxic fumes.

So it may very well be that what Poe’s weary Raven is really uttering is a lament for all of his own fine-feathered friends and relations. When will they at last come home to roost? – NEVERMORE!