Birdless

Rude huts, like birdless nests, are tenantless;

1858, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (under the pseudonym Pisistratus Caxton), What Will He Do with It?, Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1859, Volume III, Chapter 9, pp. 88-89, Most of her aunt’s property was in houses, in various districts of Bloomsbury. Arabella moved from one to the other of these tenements, till she settled for good into the dullest of all. To make it duller yet, by contrast with the past, the Golgotha for once gave up its buried treasures—broken lute, birdless cage!

1917, James Joyce, “Tutto è Sciolto” in Poetry, Volume X, April-September, 1917, p. 72, A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star Sad in the west; And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far, Rememberest:

Later that evening, Muzzlehatch and the small ape shook themselves free of the gaping crowd and drove the car, slowly at the tail of a ragged cavalcade that, winding this way and that, finally disappeared into a birdless forest.

Believe me, there are few more bewilderingly birdless places than a New England woodland in early fall.