BirdlessSilence

Certain phrases resonate for me with unnatural force. A current fave: "birdless silence" --- originally perhaps from Philip Larkin's poem "Next, Please" (1951) which concludes:

     Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
     Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
     A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
     No waters breed or break.

The phrase later appears in a Bob Geldof song ("Huge Birdless Silence", 1992), and echoes mythic-indirectly in a Counting Crows lyric ("Rain King", 1993, Adam Duritz):

     When I think of heaven
     Deliver me in a black-winged bird
     I think of flying down into a sea of pens and feathers
     And all other instruments of faith and sex and God
          in the belly of a black-winged bird.

Last week, delighted was I to spy in Frank Copley's translation of Vergil's Æneid (Book VI):

     There was a cave, deep, huge, and gaping wide,
     rocky, guarded by night-black pools and woods;
     above it hardly a bird could wing its way
     safely, such were the vapors that poured forth
     from that black throat, and rose toward a heaven's vault
     (and hence the Greeks have named it "Birdless Cavern").

The cave is called Avernus, in Greek Aornum --- meaning "birdless" ...

(see also SlowRunSummaries (17 Feb 2004) ... )

TopicLanguage - TopicPoetry - TopicLiterature - Datetag20040605

There is also this from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll:

     The sea was wet as wet could be,
     The sands were dry as dry.
     You could not see a cloud, because
     No cloud was in the sky:
     No birds were flying overhead--
     There were no birds to fly.

• Hy

(correlates: TolkienInspiration, ReversalOfFortune, SoSymbolic, ...)