Why Do Birds Sing?

Hopkins and learning to wonder.

Why do birds sing? Everyone knows that birds have their various noises, and those noises have their purposes. But not all the sounds a bird makes have an express purpose. Sometimes they merely sing. To ask why birds sing is the kind of question that comes so near to the essence of the subject that it is essentially unanswerable. To ask why birds sing is to ask why birds exist. How does one answer that question? It is better, I think, to say that birds just do sing, and, working from there, ask what that can tell us about birds, and furthermore, what that tells us about the rest of creation. 

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
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.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
-Gerard Manly Hopkins

Though scientists could probably explain each song or call of every bird and the function of that sound that that bird makes, be it to mark its territory, attract a mate, or keep track of his companions- it is a weary explanation that takes away much of the wonder one feels when he hears a melody being sung from above and imagines the bird singing, just as we sing. If all the acts of all the animals in the world are merely scientific phenomena that do not express or point to higher truths than themselves, then the world has no soul. 

Let us imagine that birds sing just because they are birds. Singing is their faculty that says, “Look! I am a bird.” A bird cannot help but sing, just as it cannot help but have the nature of a bird, so although man can deduce through the use of pale, sterile scientific study that each sparrow’s song has a purpose, if man fails to see that the sparrow is lovely and is actively telling him that very fact through his voice then man’s scope of understanding is hindered and his sense of wonder remains uninformed. 

A bird seems to sing to express its very soul, and in doing so, provides a lens for the attentive listener, through which he can better understand the nature of the bird, himself, nature itself, and nature’s god himself. Self. If one is to make any sense of life’s chaos, he must ask, “Who is ‘myself,’ and what do the innumerable other selves of animals, angels, trees, and other human beings that share this “place,” this state of living- of having life within- have to do with me?” Are we the same as all these other “selves” or different? Yes. Hopkins writes, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” In one line he compares and contrasts two different kinds of selves, remarking on the outward expressions of their particular inner natures, and suggesting that, in one way or another, they are doing the same thing despite their differences in form. Though the kingfisher and the dragonfly are different, they share the nature of self-ness; of having self. 

Next, Hopkins elevates the conversation to one about the nature of man, relating that even man shares a nature, at a level, with all these animals. The shared nature is the one of anything that has self- anything that is alive, created; other from creator, yet retaining the dynamic, living mark of the creator- because it has life within it. Anything that lives cries out its name and therefore it cries out God’s name as well. Since man is the only creature on Earth that can willfully sin, man can utter a perverted cry by acting against his nature, which is founded in Christ, and misrepresent his creator. Conversely, because of his free will, man can play his role as Christ so thoroughly that he becomes Christ. The completion of this ambition is only in the next life.

A man who can delight in a bird and how it “flings out broad its name,” can wonder at the bird and its song about its creator. He can hear how plainly beautiful the song is and chose to do the same, and live, and act, as himself- Christ.