The Thrush's Nest

Bruno Liljefors

The Thrush's Nest

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

John Clare
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

John Clare, bird enthusiast, bird poet.

"I drank the sound with joy."

And that's the impression I get - that Clare was a man who needed nature to bring him

out of himself, to lift him up. The birds fed his soul.  

 

I can relate. 

 

 

 

 

To Night

To Night

So thou art come again, old black-winged night,
Like an huge bird, between us and the sun,
Hiding, with out-stretched form, the genial light;
And still, beneath thine icy bosom's dun
And cloudy plumage, hatching fog-breathed blight
And embryo storms, and crabbéd frosts, that shun
Day's warm caress. The owls from ivied loop
Are shrieking homage, as thou cowerest high;
Like sable crow pausing in eager stoop
On the dim world thou gluttest thy clouded eye,
Silently waiting latest time's fell whoop,
When thou shalt quit thine eyrie in the sky,
To pounce upon the world with eager claw,
And tomb time, death, and substance in thy maw.


Thomas Lovell Beddoes
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

As an example of taking a simile to its limits, this is wonderful.

That weary "so thou art come again...." , as if Night is an annoying kill-joy who keeps ruining the party soon becomes much more ominous - an evil bird-spirit hatching blight, storms and frost, a predator, waiting silently to destroy.

And the words! The words!

 

Genial - dun - plumage - blight - embryo - crabbed - shun - caress - homage - sable - stoop - gluttest - fell - whoop - eyrie - pounce - maw

 

 

The poem may be in strict sonnet form, but the words are wild!

 

 

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

          

                                                                        Denise Coble

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motion swing
On the half-rotten ash-tree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove,
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

John Clare 

 Clare is such a treat for word-lovers. He works beyond mere description and sense to give us something I can only think to call texture. Every word in this poem jumps and jostles against the others, is alive with meaning and sound - very like birds on a branch. He makes it look easy, but my gosh, it is not. He is nothing short of a master. Very few people can write an excellent poem, even fewer can write a poem that flies off the page. 

 

Heath: a broad area of level or rolling treeless country

Brake: rough or marshy land overgrown usually with one kind of plant

Furze: gorse, a bushy plant

Ling: heather

Brig: bridge

Quagmire: marsh

Haw = hawthorn or fruit of the hawthorn

Closen rove: an enclosed field?

Bumbarrel: a longtailed tit

Drove: a flock

 

 

The Woodpile

Yuri Vasendin

The Woodpile

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,

I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.

No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'

The hard snow held me, save where now and then

One foot went through. The view was all in lines

Straight up and down of tall slim trees

Too much alike to mark or name a place by

So as to say for certain I was here

Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

A small bird flew before me. He was careful

To put a tree between us when he lighted,

And say no word to tell me who he was

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather—

The white one in his tail; like one who takes

Everything said as personal to himself.

One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.

And then there was a pile of wood for which

I forgot him and let his little fear

Carry him off the way I might have gone,

Without so much as wishing him good-night.

He went behind it to make his last stand.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split

And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.

And not another like it could I see.

No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.

And it was older sure than this year's cutting,

Or even last year's or the year's before.

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it

And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis

Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labor of his ax,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Robert Frost

Mr. Frost, you puzzle. You speak lightly, as though we are friends to whom you were merely giving the details of the day. And yet – we know something is being said, something that matters (enough for you to write about, and as our friend, we trust your judgment), but it is so quickly spoken, it escapes us. What does this wary bird and this forgotten woodpile in the woods signify? Is simply it to say that we might be interested to know how in this bewildering, amorphous place we have come to, with so few distinguishing points that would help us find our way (and where all we know is that we are 'far from home'), there is a bird who behaves in a curiously human manner, and an abandoned woodpile made with obvious precision and effort? To know that even in this pathless wood there are signs of care, of vibrant life, instinct and movement, and that these things too, are paths, are ways along which to travel, ways of knowing where we are? Is that it? With you, Mr. Frost, I am never sure. 

The Osprey

Allen W. Seaby

The Osprey

This morning
an osprey
with its narrow
black-and-white face

and its cupidinous eyes
leaned down
from a leafy tree
to look into the lake – it looked

a long time, then its powerful
shoulders punched out a little
and it fell,
it rippled down

into the water –
then it rose, carrying,
in the clips of its feet,
a slim and limber

silver fish, a scrim
of red rubies
on its flashing sides.
All of this

was wonderful
to look at,
so I simply stood there,
in the blue morning,

looking.
Then I walked away.
Beauty is my work,
but not my only work –

later,
when the fish was gone forever
and the bird was miles away,
I came back

and stood on the shore, thinking –
and if you think
thinking is a mild exercise,
beware!

I mean, I was swimming for my life –
and I was thundering this way and that way
in my shirt of feathers –
and I could not resolve anything long enough

to become one thing
except this: the imaginer.
It was inescapable
as over and over it flung me,

without pause or mercy it flung me
to both sides of the beautiful water –
to both sides
of the knife.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver died today. I’m sad there will not be new poems from that beautiful mind.
“Beauty is my work/ but not my only work.” She is always trying to imagine what it is like to be a bit of nature. For her, nature is something you enter into, something individual and a part of understanding what it means to be human. Here, she wears a shirt of feathers while swimming for her life! – and what a beautiful way to show her sense of being many things in many elements, and as yet unresolved, or perhaps, unfinished. And is that not true of us all?  Please God, may she now indeed have pause and mercy, and may there always be beauty and the work of it both for her and us.

The Skylark

Steven Outram

The Skylark

A song alone

comes down - and of the skylark

the last trace is gone.

Ampu

from "An Introduction to Haiku: an anthology of poems and poets from Basho to Shiki" by Harold G. Henderson

 Haiku only seems simple. I know almost nothing about the tradition, but from the little that I’ve read I’ve learned that most significant thing of all - I know almost nothing. In the sense that there are worlds of expression to explore yet. For one thing, that a poem’s art might be in what is not said, or what is there but not said – that’s more what I mean. And the Japanese poets are dedicated students of this. It’s not merely distillation of a thought, it’s getting to that level of writing where each word is a door swinging open to a new place. When it comes to poetry, how many words are enough? Is it possible that what our words have lost is a sense of silence, of falling into depths beyond words? When I read this haiku – a translation, it’s important to remember (a thousand subtleties have been lost) – I hear so many different notes. Loss, loneliness, the song (what is that song - what does it signify?), the element of nature, nature as a foil for human destinies, the qualities of the skylark – the symbolic nature of the bird. And this is without knowing any of the cultural language code being employed. I know so little. I know beauty, though, when I hear it.