The Poetic Faculty
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes.
, Walden (1854)
The word “fitness” here doesn’t mean efficiency or optimization. Thoreau means something closer to fittingness: the rightness of a creature doing what it was shaped to do. A bird building its nest, a man building his house. The activity suits the actor in some deep way.
His hypothesis is almost biological: the “poetic faculty” might develop in humans the way song develops in birds. Not as an extra skill we add on, but as a natural emergence from engaged making. We would sing because we were doing the work ourselves, with our own hands, attending to our own problems. The music would be a byproduct of the building.
The cowbird appears as a cautionary figure. It doesn’t build; it deposits its eggs in other birds’ nests. And it has, Thoreau notes, an “unmusical” voice. His point isn’t moralistic. He’s observing that something happens in the creature that makes, something that can’t happen in the creature that delegates.
We can delegate making now in ways Thoreau couldn’t have imagined. The question his passage opens isn’t whether that’s good or bad, but whether something develops through direct engagement that can’t develop any other way. Not a skill, exactly. A faculty. A way of being in the world that emerges from the making itself. The bird doesn’t study acoustics. It builds, and the song comes.