BOTTOM        The ousel cock so black of hue

With orange-tawny bill,

The throstle with his note so true,

The wren with little quill.

TITANIA         [Wakes.] What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

BOTTOM        The finch, the sparrow and the lark,

The plainsong cuckoo gray,

Whose note full many a man doth mark,

And dares not answer nay.

For indeed, who would set his wit to so foolish a bird? Who would give a bird the lie, though he cry cuckoo never so?       (3.1.121-132)

WHAT Bottom sings is less important than THAT he sings, because he needs to wake Titania. As it happens, however, he sings a cheery number about BIRDS, ordinary common or garden (or woodland) birds: he evokes, first, the ousel cock so black of hue with orange-tawny bill—a blackbird!—and then the throstle with his note so true—a song-thrush!—and the wren with little quill, SO tiny, and the little quill could be its piping call or else its particularly sharp, thin beak, as sharp as a pen…

And then it happens—perhaps Bottom has grown in confidence, is singing more loudly as he goes on? sometimes he’s having a bit of a boogie too—but, what angel wakes me from my flowery bed? gasps Titania. Angel is of course bathetically inappropriate, and there’s no way that even a tuneful Bottom sounds angelic, but flowery bed is important too, it’s bringing the sexy fairies into the picture again. Bottom doesn’t hear, it seems, and so there’s a second verse, naming the finch, the sparrow and the lark, and then—perhaps where the song was inevitably driving all along—the plainsong cuckoo gray; the cuckoo’s song may be boring in comparison with all those other songbirds, but it’s the cuckoo who gets noticed, whose note full many a man doth mark, and dares not answer nay. No man is so foolhardy as to say, nah, mate, not me! I’d never be a cuckold! For indeed, who would set his wit to so foolish a bird? Why would you get into an argument with a CUCKOO, or even accuse it of being a liar? Who would give a bird the lie, though he cry cuckoo never so? You just don’t know, do you?… WOMEN, eh. (It’s implicit, but I quite like the idea of Bottom ruefully consoling himself with being a man of the world, just as he’s about to enter into the realms of total—furry?—fantasy.)