The Yellowhammer's Nest Summary

“The Yellowhammer’s Nest” describes an intimate encounter with a bird’s nest. At the beginning of the poem, a cowboy scrambles into the briars to harvest berries, startling the yellowhammer and causing him to fly up past a wooden structure. The speaker spots the bird, and entreats his companion to go and seek the bird’s nest while its inhabitant is absent. He notes the messiness of the nest, made of whatever the bird could find. However, he is struck by the beauty of the eggs, whose surfaces are covered by squiggling lines that resemble writing. Indeed, for the speaker, the bird who made these eggs is a poet, in that she inhabits the kind of beautiful landscape that the poets idolize. Moreover, her partner is a singer, a poet of sound. The speaker recognizes their home as a paradise that he and his companion should leave alone. Yet he also notes that even in this idyllic place, there is death and disease. For the yellowhammer, “ill” can arrive in the form of the snake who comes to seize the eggs, leaving the bird to mourn its loss with all the heartbreak of a human parent whose child has died.