Misadventures in the Land of Fables #60

An example of creative confusion. Two bird fables from Arthur Golding got conflated in my recollection while I was occupied with other business. Add an original thought of my own—they happen!—and a new fable was conceived, the off-spring of these three parents.

In one fable, a ‘puttock’ (a bird of prey) seizes a nightingale and refuses its proffer of a song in exchange for mercy with the brutal line “the belly hath no ears”; in another, a kite mocks a cuckoo for its lowly diet of worms, but the cuckoo is quite content with its status, and the kite gets punished for its hubris, caught and caged while stalking a pigeon.

I felt the conclusion of ‘The Kite and the Cuckoo’ too reassuring. The kite gets captured because of pride, because it over-reaches, the cuckoo remains safe in its humility. Convenient. But it seems to me the kite’s demise was more a matter of negligence and I’m not a great believer in the western version of karma, or what goes around come around.

I suppose it is also that I find a pessimistic resolution to have greater weight. The puttock’s argument is hard to refute. It is proverbial. “An empty stomach has no ears.” But what would the world be without music and literature? These things are not luxuries, they are so often borne of suffering and sorrow, they are what holds the soul together.

But that’s one for another time.

Meanwhile, the clash of raptor and what you might call less aggressive bird stuck in my mind. This is perhaps why I started thinking about claws and how both birds, well, all birds have them, but some, those with talons, use them for killing. And so I came up with a fable focused on that contrast, and combined realism (aka pessimism) and reassurance.

You can read it here: ‘The Hawk and the Dove.’

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It seems the confusion spanned centuries. ‘The Hawk and the Nightingale‘ first appeared in Hesiod’s ‘Works and Days,’ and therefore pre-dates Aesop. Here it represents a blunt statement of power. The hawk derides the nightingale for crying out when it is caught. Why protest when it is merely the powerful exerting their power? But this is not Hesiod’s position and he proceeds to develop an argument condemning its injustice: the powerful vacate their authority if they depart from justice.

Later versions build on this scenario. The idea of the deal is introduced, a song in exchange for mercy. In some, as with Golding’s ‘Puttock’ and Lafontaine, the deal is rejected; in others, the nightingale proves too traumatised to sing sweetly. And then there is the comeuppance where the inattentive predator finds itself the victim. Golding produces a new fable for this outcome ‘Kite and Cuckoo,’ but in Caxton (1484), two centuries earlier, it is a variation on the Hesiodic original. See here.

I had initially subtitled the fable as ‘after Golding’ because it was a response to the Elizabethan writer’s work, but it now strikes me as a subtle variation on Hesiod.