Louisa Thomsen Brits considers the symbolic significance of the lark.
Dawn. Fog has claimed the Downs. Spilling, clouding, curling, swirling through coombe and catch. Above the billowing brume, naked hills swell smooth in dips and curves like sleeping figures half hidden by the froth of an eiderdown pushed aside during the night.
Dark silhouettes of cattle and wind-bent hawthorn emerge and recede as I walk through the veiled valley. There’s a faint remnant of winter frost underfoot. From a low, shrouded stage a skylark begins to sing and in the same instant, the rising sun blooms pale primrose yellow through the monochrome scene. The whole hillside is momentarily transfigured by a glow seemingly summoned by the lark’s melodious, faltering song.
In the space of an inhalation and exaltation, it’s as if all life up here shares a brightening, a promise of spring. Our separateness feels less obvious in fog; we’re hidden from each other yet more acutely aware of participating in a larger, invisible reality, of inhabiting one poetic space.
I have always loved the privacy of mist and fog, choosing to walk at dawn and dusk when mist often rises from the river reach or fog rolls in from seaward slopes. In those in-between spaces, I feel held and half-hidden, creaturely and calm, intimately connected. The rustling and calling of other living beings close-by express an inwardness that awakens what is innermost in me.
In her poem ‘Prayer’, Alice Oswald describes the soul ‘when it goes under flesh,’ as ‘small and creaturish’ 1 . The word animal comes from the Latin for soul, spirit or breath — anima. Anima is Jung’s archetypal feminine unconscious with its sense of felt presence and vital force. The lark is animate, anima, air, breath, soul, spirit, sensation. It speaks to our poetic awareness.
We tend to smuggle our very human feelings into the selves and sounds of more-than-human beings. Larks have appeared in music, poetry, painting, and mythology as a symbol of bravery, hope, inner freedom, joy, new beginnings, playfulness, even recklessness.
The skylark was a favourite of the English romantics, an emblem of ecstasy for Percy Bysshe Shelley who hails the bird as a ‘blithe Spirit’, likening its presence in flight to ‘an unbodied joy’ in his poem ‘To a Skylark’. For Wordsworth, the lark is ‘full of gladness’ 2 .
But the remarkable ascension and bubbling ballad of a male lark is a display flight to attract a mate, defend territory and distance us from its nest on the ground. There’s a flutter of fear as a lark swiftly rises into a sudden stream of song.
Everything desires to survive and thrive, to flourish and connect; each life engaged in its own intrinsic purpose — each self-fulfilling beingness integral to the very fabric of reality — an unfolding of the potential of the cosmos in every living thing.
In his poem As ‘Kingfishers Catch Fire’, Gerard Manley Hopkins speaks of how every creature expresses its essence 3 ,
‘Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.’
Sometimes it’s only in extremis that we find our voice.
Five days after we launched the hardback copies of my most recent book Path, a constellation of tumours was found in my left breast, hidden close to my heart, like the titmouse nest tucked into a twist of briar and blackthorn held in its pages. I had written a book that explores the value of a culture of encounter, registration, and reciprocity but how do we really know what is expressing itself through and within us? What are the impulses that drive us to create? Sometimes our artistic minds can seem to be ahead of us, calling from a place with a clearer view, just out of sight. Stripped of my defences after a mastectomy, I saw how Path is also a story about moving through uncertainty, yielding to animal instinct and to the skein of creaturely connection woven by the many lives that intersect our own.
Since that time, countless others have experienced an acute sense of vulnerability as we navigated the precariousness and pain of living through a pandemic and continue to reorientate ourselves in the deepening shadow of the climate crisis. In response to lives circumscribed by lockdowns and fear, many thousands of people have taken up walking, entering a new intimacy with the landscape of their lives, discovering an ‘ecological self’ 4 — that aspect of our being that acknowledges our interdependence with the rest of nature.
A friend commented recently that Path, “reads like a prayer” for myself. Three days after the paperback version was published, my remaining breast was amputated.
Through the days that followed, walking these same downland paths with my brother, trying to listen to my instinct and intuition as I unpicked the horror I felt at the prospect of more oncological treatment, my feral nature came forward to guide me.
Almost from between our feet, a lark burst upwards in a startle of flickering feathers. I felt an uncharacteristic and irrational fear for the small bird as it climbed high and higher still into wide blue sky, becoming an almost invisible ‘singing spec’ 5. Absurdly anxious that this skylark was flying so high that it would disappear out of sight, I felt the same physical sensations of rising panic and dissociation as I had when facing my mortality and examining my will to live and, in truth, my willingness to die.
The lark plucked at the fabric of my earthbound, bone-weary body, lifting a thread skywards, simultaneously unstitching me and spooling silver song across the hillside. The Latin name for skylark is Alauda arvensis, capturing the sense of flight towards the light. I wasn’t ready to fly that far from earthly being.
When a singing lark is tired, he plummets towards his nest on the ground. I wanted to drop into my own hidden nest, far from the responsibilities of daily life. In his poem ‘The Caged Skylark’ — in part an allegory of his life cramped by routine duties and the constant frustration of his creative and creaturely impulses — Hopkins describes how,
‘As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage,
Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells —’ 6
For me, it’s Hopkins again who most deftly uses language to capture the inscape 7 , the very soul, form, and flow of a lark selved flight in his poem, ‘The Sea and the Skylark’:
‘Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.’ 8
Since the medication that has caused permanent damage to the spiralling tissue of my inner ears, it’s more difficult for me to hear the skillie’s 9 song as it lifts and twists skyward. As a cruel redress, I hear a constant, high-pitched ringing and trilling that sometimes sounds like birdsong. When larks rise just ahead of me on the path in a flash of white-edged wings, I can follow the rhythm of their quivering flight and am reminded of both the joy of aliveness and fragility of existence. Skylarks, like so many other fellow creatures, are on the red list.
Today is the spring equinox. Blackthorn has blossomed a caress of cream petals over the dark spine of winter. Like larks suspended between sky and earth, we’re held in this potent, transformative moment where there is balance between night and day, dark and light. These threshold days are full of potential. Weighted with so much concern for the state of the world, we can still rise up and sing against the odds.
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1 This description is from Prayer, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Faber and Faber, 2007), p.40.
2 From the poem To a Sky-Lark by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Wordsworth also celebrated the lark in a later poem, To the Skylark.
3 Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose selected and edited by W.H. Gardner (Penguin, 1953), p.51.
4 Ecological self – a term introduced by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1912-2009) to describe the human potential to identify with other living beings; to perceive the notion of self as interwoven with the rest of life.
5 From the poem The Skylark by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)
6 Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, p.31.
7 Hopkins coined the word inscape, ‘as a name for that ‘individually-distinctive’ form (made up of various sense-data) which constitutes the rich and revealing ‘one-ness’ of the natural object’ (W.H. Gardner). Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, xx.
8 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, p.29.
9 ‘Skillie’ is a Sussex dialect word for skylark.
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Louisa Thomsen Brits is an author interested in the seam between domestic and wild, ecology and poetry. She writes about our interconnectedness and the rhythms and patterns that unite and define all life. Her most recent book, ‘Path’, is a short story about reciprocity. She’s currently writing ‘Undersong’, a book about ‘the music of what happens’. You can follow her on Instagram here.