The Mocking-Bird
From Wikisource
| The Mocking-Bird by |
| Sidney Lanier composed this poem in August 1877 while he was living in Tampa, Florida. See also Lanier’s poem To Our Mocking-Bird. |
Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray
That o’er the general leafage boldly grew,
He summ’d the woods in song; or typic drew
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray,
And all birds’ passion-plays that sprinkle dew
At morn in brake[1] or bosky avenue.
Whate’er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.
Then down he shot, bounced airily along
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again.
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain:
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakespeare on the tree?[2]
- ↑ canebrake
- ↑ According to notes from the collection published posthumously in 1884:
- “...yon trim Shakespeare on the tree”
- leads back, almost twenty years from its writing, to the poet’s college note-book where we find the boy reflecting: “A poet is the mocking-bird of the spiritual universe. In him are collected all the individual songs of all individual natures.”
- “...yon trim Shakespeare on the tree”
