Irrelevant ol' Shakespeare... hell no!

I'm reading Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography (published by Vintage in 2006) and savouring every sentence. Ackroyd was born to write:

 

"No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan.

 

He mentions some sixty species in total. He knows, for example, that the martlet builds its nest on exposed walls. Of the singing birds he notices the thrush and the ousel or blackbird. More ominous are the owl and raven, the crow and the maggot-pie.

 

He knows them all, and has observed their course across the sky. The spectacles of birds in flight entrances him.

 

He cannot bear the thought of their being trapped, or caught, or snared. He loves free energy and movement, as if they were in some instinctive sympathy with his own nature."

 

Dear ol' Will, I salute you... and I, too, cannot bear "the thought of their being trapped, or caught, or snared". I, too, love free energy and movement, even though I inhabit a world threatened by it, and a world adamant to keep them safely in the box... or in the cage... or on the butcher's block.

 

Again I write - that despite the vast size of our human egos and our illusions of grandeur, we're immensely fragile and merely custodians of 'our' land.

 

Poet Carl Sandburg from his astounding 1918 poem "Wilderness":

 

I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no:

I sing and kill and work...