Edward Thomas: Birdsong

I had just learned of Edward Thomas a few years ago, thanks to Stephen Pentz, at his blog, First Known When Lost  (see sidebar for link).  Consequently I knew little of him except for his poetry.  According to the brief biography, he was already known for his many fine essays, critiques, and writings in natural history, when he met Robert Frost in 1914 who encouraged Thomas to write poetry.  Thomas took his advice and had produced many fine poems when, unfortunately, he was killed in action in WWI in 1917.

Therefore, I was surprised to find him in Nature Writing: The English Tradition, another of the unexpected authors in that anthology whom I had known from other genres.  The following comes from the excerpt found in that anthology, and I can see why Frost had encouraged him to write poetry.


"At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging branches form blue caves, and out of these emerge the songs of many hidden birds.  I know that there are bland melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins whose earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that has burst through a more passionate silence, hedge-sparrows of liquid confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, chaffinches and yellowhammers saying always the same thing ( a dear but courtly praise of the coming season), larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes of infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, never thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, scolding, cheering, flattering, coaxing, challenging, with merry-hearted, bold voices that must have been the same in the morning of the world when the forest trees lay, or leaned, or hung, where they fell.  Yet I can distinguish neither blackbird, nor robin, nor hedge-sparrow, nor any one voice.  All are blent into one seething stream of song.  It is one song, not many.  It is the spirit that sings.  Mixed with them is the myriad stir of unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences of heart and root of tree, voices of hope and growth, of love that will be satisfied though it leap upon the swords of life." 

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
"Hampshire"
from The South Country
Excerpt comes from Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder 


What do you think?  Is there something "poetic" about the above excerpt?  Was Frost being perceptive?

Carl Sandburg: "From the Shore"

Here's one from Carl Sandburg that caught my eye as I was browsing through a collection of his poetry.


From the Shore

A lone grey bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.

Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,
Out into the gloom it swings and batters,
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
Out into the pit of a great black world,
Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown,
Love of mist and rapture of flight,
Glories of chance and hazards of death
On its eager and palpitant wings.

Out into the deep of the great dark world,
Beyond the long borders where foam and drift
Of the sundering waves are lost and gone
On the tides that plunge and rear and  crumble.
-- Carl Sandburg --
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg


I have always envied birds for they live in three dimensions while I'm trapped in two.  Yes, I know about airplanes, but I am a fearful-flyer, a control problem, I suspect.  But I never really considered very deeply just what it means to be able to fly and just what it is like, especially during those times when there are no soft winds and a blue sky and a safe landing below--at least, that is, until I read Sandburg's poem. 

The use of alliteration and the hyphenated adjectives reminds me of some Old English poems that I have read, Beowulf being one and others--"The Seafarer" for example.  This is a brief quotation and one appropriate I think:

All I ever heard along the ice-way
was sounding sea, the gannet's shanty
whooper and curlew calls and mewling gull
were all my gaming, mead and mirth
At tempest-tested granite crags
the ice-winged tern would taunt
spray-feathered ospreys overhead
would soar and scream.  .  .
 -- Anon  --
Online translation of "The Seafarer" by Charles Harrison-Wallace.




And, of course, there's always a haiku that strikes a similar note.

Grey marsh, black cloud.  .  .
Flapping away in autumn
Last old slow heron
-- Anon --
A Little Treasury of Haiku
Trans. Peter Beilenson



I read somewhere (wish I could remember who said this) that a poem should make you see something new or see something old in a new way.  I think Sandburg has succeeded here.

Has he succeeded with you?