Cultural References
The bird was a popular pet in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Tennyson mentions "the linnet born within the cage" in part 27 of the poem In Memoriam A.H.H, the same section that contains the famous lines "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." A "cock linnet" features in the classic British music hall song of that period My Old Man, and as a character in Oscar Wilde's children's story The Devoted Friend. Wilde also mentions how the call of the linnet awakens The Selfish Giant to the one tree where it is springtime in his garden. William Butler Yeats evokes the image of the linnet in The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1890) in line 8: "And evening full of the linnet's wings."
"The Linnets" has become the nickname of King's Lynn Football Club, Burscough Football Club and Runcorn Linnets Football Club (formerly known as 'Runcorn F.C.' and Runcorn F.C. Halton). Barry Town F.C., the South Wales-based football team, also used to be nicknamed 'The Linnets'.
William Blake invokes "the linnet's song" in one of the poems entitled "Song" in his "Poetical Sketches."
William Wordsworth argued that the song of the Linnet provides more wisdom than books in the third verse of The Tables Turned:
- "Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
- Come, hear the woodland linnet,
- How sweet his music! on my life,
- There's more of wisdom in it."
But the fellow English poet Robert Bridges used the Linnet instead to express the limitations of poetry - concentrating on the difficulty in poetry of conveying the beauty of a bird's song. He wrote in the first verse:
- "I heard a linnet courting
- His lady in the spring:
- His mates were idly sporting,
- Nor stayed to hear him sing
- His song of love.--
- I fear my speech distorting
- His tender love."
The musical Sweeney Todd features the song "Green Finch and Linnet Bird," in which a young lady confined to her room wonders why caged birds sing:
- "Green finch and linnet bird,
- Nightingale, blackbird,
- How is it you sing?
- How can you jubilate,
- Sitting in cages,
- Never taking wing?"
Read more about this topic: Common Linnet
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