In 1996, I was teaching American literature at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta. One morning I confronted a room full of 10 th graders, each staring at me intently. We were studying Emily Dickinson. I had not prepared for class.

Do you have that sinking feeling in your stomach?

It was my first semester at the school, and although I had been teaching for five years, I frequently felt like a rookie all over again. I was learning a new schedule, new students, new books. Excuses, excuses. On this particular day there were no excuses; I simply hadn't prepared a lesson around Dickinson's poem #1463.

#1463

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel–
A Resonance of Emerald–
A Rush of Cochineal–
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head–
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride–

We spent the period stumbling through the lines together, like members of a bad book club, and missed the mark by a mile. I was so ashamed of my failure that day that I never talked about the poem again in class, never asked about it on a test. I let it go. And then I stumbled across it again, a few years later. This time, I gave it my full attention.

It's well known that Emily Dickinson rarely left her Amherst, Massachusetts home. As an adult, she wrote poems on the second floor of her father's house at 280 Main Street. From her bedroom window, she could see orchards, now replaced by a stand of evergreens, and the hedges in her yard. From that vantage, she could also see an amazing variety of birds.

Dickinson's images in poem #1463 describe Archilocus colubris , the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, smallest of eastern North America's avifauna and the only member of its family to breed in New England. Unique among birds, hummers can fly backwards and they can also hover in place, thanks to helicopter-like wings that seem to turn like "mill wheels," as Dickinson writes in another poem. On the male of the species iridescent emerald feathers across their backs and wings and white chests are offset by a spectacular red gorget of feathers at the throat. Dickinson describes a deep ruby red, "cochineal." A dye derived from the crushed shells of an insect by the same name, cochineal was probably used by indigenous peoples to color textiles long before the first Spanish colonial records mention it in the 16 th century. As Dickinson's hummingbird moves from flower to flower drinking nectar, his delicate dance belies his speed. Hummingbirds can fly up to 60 miles per hour, which helps them make spring and fall crossings, not of the Atlantic Ocean between Amherst and the Tunisian capital in Africa, but of the Gulf Coast between the southeastern states and their winter homes in Mexico and Central America. All while weighing in under four grams, about the heft of a penny.

Figuring out Dickinson's descriptions and references took a bit of research, and a bit of thinking. Sometimes the meaning in the lines of a poem is obvious, but they sometimes require a knowledge of agricultural and natural images that students don't have.

I've set out in the last few years to reconnect my students to the natural world and to great literature at the same time. I begin that process by asking my students to use their eyes to see and their ears to listen.

"I'll never be able to go outside again without paying attention to all the sounds." That's how one student described his experience of "Between Heaven and Earth" a spring term junior/senior English elective I offer at Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh. On our suburban campus, we've spotted almost seventy species of birds, from tiny American Goldfinches to Great Blue Herons. My students are required to identify thirty-five of the more common species by sight and sound. We use a CD of bird calls that students download to their I-Pods. Students are quizzed on five species each week.

We start with easy ones: Black-Capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Downy Woodpecker, Canada Goose, American Crow. These are confidence builders, and soon enough my students realize that their calls, squeaks, and squawks are pretty easy to master. They're reluctant to imitate them aloud with me, but by the second week, they look forward to the quizzes as they learn to trust their eyes and ears. When we take walks outside and they hear some of these birds for the first time, they betray some of the same delight that young children show: smiles, yelps, giggles. They're learning to trust their senses again.

At the same time, I begin to include the literature of birds. We read a hilarious translation of Aristophanes The Birds by Princeton poet Paul Muldoon. Three actors portray a dramatic catalog of Old World birds that requires plenty of physical comedy, witty language, and bawdy play. From there we skip ahead to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowles. A poem of medium length in Middle English, we read it aloud in class to get a sense of its language and the medieval understanding of natural symbolism. Shady Side Academy offers Latin, German, French, Spanish, (and Chinese), so the students are able to draw on their linguistic skills to interpret the archaic language of the poem. For an English teacher interested in etymology, this is certainly one exercise where I learn from my well-trained students.

From fifteenth century England we jump to the nineteenth century and American writers. Excerpts from the paintings and journals of John James Audubon allow us to discuss the notion of a developing American character through the life of one artist, writer, and immigrant. We also talk about changing ideas of the American landscape. From there we turn our attention to American poetry.

