Thus the birds were, to the mediaeval singers, their orchestra, or
rather their chorus; from the birds they caught their melodies; the
sounds which the birds gave them they rendered into words.
And the same bird keynote surely is to be traced in the early English
and Scotch songs and ballads, with their often meaningless refrains,
sung for the mere pleasure of singing:
'Binnorie, O Binnorie.
Or -
'With a hey lillelu and a how lo lan,
And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie.'
Or -
'She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley,
And there has she her sweet babe born,
And the green leaves they grow rarely.'
Or even those 'fal-la-las,' and other nonsense refrains, which, if
they were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant?
In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird keynote. He who wrote
(and a great rhymer he was)
'As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane,'
had surely the 'mane' of the 'corbies' in his ears before it shaped
itself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a
'woodwele' who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how -
'In summer, when the shawes be shene,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the fowles' song.
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