Birds of a species converse from tree to tree for the perpetuation of their kind. In literature, too, birds of a species may converse, though their impulses are imaginative, not biological. In a poem we featured in January 2022, the thrush, with its trilling song, figures for the Romantic John Keats (1795–1821) as an emblem of what he called negative capability. In a poem we featured a year later, January 2023, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), straddling the Romantic and modernist worlds, used the thrush to suggest hope and joy, the same extrarational apprehension of beauty which animates Keat’s poem. But for Hardy, that beauty lies beyond the reach of human beings, imprisoned by doubt in a dark world.   

Today’s Poem of the Day, by Edward Thomas (1878–1917), adds its voice to this exchange of literary birdsongs. Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras, wrote his entire body of poetry between 1914 and 1917, in the shadow of the war in which he died. His poems, though, deal largely with what Wordsworth called “spots of time,” outside the margins of that war: the sunlit quiet of a country railway station, for example, or the habits of birds, whose songs he noted obsessively in his journals. Here, his thrush answers both Keats’s and Hardy’s thrushes, in its blithe unawareness of the turn of seasons.

The poem’s speaker records his impressions of this song in shifting trimeter-to-dimeter quatrains, rhymed in the first and last lines. For him, the months have names. Time has meaning. To hear a thrush sing in April is to anticipate its song in winter. For the human listener, the year, like his own life, has a beginning and an end. But the bird sings on in sublime ignorance of time. 

The Thrush 
by Edward Thomas 
 
When Winter’s ahead, 
What can you read in November 
That you read in April 
When Winter’s dead? 
 
I hear the thrush, and I see 
Him alone at the end of the lane 
Near the bare poplar’s tip, 
Singing continuously. 
 
Is it more that you know 
Than that, even as in April, 
So in November, 
Winter is gone that must go? 
 
Or is all your lore 
Not to call November November, 
And April April, 
And Winter Winter—no more? 
 
But I know the months all, 
And their sweet names, April, 
May and June and October, 
As you call and call 
 
I must remember 
What died into April 
And consider what will be born 
Of a fair November; 
 
And April I love for what 
It was born of, and November 
For what it will die in, 
What they are and what they are not, 
 
While you love what is kind, 
What you can sing in 
And love and forget in 
All that’s ahead and behind.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.