The poetry of Walt Whitman is crowded with allusions to song and the singer. Music was important to him in life (he had worked as a music journalist) and is a central metaphor in his work. The poet of “I Hear America Singing” was blessed with an ear for inner rhythms which he transformed into melodious free verse that broke the barriers of poetic language.
Given the musicality of his songs, it is not surprising that the poet inspired composers around the world (the number of settings of his texts exceed 1,200).
In literature, the wild bird is presented as a symbol of freedom. It represents the yearning for escape from (social or psychological) constraints in order to establish personal autonomy. The portrayal of birds allows the reader to connect with themes of freedom, independence and aspiration.
It makes the metaphor of the “caged bird” all the more effective as this figure of speech suggests confinement and a craving for liberation (“jailbird” is a synonym for prisoner; “flying away” indicates escape).
The caged bird sings of freedom. Within this context, how can we interpret “My Canary Bird,” one of Whitman’s late poems?
Passion for Song
The Canary Islands are an archipelago off the north-western African coast. When the ancient Romans invaded the region, they used the name Insula Canaria (Island of Dogs) in reference to many aggressive wild dogs that roamed the surroundings. Canary birds were named after the island – not the other way around.
When Spanish sailors first reached the Canary Islands, the men were charmed by the bird’s song. They caught some of the greenish-brown wild creatures and shipped them home. Having claimed the archipelago in 1500, the Spanish trade in canaries soon boomed.
With monasteries holding a monopoly on the business, they were bred on the mainland and sold to Italian, Swiss and Austrian clients. The monks only sold jealously guarded male birds (as females do not sing) and there was no canary-breeding taking place beyond the cloister walls. The canary was a Catholic bird.
In the mid-1500s, a Spanish ship carrying canaries ran aground on the Tuscan island of Elba. The birds escaped and established residence there to the delight of local traders who started the process of selective breeding.
Exclusive Spanish trade domination was broken. Canaries spread outwards on routes into Europe. The bird was warmly received in France and Flanders and became associated with the history of Protestant migration from the region.
In 1564, Queen Elizabeth invited a number of Flemish weavers and their families to settle in Norwich in an attempt to arrest the town’s decay precipitated by the decline of its textile manufacture. The arrival of skilled “strangers” marked the city’s revival.
It set a precedent. Upon reports in 1567 that the Duke of Alva’s army was heading towards the Southern Netherlands to reinforce absolute (Catholic) Spanish rule in the region, vast numbers of Protestants fearing persecution fled from town and country. By the early 1570s some 10,000 Flemish refugees had crossed the Channel.
By the late sixteenth century, Norwich housed a large immigrant community. The newcomers grew flowers and vegetables unknown before in England; they refined the technique of making tiles and pottery; they introduced the craft of printing in the city among many other innovations.
Refugees also brought new pastimes (such as playing cricket) and hobbies, including their passion for canary-breeding. The “Norwich Canary” soon was a popular breed.
Flemish weavers apparently enjoyed having canaries around them as the sound of the loom encouraged the birds to sing, breaking the monotony of relentless work (exiled in London, French Huguenot silk weavers shared the passion). Norwich and surrounding villages became a prime location for commercial breeding. Queen Elizabeth herself developed a love for canary song and assembled a team of Royal Canary Keepers to assist her in the hobby.
Originally limited to Royal and aristocratic households, at the beginning of the nineteenth century canaries were being kept by people in many European countries, across all social strata.
Jacob Mackley, dubbed the “King of Canaries,” was regarded as a national authority on the bird. Having established the firm of Messrs. Mackley Brothers on Philadelphia Lane, Norwich, he shipped his locally-bred canaries worldwide.
The American market was particularly strong. In the early 1900s, the firm annually exported more than 10,000 birds to the city of New York.
Canary Craze
Once Spain lost its monopoly on breeding, many German speaking regions took on the challenge and produced strains of canaries that differed in color, feather structure and song.
The most famous breeding area was the Upper Harz Mountains, Saxony, where canary peddlers did a roaring trade. The “Harz Roller” was renowned and admired for its wonderful song.
