Dear Carolyn and all,
you may find this
interesting:
In the last, fifth, stanza of The
Lord Forbid my Going Mad (1833), the poem I cited in my previous
posting,* Pushkin mentions a nightingale:
And I shall hear at night neither the
brilliant
voice of the nightingale,
nor the dense forest's murmur,
but my companions' cries,
the oaths of the night wardens,
shrill sounds, the clink of chains.
In the Commentary to his Translation of Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin (note to Seven:VI:5-6; vol. 3, p. 74 of the
Princeton/Bollingen edition), Nabokov (the above translation from Pushkin
is his) says that the epithet "brilliant" (yarkiy) is Pushkin's special
code in which he signals his awareness of Batyushkov's madness. The same
epithet, unusual in the Russian poetry for the nightingale, was used by
Batyushkov in his elegy The Last Spring (1815): "The brilliant voice of
Philomela / has charmed the gloomy pinewood".
Let's now switch from Pushkin to Tyutchev, author
of the short poem Bezumie ("Madness", 1830). In his eight-line poem
Vecher mglistyi i nenastnyi ("A misty, foul-weathered evening", written
in the 1830s) Tyutchev speaks of the shock he expierenced when
hearing the skylark, a bird that sings (unlike most other birds,
while soaring above the ground) before noon, at an unusually
late hour. The bird's voice stunned the poet's soul like a horrible
laughter of madness: Kak bezum'ya smekh uzhasnyi / On vsyu dushu mne
potryas.
Let's now switch from Russia to England
("where poets flew the highest", according to Shade; see Kinbote's note to l.
922). To a Skylark ("Hail to thee,
blithe Spirit, / Bird thou never wert...") is the famous poem (1820) by P.
B. Shelley. Its last stanza reads:
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.
"Shelley's incandescent soul" is mentioned in
Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity (see Kinbote's note to l.
347). On the other hand, the title of one of Shades' books of
poetry, Hebe's Cup, seems to refer to the last stanza of
Tyutchev's poem Vesennyaya groza ("The Spring Thunderstorm",
1828) that mentions yet a third bird, the eagle:
You'd say: the frivolous Hebe,
feeding Zeus' eagle,
has spilled on Earth, laughing,
the thunder-boiling cup.
Add to this that Shade's parents were
ornithologists, that his wife's maiden name is Irondell (which comes, according
to Kinbote, from hirondelle, French for "swallow") and that his
last unfinished long poem begins with an avian image ("I was the shadow of the
waxwing").
I could say more, but the above would suffice
for now .
*the poem's second line, "Net, legche posokh i
suma", can be paraphrased, to rhyme with the first, as "a
beggar's lot is not as bad" (suma, bag, being a traditional
attribute of a [Russian] beggar; khodit' s sumoy means "to beg, go
a-begging"). As a next step, one is tempted to substitute "exile" for
"beggar". Then we'll have: "The Lord, forbid my going mad / an exile's lot is
not as bad".