The Unknown Bird (5)

Since talk about birdsong is all over the internet at the moment (eg here), I thought I'd follow yesterday's poem about the oven bird with another bird poem — this time by Robert Frost's English friend and fellow poet, Edward Thomas. I've long admired and been moved by this poem, and have written about it before on my blog. When young I naively thought I might be able to pin this bird down. Now I realise it's an impossible task, of course. But, from time to time, I still hear its 'bodiless sweet' song, 'sad more than joyful', in my imagination and in my heart. And, for a moment, 'become light as that bird wandering beyond my shore'.  

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him:
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off -
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is - I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straighway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

EDWARD THOMAS

Suddenly Summer

Sunday's wildflower walk took in the countryside east of the village. My walk yesterday covered the western side. In fact it was the same walk I did here and here. But what a difference three months make. The countryside had been completely transformed by the green burgeoning of summer. It was like walking through an utterly different landscape. In the middle of May I'd left a cold, drab England for Sicily. Returning to England a few weeks later I'd been ambushed by the loveliness, the luxuriance of a late springtime. There'd been buckets of rain and big dollops of sunshine in my absence, which had spurred the season into sudden, flowering growth. This all-sensory shock remained with me. From nowhere it was suddenly summer.

When I'd walked this way in April I'd practised a Zen exercise by rotating my five senses - sight, sound, smell, touch, taste - and focusing hyper-consciously on each one in turn. This time it struck me that my wildflower experiment was simply a more refined variation on this: I was concentrating on one object of vision only - looking exclusively at the wildflower channel, you might say. And what riches this narrowed, concentrated vison brought! It's extraordinary how much we miss without this kind of conscious, focused gaze. I'd never have guessed I would have found a staggering 75 different species of wildflower before taking Sunday's dedicated stroll.

Yesterday's walk added a further six flowers to the list: wild carrot, common knapweed, common sorel, self-heal, ground-ivy, shepherd's purse. But there weren't as many wildflowers here compared with Sunday - for I was crossing farmed fields and cultivated ground. It demonstrated to me quite clearly how the roadside verges and hedged backcountry lanes to the east were a much safer haven for a wide variety of wildflowers than this monocultured farmland. It wasn't until I reached the untouched grassland around the old gravel-pit lakes that the flowers became more abundant: bird's-foot-trefoil, ox-eye daisy, hogweed, hemlock, tufted vetch, dog rose, creeping thistle, meadow buttercup, poppy, clover, mallow.

By the lakes I stopped, relaxed and looked about, shifting my intense mono-vision to a broader field of view. A goldfinch trilled its liquid, silvery song from the top of a bush. A yellowhammer - a common bird hereabouts - repeated its 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese' mantra and flew from the hedge, a blaze of yellow amid the green. Iridescent blue damselflies darted among the docks and sorels. And a large emperor dragonfly rested motionless in the grass at my feet, its abdomen electric blue with a dark, central stripe, its thorax apple-green.

Gradually I became aware of more birdlife all around me - a grasshopper warbler whirring out its montone song, sounding for all the world like an angler's ratcheted fishing reel, a pheasant sqawking in the undergrowth, a crow caw-cawing in the distance...

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

EDWARD THOMAS Adlestrop

Beauty

Since quoting the poem The Unknown Bird in this morning's post - and spurred on by singing bear's comment on it - I haven't been able to stop myself reading and rereading many of Edward Thomas's lovely, quietly resigned poems. So here's a final poem by him. It's one of those which leapt out at me straight from the page.

Beauty

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph -
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

The Unknown Bird

As well as Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas, there is another poet called Thomas I like very much, and that is Edward Thomas (1878-1917). A somewhat melancholic and solitary figure, his life was cut tragically short when he was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in WWI. He scraped a living as a hack writer, producing reviews, nature essays, topographical works, even a novel - anything to earn a crust.

But his friend, the great American poet Robert Frost, encouraged him to uncover his true, literary talent - which lay in the writing of a type of unsentimental, acutely observant, rather melancholic nature poetry. His poems had a strong, posthumous influence on later English landscape and nature poets such as Ted Hughes. Thomas was a keen walker and walked through much of Southern England and Wales in his travels.

This poem, The Unknown Bird, is one of his finest poems, and one of my favourites:

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him:
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off -
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is - I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straighway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

There's a hint of mysticism in this poem I find very appealing, a sense of something being just out of reach, a communion with a spirit in nature which can give momentary release from the pain and suffering of human life. This chimes in very much with the theme of my recent post A Gift From The Gods.