The name identified with breeding this bird was Wilhelm Trute whose family and ancestors had lived in the Harz region since the fifteenth century. Like his father before him, he was employed as a miner in the region.
During his employment in the second half of the nineteenth century, he developed a passion for canary breeding. This combination of activities was significant. Within mining communities it had been noticed that canaries tended to die more quickly than humans in the presence of toxic gases. The birds started serving as early warning systems.
Following in Trute’s footsteps, breeding canaries became a secondary occupation for mining families as was the making of cages for the birds. The sale of Harz Roller cocks boomed. The hens were less suitable for sale, as only the males produced the valued song as part of their courtship behavior. Since only a few hens were needed for breeding, most females were turned into “pit canaries.”
By the nineteenth century bird fanciers in London would only accept Norwich or Harz canaries, driving many Spanish and Portuguese exporters out of business.
The Harz varieties were in great demand, even amongst cash-strapped working people who would often save up for a whole year to buy these birds. Tulip Mania in Europe was succeeded by a Canary Craze.
Avian Migrants
Once European colonization was set in motion, numerous new species of animals reached North America, from the import of domestic fodder animals to an invasion of pests such as the brown rat. During the nineteenth century animal migration entered a new phase.
The rise of zoos, private menageries, traveling circuses as well as an exploding pet market sparked the trade. Private dealers emerged to capitalize on the demand of (exotic) pets. New York City became the epicenter of the American trade in animals.
Prior to the invention of radio and recorded music, caged songbirds offered a popular form of home entertainment. Some were imported from Latin America and the Caribbean, but the most desirable birds included wild European species such as linnets, thrushes, nightingales, robins, finches, mockingbirds and buntings. By far the most popular was the canary.
Small neighborhood bird stores became a common sight in American cities and towns. More professional businesses sprung up too, including the Manhattan Bird Store which produced a trade card showing a fine menagerie with a flock of vibrant colored birds. The canary remained America’s most popular pet bird for some considerable time. They were even sold in barber shops.
In 1847, a group of bird lovers got together to exhibit their collections of “rare fancy and singing birds” in the Lyceum Building at 563 Broadway. It was reportedly the first bird show of its kind in the United States. It became an annual event.
In 1855, the bird fair took place on the ground floor of the frame building at 323 Bowery where German immigrant William Messenger, a prominent dealer in rare birds, ran his shop. Manhattan’s canary trade was largely driven by European immigrants from the German speaking regions.
Bird Fanciers & Canary Sellers
The undisputed “King of the Trade” was Charles Reiche. Having arrived in the city of New York in 1843 in company of his younger brother Henry, he began peddling canaries, bullfinches and other songbirds.
Once settled, the brothers opened a shop at 55 Chatham Street near the Bowery where they began importing and selling about two thousand canaries a year. They made a fortune during the California Gold Rush, shipping three thousand canaries to San Francisco where they were sold quickly to aspiring miners at astonishing prices.
Spurred on by this commercial success, Charles published The Bird Fancier’s Companion in 1853. The book became immensely popular and was reprinted many times. From 1853 to 1867, the Reiche brothers imported an estimated twenty thousand canaries each year. By 1871, the number had increased to forty-eight thousand.
Eventually the brothers expanded their business to include captives other than birds and began supplying circuses with a variety of animals. In cages inside their shop on Chatham Street and outside in a backyard, the brothers displayed a selection of snakes, tigers, leopards, wildcats and monkeys.
They supplied exotic animals to almost every traveling show in the United States (most of the stock was eventually housed at a large depot in Hoboken, New Jersey). The Reiche firm was hailed as the “most extensive bird and wild beast importer in the world.”
Delivering canaries from Europe to the American market was a laborious undertaking. In 1883 George Holden published a book about the trade of birds which he titled Canaries and Cage-Birds. At the time of publication, the United States was importing well over one hundred thousand canaries every year and the market was expanding.
