If the Robin sings our song of place, it is the Northern Mockingbird who sings our worksong, the song of our self- surrender to work in place.
Thrush Music: American Poet-Naturalists and the Poetics of Loss | p 3
A Mockingbird at flood is the epitome of surrender, extravagance, abandon. It sings all undefined in front, as Thoreau would have us live. It leaves room ahead of itself, as Whitman says the poet should. And it is the Mockingbird whose "reckless despairing carols" awaken the poet in Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." In this poem, the male bird's springtime song of love and courtship turns to a song of loss when his mate disappears, but we are meant to hear the affirmation in those words, reckless and despairing: the radical meanings of setting aside care, relinquishing hope and expectation. When we are able, with the poem's speaker, to fuse the love song and the song of loss, when we are able to accept that our words and actions have no permanence in themselves, but only a place in a web whose permanence is change—growth nurtured by decay—then we are ready to begin the work of making meaning, in our poems and other labors.
The Mockingbird awakens us to the freedom that comes from accepting limits, and we might listen in passing to the song that supplies the question of this conference: "what to make of a diminished thing."
"There is a singer everyone has heard, Frost proclaims in "The Ovenbird." Frost never quite tells a lie: if you've ever been in the woods, then you probably have heard this song without knowing that it belonged to the Ovenbird— ventriloquist, comedian, and otherwise shy and diminutive warbler.
Northern Mockingbird
Ovenbird