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. 

 

 

 

 

Silent Noon

Thompson/Ford

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,—

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—

So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,

This close-companioned inarticulate hour

When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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

(To find just the right illustration/photo/painting – almost impossible! I have loved this poem for so long, it’s frustrating not to pair it the way I want to. However! This poem.) This poem is about as close to perfection as  you can get.  When you read something and it’s like second nature, like a second skin, an articulation of your experience – it’s magic. I read this poem and it could be me. I have done this, been here, thought this, and yet – Rossetti wrote it. How can it be? He lived nearly 200 years ago. A world and time away. The difference between my world and the world of the person walking down the sidewalk toward me is spectacular enough – Rossetti? And yet here we are – occupying the same moment, the same place, the same mind. I just shake my head. “This close-companioned inarticulate hour/When twofold silence was the the song of love.” So help me, I hear these words in person – I mean, as if Rossetti were speaking to us, reaching his hand across the years, calling us his close-companions. If there is anything beneficial about poetry (!) this is right up there, this connecting of minds and lives, this, yes, I will say it at the risk of sounding maudlin, love.

Hen's Nest

Mara Schasteen

Hen's Nest

Among the orchard weeds, from every search,

Snugly and sure, the old hen's nest is made,

Who cackles every morning from her perch

To tell the servant girl new eggs are laid;

Who lays her washing by; and far and near

Goes seeking about from day to day,

And stung with nettles tramples everywhere;

But still the cackling pullet lays away.

The boy on Sundays goes the stack to pull

In hopes to find her there, but naught is seen,

And takes his hat and thinks to find it full,

She's laid so long so many might have been.

But naught is found and all is given o'er

Till the young brood come chirping to the door.

John Clare

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

John Clare wrote a lot about birds. Therefore I like him. Not just his poems – him. There! How’s that for a careful critique!