Voiced
creatures annotation
Modern treatments of birds in relation to poetry
invariably ignore Hesiod’s Works and Days, although it cites the hawk
and nightingale, and the crane, cuckoo, swallow, and crow, plus an insect that
has been important to poetry, the cicada.
The omission of the nightingale is especially difficult to countenance,
since Hesiod has the hawk explicitly call it “poet,” and since its citation is
widely recognized among Hesiod scholars as a figure for the narrator
himself. Classicists themselves are
largely responsible for the other omissions, by treating the creatures’ calls
as mere signals for agricultural tasks.
This article argues that, on the contrary, Hesiod’s voiced
creatures prefigure those of modern poetry: the nightingale as Ur-poet
(although not as bird of love, a conceit originating in medieval times), the
crane as symbol of industry, and so on.
It is probable that Hesiod actually thought of the birds as fellow poets
whom he was translating with the aid of the Muses. (And to him the cicada was a false poet
because it presided over sweltering conditions after promising otherwise, if
the point is perhaps connected with the creature’s status as insect rather than
bird.)