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:
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)