Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song,
Like to the melancholy Jaques, complain,
Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong,
And sighing for thy motley coat again.

Aside from this sonnet, the mockingbird has got into poetical
literature, so far as I know, in only one notable instance, and that in
the page of a poet where we would least expect to find him,--a bard who
habitually bends his ear only to the musical surge and rhythmus of total
nature, and is as little wont to turn aside for any special beauties
or points as the most austere of the ancient masters. I refer to
Walt Whitman's "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking," in which the
mockingbird plays a part. The poet's treatment of the bird is entirely
ideal and eminently characteristic. That is to say, it is altogether
poetical and not at all ornithological; yet it contains a rendering
or free translation of a bird-song--the nocturne of the mockingbird,
singing and calling through the night for its lost mate--that I consider
quite unmatched in our literature:--

Once, Paumanok,
When the snows had melted, and the Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this seashore, in some briers,
Two guests from Alabama--two together,
And their nest, and four light green eggs, spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand,
And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

_Shine! Shine! Shine!
Pour down your warmth, great Sun!
While we bask--we two together._

_Two together!
Winds blow South, or winds blow North,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
If we two but keep together._

Till of a sudden,
Maybe killed unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest,
Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appeared again.

And thenceforward all summer, in the sound of the sea,
And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.

_Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up, sea-winds, along Paumanok's shore!
I wait