From lapwings in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to the titular raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, birds have long acted as inspiration for literature. Some are used to evoke a sense of freedom and wildness while others are an ill-omen, foreshadowing tragedy. The curlew, however, has long evoked a whole spectrum of human emotions.
Sadness, longing, joy – they can all be found in the call of the curlew, and it is this call that lodges deep in the hearts of poets, authors and story tellers. Take W. B. Yeats, who gave the curlew a starring role in several poems.
In He Reproves the Curlew, by W.B. Yeats, an escape into the supposed sanctuary of nature is tainted by the sorrowful call of our largest wading bird, causing the narrator to cry:
‘O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.’
While modern nature writing uses nature largely as a vehicle for escape, He Reproves the Curlew highlights how the natural world can also brutalise our emotions. The curlews ‘love weep’ embodies Yeats’s yearning for a love now lost and which he may never truly recover from – we will find our grief echoed wherever we turn.
Some have described the curlews call as sounding like a grieving mother crying for her lost child, and in this instance, it is used by Dylan Thomas to mourn not lost children, but children that will never be.
‘Sweet-throated cry, by one no longer heard. Who, more than many, loved the wandering bird.’ – Vernon Watkins
‘Curlews in April hang their harps over the misty valleys. A wet-footed god of the horizons.’ – Ted Hughes
