Birds Without Feet?

In this poem, Pulter develops a spiritual meditation based upon an emblematic interpretation of an animal that she had certainly never seen. The manucodiat, now known as a bird-of-paradise, is a tropical bird that first became known to European explorers and naturalists during the sixteenth century. Compare Pulter’s treatment to two naturalists’ accounts, a seventeenth-century illustration of the “birds without feet” and one earlier poetic description.

Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works (translation Josuah Sylvester) was one of the most widely read poems of the seventeenth century. Often described as a hexameral epic, the Divine Weeks and Works is an extended commentary on Genesis. The first book (or Week) follows Genesis 1:1-8 closely and describes Creation through depictions of all parts of the natural world. Divine Weeks and Works could be (and was) used as a compendium of natural historical knowledge. The birds-of-paradise are described on the the fifth day of the first week among the “strange and admirable birds”:

But note we now, towards the rich Moluques,
Those passing strange and wondrous (birds) Mamuques,
(Wond’rous indeed, if sea, or earth, or sky,
Saw ever wonder, swim, or go, or fly)
None knows their nest, none knows the dam that breeds them,
Food-less they live, for th’ air alonely feeds them,
Wing-less they fly, and yet their flight extends,
Till with their flight, their unknown lives-date ends.

Source: Josuah Sylvester, Bartas His Deuine Weekes and Workes (London, 1605), p. 180, with spelling modernized by Lara Dodds.

John Ray,
Of the Bird of Paradise, or Manucodiata, in general

That Birds of Paradise want feet is not only a popular persuasion, but a thing not long since believed by learned men and great Naturalists, and among the rest by Aldrovandus himself, deceived by the birds dried or in their cases, brought over into Europe of the East Indies, dismembered, and bereaved of their Feet. Yea, Aldrovandus and others do not stick to charge Antonius Pigaseta, (who gave the first notice of this Bird to the Europeans) with falsehood and lying, because he delivered the contrary. This error once admitted, the other fictions of idle brains, which seemed thence to follow, did without difficulty obtain belief, viz. that they lived upon coelestial dew; that they flew perpetually without any intermission, and took no rest but on high in the Air, their Wings being spread; that they were never taken alive, but only when they fell down dead upon the ground: That there is in the back of the Male a certain cavity, in which the Female, whose belly is also hollow, lays her Eggs, and so by the help of both cavities they are sitten upon and hatched. All which things are now sufficiently refuted, and proved to be false and fabulous, both by eye-witnesses, and by the birds themselves brought over entire.

. . . .

These most beautiful birds (as Aldrovandus reports) are called by the inhabitants of the Molucca Islands Manucodiatae, that is, Gods birds, and had in great esteem and veneration. They are called Birds of Paradise, both for the excellent shape and beauty of their bodies, and also because where they are bred, whence they come, and whither they betake themselves is altogether unknown, sith they are found only dead upon the earth, so that the Vulgar imagine them to drop out of Heaven or Paradise.

Source: John Ray, trans. The Ornithology of Francis Willughby (London, 1678), p. 90. Spelling modernized by Lara Dodds

Further Reading