A Year with the Birds

Georg. i. 356 foll. I quote this time Mr. R. D. Blackmore’s admirable rhyming version.

Ere yet the lowering storm breaks o’er the land
A sullen groundswell heaves along the strand,
On mountain heights dry snapping sounds are heard,
The booming shores bedrizzled are and blurred,
And soughs of wind sigh through the forest stirred.
The wave already scarce foregoes the hull
When homeward from the offing flies the gull,
With screams borne inland by the blast; and when
Sea-coots play round the margin of the fen;
The heron quits the marsh where she was bred
And soars upon a cloud far overhead.

86

Following Keightley’s Commentary, which is the best we possess on Georg. i. 351-423.

87

Aen. xii. 473. Mr. Mackail translates: “As when a black swallow flits through some rich lord’s spacious house, and circles in flight in the lofty halls, gathering her tiny food for sustenance to her twittering nestlings, and now swoops down the spacious colonnades, now round the wet ponds,” &c.

88

Aen. ix. 564; xi. 721, 751; xii. 247.

89

As in the poplar-shade a nightingale
Mourns her lost young, which some relentless swain,
Spying, from the nest has torn unfledged, but she
Wails the long night, and perched upon a spray
With sad insistence pipes her dolorous strain,
Till all the region with her wrongs o’erflows.

    – Georg. iv. 511.

90

Aen. vi. 309. “Multitudinous as leaves fall dropping in the forests at autumn’s earliest frost, or birds swarm landward from the deep gulf, when the chill of the year routs them over seas and drives them to sunny lands.”