
“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.”
Source: Taking Care of Terrific
28 October 1492
Journal of the First Voyage
“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.”
Source: Taking Care of Terrific
Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart
Source: The Oven Bird (1916)
Context: There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
“That crystal river keeps its pools of blue water free from all stain above its shallow bed, and slowly draws along its fair stream of greenish hue. One would scarce believe it was moving; so softly along its shady banks, while the birds sing sweet in rivalry, it leads along in a shining flood its waters that tempt to sleep.”
Caeruleas Ticinus aquas et stagna uadoso
perspicuus seruat turbari nescia fundo
ac nitidum uiridi lente trahit amne liquorem.
uix credas labi: ripis tam mitis opacis
argutos inter uolucrum certamine cantus
somniferam ducit lucenti gurgite lympham.
Book IV, lines 82–87
Punica
(26th April 1823) Fragment - Do any thing but love ; or if thou lovest
The London Literary Gazette, 1823
1872(?), page 92
John of the Mountains, 1938
Letter to his wife, Maria Bicknell (20 April 1821); as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 28
1820s
“And the flowers sing in D minor
And the birds fly happily.”
Spank Thru.
Song lyrics, B-sides and compilation tracks (1989-1993)