In the spiritual realm, birds have a special place, especially cardinals. Poets think of them as messengers. Why, I am not sure. My mother loved herons; seeing one, we think of her. Another friend loves geese unseen; her father was a Marine. The cardinal’s feathers light up the woods, quiet as a dove – message from above?
Emily Dickinson thought birds were like “hope.” She reveled in them, and in them, it. Not just cardinals, she pondered how they flew, what they knew:
“Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all …”
The poet Shelly, who studied birds while hiking, seemed to think they opened a door within him, letting out his “blithe spirit,” inspiring him to write.
Whether Shelley thought they touched heaven, or were just in communication with it, they held a key. They do for me. Of his skylark,” he wrote:
“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
Having seen peregrine falcons dart about Acadia’s Precipice and swallows under my eaves at dark, now and then a lark, I wonder: Are birds somehow given lightness to remind us, to lighten me and you, making us think of who knows who?
Shelley’s ode continued:
“Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar,
and soaring ever singest.”
When do we tend to see birds in winter? Morning and sunset. Unless it is an owl, this is when they catch our eyes, chickadees and woodpeckers, birds of every size.
Wrote Shelley:
“In golden lighting
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams,
And Heaven is overflow’d.”
So, in the hurly-burly, fast-paced world we inhabit, paying our daily dues, winter robbing us of light, dawns thick with news – it is alright … to slow now and then, search an eagle or wren, find a cardinal to lift your spirits, yeast to leaven, a little message, bright and clear, from a loving heaven.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
