My research on Whip-poor-wills in American culture has recently taken me to poetry. To understand the emotions we associate with the song of Whip-poor-wills, I’ve been reading references to them in poems in the American Poetry database.
There are over 400 poems that mention the species. (I’ll post some of my favorite ones that are in the public domain on my blog). Sadness and grief are among the dominant emotional themes. But many poems conjure Whip-poor-wills to characterize summer nights.
Auspiciously, I encountered one today — James Edwin Campbell’s “A Night in June,” set under the full moon of June. For us, that phase is tonight — June 21, 2024. And it is a massive Strawberry Moon. Whip-poor-wills are lunarphilic; they sync much of their behavior — breeding, singing, feeding young — to the cycle of the moon. Tonight should be epic wherever there are nightjars to attend to the night sky.
Just a bit more by way of introduction, James Edwin Campbell (1867-1896) was a writer, poet, and educator in the late-18th century. His poem “A Night in June” is a response to James Russell Lowe’s “What’s So Rare as a Day in June?“
I have to side with Campbell on this. What more, than a Whip-poor-will beneath a full moon, can we ask of June as it transforms spring into summer?
A NIGHT IN JUNE
James Edwin Campbell
I
1 “What so rare as a day in June?”
2 O poet, hast thou never known
3 A night in rose-voluptuous June?
4 High over all a broad, full moon,
5 Grey broken clouds that sink and swoon
6 In floods of light,
7 Which down the sky’s vast steepness pour,
8 Niagara in all save roar—
9 Sound lost in sight!
II
10 Now serenades the midnight moon,
11 The beetle’s drum, the frog’s bassoon,
12 And mingled with these rises shrill
13 The piccolo of whip–poor–will
14 Played in the beech just on yon hill,
15 Now moon-gold crowned;
16 Then tinkling notes of light guitar,
17 With voices softened from afar,
18 Sight lost in sound!
Featured photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash
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