Shipping these birds was undertaken by traveling merchants. In his narrative Holden invites the reader to follow the long journey made by one such traders whom he introduced by the name of “Fritz.”
Starting his trek in the Upper Harz Mountains, the latter spent weeks visiting breeders and buying up male samples born earlier that spring. Each canary came packed in its own little cage, the manufacture of which was a cottage industry in itself.
Fritz hoisted some two hundred cages onto his back before setting off to the port cities of Bremen or Hamburg. The hardiest birds were selected to be sent to New York City (the best singers were kept for a thriving European market) in the hope that they would survive the long and often arduous voyage.
Entrusted with 1,400 birds by his employer, Fritz loaded them all in the steerage compartment onboard a transatlantic steamer. They were housed in a specially-constructed room near the boilers to keep the birds warm. One man was sent with them to make sure they were fed and properly looked after on their epic Atlantic journey.
Every day, each individually-caged bird had to be checked, fed and every cage cleaned, however rough the sea. Through it all, Fritz had to guard against rats or human theft.
The trip was an exhausting one. As a bird lover himself, George Holden intended to impress upon his readers the “dangers through which the feathered emigrants have passed in their younger days while coming to this country.”
Stuffed Canary
Bolton Museum in Greater Manchester, England, is home to an extensive collection of artifacts relating to Walt Whitman. Its archive is a treasure trove of photographs and letters. The exhibits include a lock of the poet’s hair, a fistful of dried grass gathered from his birthplace in Huntington, NY, and a stuffed New Jersey canary.
The collection owes much to a group of admirers known as the “Bolton Whitmanians.” Formed in 1885, its members met in a house on Eagle Street (where else?) owned by James Wallace, an architectural draughtsman, to celebrate the life and writings of the poet. Wallace actually made the pilgrimage to New Jersey to meet the elderly author in person.
Walt Whitman spent the final years of his life in Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, a bedridden semi-invalid, idolized but lonesome. His canary offered solace. It may well be that he had purchased the bird from Charles Reiche’s shop in Manhattan. Its song inspired his short poem “My Canary Bird,” published in the New York Herald on March 2, 1888.
The final lines of the poem suggest that the caged bird’s “joyous warble” was “just as great” as any piece of fine literature. The bird’s song is by implication a call to the poet himself to continue writing, however bleak and confined the circumstances.
If the caged bird can sing, so his voice should be heard too. The resultant effort might not reflect his former self, but it would still be a song.
Whitman included the canary poem in the 1891/2 edition of Leaves of Grass. It was followed in the sequence by another recent verse entitled “Queries to My Seventieth Year.” Again the caged bird theme is alluded to, describing himself with ruthless honesty as “parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching.”
Once a poet of eagles and hawks, Whitman was forced to turn to domesticated birds. They were emblematic of his own reduced strength. The aging author realized that his ability to sing was dwindling. The caged bird is a metaphor for the loss of poetic flight. When his canary died, he had it symbolically stuffed.
Having finished the final edition of his masterpiece in 1891 (now known as the “Deathbed Edition”), he asked his friend Richard Maurice Bucke, the Canadian physician and the poet’s first biographer, to present the canary in person to the “Whitmanians” on his 1891 trip to England.
It was a message that his days of song and creative endeavor were over. Whitman died shortly after. The canary, mounted and perched on a leafy twig and preserved under a bell jar, remains on display in the Bolton Museum – still caged after all those years.
Illustrations, from above: Walt Whitman, 1873 by Phillips & Taylor (Library of Congress); A map of the Canary Islands, showing prevailing winds; A Norwich canary with its distinctive stocky shape; A canary breeder from Howard Fogg’s 1924 Revised Encyclopedia of Canaries; Aluminum canary air tester, used by rescue parties in mines (Science and Industry Museum, UK); “Girl with Canary (The New Arrival)” by Seymour Joseph Guy, undated; Manhattan Bird Store’s trade card published by Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann Lithography, Warren Street (New York Historical Society Gallery); and Walt Whitman at his Camden home in 1891.
