Riding between the villages of Hazelbrook and Woodford this morning, I was afforded a magnificent view to the north. Wooded hills and mountains lay like a smooth carpet, the dark greens of the gums almost silver in the winter sun. Australian trees do not lose their leaves in autumn - the dry climate would make their replenishment untenable - though we have enough introduced exotics to throw some colour into the mix.

There was also apparent a calamity of bird sound; anything that could get up a tweet was in full song, doubtless rejoicing in the splendid morn. And thus Shelley's Skylark came to mind, and the bird that inspired the hymn of praise that is To A Skylark. 

'What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plains?'

Shelley was writing in the first two decades of the 19th Century. More than half a century later, Thomas Hardy would pen a tribute to Shelley by way of eulogising (the now long dead) skylark in Shelley's Skylark.

'The dust of the skylark Shelley heard

And made immortal through times to be;

Though it only lived like another bird.

And knew not its immortality.'

Birds often feature in poetry and seem to be somewhat of an inspiration. The poet whose poetry got me hooked as a 16 year old was John Keats. Ode To A Nightingale was one of the first things I knew by heart, as gloomy an encomium as one is likely to read, for Keats is very preoccupied with thoughts of death. The bird song is almost an intrusion into his introspection. And yet it is a beautiful poem, teetering on fracturing and conflicting emotions.

'Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;'

I love that allusion, echoing, as it does, over millennia.

I wonder what appeals to thinking teens nowadays?