A Coal-white Bird appeares this spring
That neither cares to sigh or sing.
This when the merry Birds espy,
They take her for some enemy.
Why so, when as she humbly stands
Only to shake you by your hands?
This poem appears in the first month-section of Samuel Danforth’s MDCXLVII: An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1647, published in colonial Massachusetts. Danforth had written an almanac one year prior with no poetry, and another author’s almanac predated it, but the latter doesn’t survive today. According to Ross Eckler’s The National Puzzlers’ League: The First 115 Years, it’s the source of the oldest extant puzzles in America.
These riddle-poems were matched to the months, but the calendar was different in the seventeenth century—March was considered the first month of the year, February the last. So the poem above was matched to March.
All very well, but what does it mean?
No one knows for sure. We can’t even agree on whether “coal-white” means “black and white” or “white like burned-out charcoal.”
If it’s black and white, the “coal-white bird” could be a minister, light-skinned, black-clad, eager to shake your hand and lead you to the Lord. The “merry Birds” could be Native Americans, viewing ministers with suspicion. Elsewhere, the Almanack celebrated the first preaching of Christianity to natives in their own language…
whereby much illumination & sweet affection was in a short time wrought in diverse of them & a hopefull reformation begun, in abandoning idlenes, filthynes and other known sinnes, and in offering up themselves and their children to the English freely and gladly, that they might be better instructed in the things of God.
(cough)
If “coal-white” is white, the “coal-white bird” could’ve been a fever running through the colony, resulting in paleness. Calling it friendly would be tongue in cheek—a fever is “outgoing” by spreading its infection and “shaking hands,” that is, causing your hands to shake.
Or it could’ve been a book, printed in black ink on white paper, “shaking hands” with you as you turn its pages. Other poems in the edition mentioned religious controversies. Perhaps some book with a bird-referencing title was kicking up a fuss.
Or—since it’s linked to March and springtime—maybe the “bird” is a bird of spring. A mockingbird “acts friendly” but as an enemy to other birds by adopting their melodies. Maybe, maybe. Dunno.
Other Danforth works are much more guessable riddles, like January’s:
Great bridges shall be made alone
Without ax, timber, earth or stone,
Of chrystall metall, like to glasse;
Such wondrous works soon come to passe,
If you may then have such a way,
The Ferry-man you need not pay.
The “bridges” are formed as the rivers ice over.
Some of its poems aren’t puzzles at all. November’s wry paradox acknowledges the limits of an almanac’s ability to predict the weather:
None of the wisest now will crave
To know what winter we shall have.
It shall be milde, let such be told,
If that it be not over cold.
Nor over cold shall they it see,
If very temperate it bee.
“It’ll be a nice day, if it doesn’t rain.”
“It’ll be a nice winter, if it doesn’t snow.”
In the other two years he did the Almanack, Danforth wrote longer poetic sequences celebrating Massachusetts. Though of interest to historians, they aren’t puzzles or notable as wordplay. After this, he left the Almanack to take up work as a pastor.
However, his wordplay career wasn’t quite done. Tomorrow, I’ll get into another of his works, which blazed a similar trail for American anagramming.