Opinion: Losing our Surround-sound

When one species dies, what is lost forever is an entire lifestyle, a whole tradition of living and, therefore, a part of planetary memory

By Pramod K Nayar

The nightingale’s song, the warbles and calls of different species have been the foundation of numerous poems down the ages. Animal communications, a huge field of study, argue for intra- and cross-species communications in the nonhuman. For those who believe these are human attempts to capture the world of animals, there are others who believe that animal sounds are a part of how humans and animals engage in world-making together. As the animal studies scholar Sundhya Walther notes, ‘we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness’.

Much verse has been expended on reading birdsounds, metaphorising them and mourning their disappearance. This disappearance, for the poets, reduces the value of human habitation itself. The human habitat requires Nature’s surround-sound in these poets.

Sound Sense

Jonathan Bate, the well-known ecocritic, argues that poetry is a response to the poetry – or ‘song’, as he calls it – of  the earth. Wordsworth, Shelley and the English Romantic poets built their poetic verses and worlds aroundthe nightingale’s or the thrush’s musical notes and, often, made metaphoric connections with the meanings and lives of humans.

In Shelley,the human is an ear-witness, for the bird is invisible: ‘Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight’. Later, Shelley offers a series of similes: ‘like a poet hidden’, ‘like a high-born maiden’, etc before making his comparison: ‘our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’. Committed to seeing the bird as a precursor to the poet, Shelley pleads:

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

The bird is a muse that spurs human versification. Following Bate, this is an attempt to integrate the human with Nature, at least in verse. But it also implies a willingness to learn from Nature (note that the first verb of Shelley’s last stanza is ‘teach’), and this reiterates the older theme of Nature-as-teacher.

Others,like Keats, see Natural sounds as extending beyond the lifespan of the human:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! 

         No hungry generations tread thee down; 

The voice I hear this passing night was heard 

         In ancient days by emperor and clown: 

This is an attempt to demonstrate a certain continuity in and of Nature: generations of humans have heard the song of the earth, and learned from it, taken pleasure from it.

There is a pleasing uncertainty about bird sounds and their preferred meaning, for instance, in Wallace Stevens’ famous ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’:

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

Stevens recalls Walt Whitman’s equally famous ‘mocking-bird’s throat’ and the human’s ‘beginning notes of yearning and love’ in ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Native American and European descent, in ‘Platte Mares’ describes a landscape of multispecies sounds. Sandhill cranes, known for their trumpet-like calls, dot this landscape, and their mares are ‘purring chortling kettling’. Describing the soundscape as ‘call & response’ Coke documents a variety of their calls:

unison call, antiphonal

territorial call, mated

postures vocalized.

In Coke, it is just ‘the season’, defined by bird sounds, which makes a pleasurable season for the human ear-witness too.

Animal sounds surround us — althoughurban habitations today are short on these — and constitute, as the poets indicate, a world-making. The nonhuman mediates our experience of the world: they make up our senses.

Preying Sounds

Ted Hughes famously described the hawk in terms that are evocatively violent. Hughespresents the bird’s unsurpassed power in visceral but silent terms:

I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads 

And the hawk, obviously pleased with the world, decides that ‘I am going to keep things like this’.Decades before Hughes, Alfred Tennyson imaged Nature as a powerful bird. In Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ the predator makes no sound as it swoops down:

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

But human interpretations of predators and prey are also modes of world-making: we announce that Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ (Tennyson). And oftentimes, we miss the meaning of the sounds.

In Derek Walcott’s ‘The Season of Phantasmal Peace’, he records the birds’ ‘twittering tongues’. The birds in a concerted effort, ‘lifted together/the huge net of the shadows of this earth’. But the humans are unsure of the nature of this Nature:

they could not hear

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,

bearing the net higher, covering this world

like the vines of an orchard

Walcott’s lines resonate with the point made by Bate and other ecocritics that humans fail miserably in interpreting the sounds Nature makes.

Unsound Habitation

For many poets, the arrival of modernity and its consort, colonialism, has produced a significant loss: the shared world-making of humans and nonhumans.They mourn the fact that nonhuman sounds have all but disappeared, thus depriving human habitats too. Native American poets, in particular, see the European arrival in the ‘new world’ and the building of American ‘civilisation’ as instrumental in the loss of species habitats, and sounds.

Sherwin Bitsui, the Navajo poet, in his untitled poem in the collection Flood Song writes:

a nation growling into them
as they scrape double-plumed birdsongs

from the beaks of drowned hummingbirds

and smash them into eagle-bone whistles

then ringlets of fire

then the blood of orphaned lambs.

The nation ‘growls’ into and at the birds, and other species.

For Linda Hogan, another Native American poet, in a poem titled ‘Crows’, the crows’ ‘gravel voices/are thunder breaking the sky’. But Hogan notes that the crows’ sounds are drowned out by the noise of guns, and having been shot, the birds fall silent. So the harmless cacophony of bird calls is ended by the violent sound of bullets.

Even conservation attempts, writes Chippewa poet Kimberly Blaeser, cannot but be cliches now:

Nominal signs, these words we use—future, ecology, seven generations—

have yellowed into clichés, editorials that line the cages

of captured birds, burn in unransomed stone fireplaces

of America’s aspiring, royal mining families.

As humans destroy the habitats of the critters that makeand heal our world, the loss of one species is not of that species alone. When one species dies, what is lost forever is an entire lifestyle, a whole tradition of living and therefore a part of planetary memory.

This loss of planetary memory generates poetic mourning, leading Mahmoud Darwish to ask: ‘where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ But we also have Wallace Stevens in ‘Sunday Morning’:

I am content when awakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?

(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)