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.