In Fiction
Eurasian Bittern is proposed as a rational explanation behind the mythical creature drekavac in short story Brave Mita and drekavac from the pond by Branko Ćopić.
The species is mentioned in George Crabbe's 1810 narrative poem The Borough, to emphasise the ostracised, solitary life of the poem's villain, Peter Grimes:
"And the loud Bittern from the bull-rush home
Gave from the Salt-ditch side the bellowing boom:"
Thomas McDonagh the Irish poet executed for his part in the Easter Rising translated a famous Gaelic poem "The Yellow Bittern". His friend and fellow poet Francis Ledwidge wrote a celebrated "Lament for Thomas McDonagh" with the opening line He shall not hear the bittern cry.
In the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the villain Stapleton proposes the boom of a Bittern as an explanation for the howl attributed to the mystical hound.
Read more about this topic: Eurasian Bittern
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)