This week’s choice marks the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough and it is “The Naturalist’s Summer-Evening Walk” by Gilbert White, another pioneering naturalist.
These, Nature’s works, the curious mind employ,
Gilbert White (1720—1793)
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy:
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein!
Poem 437. The Naturalist’s Summer-Evening Walk
When day declining sheds a milder gleam,
What time the may-fly haunts the pool or stream;
When the still owl skims round the grassy mead,
What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed;
Then be the time to steal adown the vale,
And listen to the vagrant cuckoo’s tale;
To hear the clamorous curlew call his mate,
Or the soft quail his tender pain relate;
To see the swallow sweep the dark’ning plain
Belated, to support her infant train;
To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring
Dash round the steeple, unsubdu’d of wing:
Amusive birds! — say where your hid retreat
When the frost rages and the tempests beat;
Whence your return, by such nice instinct led,
When spring, soft season, lifts her bloomy head?
Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride,
The God of Nature is your secret guide!
While deep’ning shades obscure the face of day
To yonder bench leaf-shelter’d let us stray,
’Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,
And all the fading landscape sinks in night;
To hear the drowsy dorr come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket cry;
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood;
To catch the distant falling of the flood;
While o’er the cliff th’awakened churn-owl hung
Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song;
While high in air, and pois’d upon his wings,
Unseen, the soft, enamour’d woodlark sings:
These, Nature’s works, the curious mind employ,
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy:
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein!
Each rural sight, each sound, each smell, combine;
The tinkling sheep-bell, or the breath of kine;
The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze,
Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees.
The chilling night-dews fall: away, retire;
For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire!
Thus, ere night’s veil had half obscur’d the sky,
Th’impatient damsel hung her lamp on high:
True to the signal, by love’s meteor led,
Leander hasten’d to his Hero’s bed.
This poem, written as a letter to Thomas Pennant, is a glorious evocation of the natural world as Gilbert White saw it. White is widely considered to be the first ecologist and is therefore a forerunner of David Attenborough’s.
White’s rural evening walk captures a great swathe of nature. We see mayflies, crickets, glow-worms and bees—“dorr” is an Old English name for a bee or fly, hence dumbledore for a bumblebee; we see the hares and bats; most of all we see and hear the birds: owls, cuckoos, curlews, quail, swallows, swifts, and woodlarks. Each is described differently according to their calls or behaviour—the vagrant cuckoo, the clamour of the curlew contrasted with the soft, plaintive call of the quail; the swallow and the swift swinging effortlessly through the air and the owl skimming noiselessly along.
Many of these experiences are now commonplace thanks to Attenborough and the long list of technical experts behind his programmes but White triggers our imagination to perform much the same office.
He observes that the birds he names will be absent once winter sets in and wonders where they may lie hidden (migration was only accepted as the explanation at the end of the eighteenth century) over the sparse times—the “baffled searches” of “man’s prying pride” having been fruitless (since the birds were not in fact hiding).
His description of the later evening when “blended objects fail the swimming sight” (swimming in this sense meaning blurred) is quite enchanting: the buzzing of a belated bee, the noise of crickets, the bats swooping past and the cries of owls and the song of larks. He describes the feeling of contentment the scene brings him—the natural world and the “rural sights”: sheep and cattle, the scent of mown hay and chimney smoke mixing as the glow-worms begin their courtship by lighting their lamps just as in the classical Greek myth Hero guided her lover Lysander by lighting a lamp at the top of her tower.
I like the way White describes the natural world; it reminds me of the quiet, authoritative tones that Britain’s favourite naturalist has described the natural world since before I was born.
Happy birthday Sir David Attenborough—it is a better world for your presence. I can heartily recommend the audiobook of his autobiography, Life on Air, read by the man himself.
There are two performances of the poem on YouTube—I have chosen the one by Steven Crossley.
