Wednesday
The ruby throated hummingbirds have been flocking to our feeders recently, sometimes looking like a swarm of large insects. It’s a riveting sight and reminds me somewhat of the angels hovering around the celestial rose that Dante witnesses in Paradise. Here’s his description:
Meanwhile
That other host, that soar aloft to gaze
And celebrate his glory, whom they love,
Hover’d around; and, like a troop of bees,
Amid the vernal sweets alighting now,
Now, clustering, where their fragrant labour glows,
Flew downward to the mighty flow’r, or rose
From the redundant petals, streaming back
Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy.
Faces had they of flame, and wings of gold;
The rest was whiter than the driven snow.
And as they flitted down into the flower,
From range to range, fanning their plumy loins,
Whisper’d the peace and ardor, which they won
From that soft winnowing. Shadow none, the vast
Interposition of such numerous flight
Cast, from above, upon the flower, or view
Obstructed aught. For, through the universe,
Wherever merited, celestial light
Glides freely, and no obstacle prevents.
Unlike the angels, however, the hummingbirds don’t whisper as they fan their plumy loins. Rather, their wings beat the air at an average of 53 beats a second, making a kind of drilling sound. It can be somewhat unnerving when I go out to refill the feeders, and for this unsettling aspect of hummingbirds, D. H. Lawence has the poem for us.
Lawrence gets a lot right about the beauty of hummingbirds—how they race down avenues and how they appear to be “a little bit chipped off in brilliance” (great assonance in that line). Given their frenetic activity, the world seems to slow down around them, which Lawrence captures through the contrast between “whizzing” and “slow, succulent stems.” But then he shifts to a nightmare vision. Here’s the poem:
I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chirped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.I believe there were no flowers then,
In the world where humming-birds flashed ahead of creation
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.We look at him through the wrong end of the telescope of time,
Luckily for us.
I am put in mind of Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds,” later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, which has such passages as the following:
They kept coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings. The terrible, fluttering wings. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. Nothing else mattered. He must keep them from his eyes. They had not learned yet how to cling to a shoulder, how to rip clothing, how to dive in mass upon the head, upon the body. But with each dive, with each attack, they became bolder. And they had no thought for themselves. When they dived low and missed, they crashed, bruised and broken, on the ground. As Nat ran he stumbled, kicking their spent bodies in front of him.
Yes, I’m glad I’m a large creature when I venture out amongst them. And that they hold off from attacking me.
