The rooks are Gothick which have brought to mind
The naturalist Charles Waterton. He wrote
With care and indignation: an explorer:
A solitary who loved, above all creatures,
The birds of the air. When at his burial
A linnet sang out, fact gave rise to legend:
That the flotilla of black barges floating
His body to its lakeside grave had been
Escorted by long flights of birds in mourning.
Among them, rooks. From trees they pinnacle
Like symptoms of a fantasy, their humped
Black shapes unfold now, lifting, taking wing
To drape the sky with signs of lamentation.
No. Waterton – who one phantasmal night
Of gloom and tempest wrote in quietness,
Not fantasy not legend, but ‘the history
Of the rook’ – in the rook saw no gloom, would not
Submit to the ‘blue devils’ conjured up
By the November fogs but would combat them
With ‘weapons of ornithology’.
He had,
‘Having suffered himself and learned mercy’,
Laid his guns down, walled in his park and lake,
And made a pause in nature.
There he watched,
Rejoicing in cacophony – explored
Downward
toward a silence
undisturbed
The barn owl winged its day through,
made a space
Where rooks alighted, their gregarious croak
In tune with an unheard polyphony
His prose, which does not venture to transcribe it,
Bespeaks. Of science and his own estate
a sanctuary
the mind
Questing could enter into, haunt in freedom,
And dwell in, freed of its own hauntings.
Blithe
You must have been, Charles Waterton, to know
That the inequitable penal laws
Enforced by ignorance and sentiment
Against all ‘pests and vermin’, now repealed
By you, no longer warped the needful cycles
Of breeding and predation. Blithe you were
From your high perch to watch the darting turquoise
Spear the still pool, to hear the barn owl screech
No special doom to man, and see the rooks
Fly overhead in the dawn light to pass
Into the still remote, unmediated
Variety of inhuman atmosphere.