“That raven on the left-hand oak, Curse on his ill-betiding croak, Bodes me no good!”
“She had scarcely uttered this when down came her old stumbling mare to the ground. Her every egg was smashed to atoms; and whilst she lay sprawling ... she was perfectly convinced in her own mind that the raven had clearly foreseen her irreparable misadventure.”
If one alighted on a church-tower the whole parish trembled, and when a cottager saw one perched on his roof-tree he made his will; or if it happened that a man or woman was ill in his house the death of that person was regarded as certain. The more learned would quote for you how Tiberius, Plato, Cicero and other great men of the past had been similarly warned, and doubtless many a person has died in these circumstances of nervous fright and discouragement. It is to this dread that Marlowe refers in his _Jew of Malta_:
Like the sad presaging raven that tolls The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak, And, in the shadow of the silent night, Does shake contagion from her sable wing.
The last line contains a new and heinous calumny widely credited. So Shakespeare makes Caliban threaten Prospero and Ariel with
As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen.
I wonder, by the way, who first spoke—the simile is, at any rate, as old as Chaucer’s time—of the wrinkles that gather about the corners of our eyes when we get on in life, as “crow’s feet”? Frederick Locker sings of his grandmother:
Her locks as white as snow, Once shamed the swarthy crow; By-and-by That fowl’s avenging sprite Set his cruel foot for spite Near her eye.
The expression of course is a suggestion of the radiating form of the wrinkles at the outer corner of the eye to a crow’s track; and this reminds us of the fact that when soon after the Norman conquest in England there was a vast popular interest in royal genealogy, people spoke of the branching form of a family tree, when drawn on paper, as a “crane’s foot” (_pied de grue_), whence our term _pedigree_.
Omens are deduced from the flight and cries of ravens, crows, magpies, and certain other corvine species, especially as regards their direction relative to the inquirer. Horace, for example, in his _Ode to Galatea_ on her undertaking a journey, tells her that he, as a “provident augur,”