Sounds of birds, most especially, were used to mark both the hours of the day and the seasons. The cuckoo is the bird of spring, while the lark sings in the early morning and the nightingale during the night. This gave them significance at once practical and poetic, as is illustrated by this exchange in Williams Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, taking place after a night of love.
Until the modern period, when clocks became relatively inexpensive and accurate, the songs of birds were constantly used to signal the time of day and night. The association of birdsong with hours is why many of the first affordable clocks used a mechanical cuckoo to announce the hours.
The song of the cuckoo traditionally announces the beginning of the growing season with an outpouring of exuberant energy. Farmers understood it as a signal to begin planting, but spring is above all the season of love. Through most of history, apart from the high Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, amorous passion has been regarded with suspicion, and that may also be said of the cuckoo. Its song has traditionally been a good omen for those who planned to marry but a warning of possible adultery for those already wedded. Pliny the Elder suggested that hawks transformed themselves into cuckoos, since the hawks seemed to vanish at about the same time as cuckoos became numerous. He observed, however, that hawks would eat cuckoos if they did meet. The idea reflected the bird's reputation for treachery, since, as Pliny put it, “the cuckoo is the only one of all the birds that is killed by its own kind” (book 10, section 21). This superstition has continued into the twentieth century in parts of Europe.
According to one myth, Zeus first made love to Hera after he had moved her to pity by appearing in the form of a disheveled little cuckoo. The bird was one of Hera's attributes and adorned her scepter. Indian poets knew the cuckoo as the “ravisher of the heart” (Gubernatis, vol. 1, p. 226), and the god Indra also assumed the form of a cuckoo for the purpose of seduction.
The idea that the cuckoo is an adulterer has at least some distorted basis in observation, since the European cuckoo will lay its eggs in the nest of another bird. The egg containing the young cuckoo will generally hatch first, and the fledgling will push the other eggs from the nest. Pliny explained this by saying that all other birds so hated the cuckoo that it would not dare make a nest, for that would be vulnerable to attack. The only way the cuckoo could procreate would be by concealing the identity of its offspring. The use of the word cuckold for a man whose wife is unfaithful goes back to The Owl and the Nightingale, a poetic dialogue on love and marriage written in England around the end of the twelfth century. In an era when marrying for love was still a somewhat revolutionary idea, the cuckoo increasingly came to represent sexual energy, while the nightingale was more romantic.
Although the cuckoo of literature is masculine, the nightingale is usually female in Western culture, and people have found her song less exuberant than sweet and sad. Her tragedy, as told by Appollodorus, began as Procne, a princess of Athens, married King Tereus of Thrace. They had a son named Itys. Tereus raped Philomela, his wife's sister, and then cut out her tongue so she could not reveal his crime. Philomela wove characters telling her story into a robe and gave it to Procne, who then killed Itys, boiled him, and served him up to his father, Tereus, in revenge. When the king realized what had happened, he set out in pursuit of the two sisters. The women prayed to the gods, who then turned Procne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. Latin authors, however, confused the two sisters and called the nightingale Philomela, a name later used by poets throughout Europe, perhaps because the song of a nightingale seemed to belong less to a killer than to an innocent victim. According to Pliny the Elder, the nightingale's song was so beloved in Rome that caged nightingales there commanded the sort of prices paid for slaves.
In The Owl and the Nightingale, the songster becomes an advocate for courtly love and the owl accuses her of promoting licentiousness.
In traditions of the Near East, the nightingale is masculine and in love with the rose, a tragic passion incapable of consummation, but the Islamic world shared Western ambivalence about romantic passions. In The Conference of Birds, written by Sufi poet Farid Ud-Din Attar in Persia around the end of the twelfth century, the hoopoe summoned the birds to a pilgrimage to their king, the Simorgh. The nightingale responded that the rose flowered only for him and he could not leave her for a single day. The hoopoe then replied that the love of the rose was a superficial illusion, and the rose really mocked the nightingale by fading in a day.