I've taught literature for 15 years, and poems still scare kids... and adults, too! (I recently heard U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser blame this on T.S. Eliot, among others, who took an art form appreciated and practiced by the masses and made it something exclusive to the educated elite.) We read the Emily Dickinson poem with which I began this article, but by then the students have a context for the poem, and have probably seen hummingbirds on campus. We read Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, ee cummings, Stanley Kunitz, and many, many others. (My list of American bird poems tops four hundred.) Some poems are high art, others for the casual reader, like this poem by Ogden Nash.

The Grackle

The grackle's voice is less than mellow,
His heart is black, his eye is yellow,
He bullies more attractive birds
With hoodlum deeds and vulgar words,
And should a human interfere,
Attacks that human in the rear.
I cannot help but deem the grackle
An ornithological debacle.

With weekly bird quizzes, in-class essays, and longer analytical assignments, there is plenty of reading and writing to bring rigor to the course. The final project is a two-parter. On the final day of class students meet me at 6:30 am to walk the campus. They carry pencils and three by five note cards, and in the first hours of the day they record all the bird species they see and hear. We meet again to walk at lunch and finish just after classes adjourn. It's one of the more unusual final exams they'll take at Shady Side Academy.

The other portion is a paper, six to ten pages in length, in which they write about a single species, offering both creative non-fiction observations and a literary analysis of a poem about the species. My goal is to have students blend science, art, and their own observations in a readable piece. The detail with which they conduct field work, their understanding of poetry, and the ways they find to bridge the two have proven again and again that students find a kind of authenticity in the course. The natural world we explore and the literature we read have become real to them. There's life in both, where it may not have existed before, at least not in the same way.

Courses like "Between Heaven and Earth" have a value for the enrolled students: they break down the barriers between disciplines in a way that honors the liberal arts traditions upon which so many of our schools are founded. It feels like teachers are sometimes asked to create specialists at an early age when sparking a student's curiosity and showing them novel ways of approaching topics might serve them better in the long run. That said, I neither expect to produce literary critics nor biologists, poets nor birdwatchers. If somewhere down the line, a student remembers that the call of the Tufted Titmouse sounds like "Peter, Peter, Peter," and that gets them to pay a bit more attention to their surroundings, I'm happy. If it stirs some inchoate feeling of stewardship for the natural world, all the better. And if they forget that simple mnemonic, and just remember a walk through the school's woods on a sunny spring day, that is enough.

I should add that I am fortunate to have academic training in both the sciences and humanities to make such an interdisciplinary courses a natural for me, but I've co-taught a version of this class with a veteran biology teacher whose scientific knowledge, to say nothing of his sense of humor, far exceed my own. I've made it a point to partner with colleagues at Shady Side Academy who have expertise in different areas. I've co-taught a course called "The African-American Experience" with a history teacher. With a math teacher who holds a doctorate in hymnology, I've twice taught "The Bible as Literature." The possibilities for cross-fertilization are myriad. I suspect our schools are full of such broadly trained instructors. Do we take advantage of the ethos and flexibility of independent education to bridge disciplines and subject areas? We grow professionally by doing so, we recapture some of that intellectual collegiality I suspect we all miss, and our students benefit from the modeling of different perspectives and different voices. It's well worth our efforts.

Bibliography

Emily Dickinson, #1463, Complete Poems , Little Brown, 1960.

Ogden Nash, The Grackle, Verses from 1929 On , Little Brown, 1959.

David Liebmann received his undergraduate degree from Middlebury College and a masters from Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English. He is a member of the board of directors of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania. In 2001, he was awarded a place at the National Science Foundation's Chautauqua on "Biodiversity and Ecology of Mammals and Birds of the Appalachian Mountains." That year David also spent time with Dr. Alan Strong of the University of Vermont as he conducted field research on Savannah Sparrows, Bobolinks, and Black-Throated Blue Warblers. Along with being an avid birder, he teaches "Between Heaven and Earth" at Shady Side Academy, among more traditional courses. David's initial ornithological training took place at Chewonki in Wiscasset, Maine, where Roger Tory Peterson, a camp counselor and art teacher at The Rivers School, began his Field Guide to the Birds . David currently chairs Chewonki's Maine Coast Semester Advisory Council. Before his appointment at Shady Side, he taught at The Museum of Jewish Heritage (NYC), The Westminster Schools (GA), and the Maine Coast Semester. A book, Between Heaven and Earth: A Literary Field Guide to the Poetry of Birds , is forthcoming.