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Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism by Beryl Rowland

1981; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1981.0008

1913-4835

Chauncey Wood,

Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies

R E V I E W S Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978). xvii, 213. $15.00 This is the third of Beryl Rowland’s books on generally zoological topics, and is intended as a companion volume to her earlier work, Animals with Human Faces. Both Birds with Human Souls and Animals with Human Faces are written by a scholar and contain much scholarly material, but they are not intended primarily for scholarly use. Professor Rowland’s earliest work in this genre, Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World, is very different. It is a scholarly explication of the poetic function of the animal images in Chaucer’s poetry, and is a useful reference work for teachers of Chaucer and for those writing on many aspects of the poet’s work. Birds with Human Souls, however, like Animals with Human Faces, is not primarily but sec­ ondarily directed towards scholars. It is organized entirely on encyclopedic lines, and proceeds from Albatross to Wren with comments on the appear­ ances of these birds in literary works as diverse as Coleridge’s “Ancient Mar­ iner” (for the Albatross) and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (for the Wren). The book also contains numerous comments on birds in myth, folklore, and in non-western cultures. Birds with Human Souls is, therefore, that rara avis a book that can be used by scholars and enjoyed by general readers. The teacher of English will find small but incisive analyses of poems like Richard Wilbur’s “Still, Citizen Sparrow,” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” while the reader seeking entertainment as well as knowledge will discover that in Victorian times ladies of the evening were known as “sparrow catchers,” while in the works of Martial and Juvenal “raven” is the term used to describe a lover who indulges in sexual practices commonly and erroneously thought to be par­ ticularly modern. Of course, the most likely “general reader” to encounter this book is someone who is a teacher of English who starts on one of the entries in order to find out something more about, say, the Blackbird that Wallace Stevens looked at in thirteen different ways, or about the curious E n g lish Studies in C anada, vii, i , Spring 1981 image of Lear’s children as “pelican daughters,” and then simply reads on and on. An example will help. Should some reader of this journal feel the need for some fresh ammunition prior to teaching a class on Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” he or she would find, under the entry for “Cock,” the following: a rehearsal of various interpretations of the significance of the Cock dedicated to Aesculapius by Socrates just before his death; an analysis of Ambrose’s hymn “Aeterne Rerum Conditor,” which introduced the “gallo canente” into the liturgy of the church; the information that an ironwork Cock on top of a medieval church represents a preacher; a medieval exegesis of the significance of the Cock whose crowing is linked with Peter’s denial of Christ; an explanation of the symbolism of white sugar cocks served at Chi­ nese weddings; remarks on the symbolism of the fighting Cock on medieval tombstones as an emblem of Christian courage; an explication of the innu­ endo in the medieval lyric of the “gentle cok” that is said at night to “percheth him / In myn ladyes chaumber” ; a similar comment on the Cock in D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Man Who Died,” which was originally published in Paris as “The Escaped Cock” ; and, finally, an interpretation of Chaucer’s Chanticleer as a priest who succumbs to the world, the flesh (not surprisingly), and the devil. I would defy anyone not to read the whole entry. One assumes that Professor Rowland’s initial researches into bird and ani­ mal symbolism as a medievalist seeking to explain references in Chaucer provided the basis for her two subsequent books that deal with much broader subject matter. Much of the medieval material, however, remains; for exam­ ple, virtually all of the book’s three-score illustrations are from the Middle Ages, while medieval bestiaries play a large...