Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

I’ve only been to Europe once, for just a few days in 2014, and I’ve never been anywhere in the U.K. For the first quarter-century of my birding life, I shied away from looking at pictures or reading about birds outside the boundaries of the United States—I didn’t want to feel sad thinking about species I thought I’d never see.

But even then, I did familiarize myself with some faraway species—mostly birds that had been mentioned by Shakespeare. Some were already very familiar to me. When Macbeth cruelly calls a servant “Thou cream-faced loon,” he was talking about our own Common Loon in winter plumage.

When King Lear tells Gloucester, “Die for adultery? No. The wren goes to’t,” he’s talking about the Eurasian Wren, which up until 2010 was considered the same species as my own beloved Winter Wren. Poems and folklore referring to “Jenny Wren” are also about this species.

I also knew that the “four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” were Eurasian Blackbirds, closely related to our own robin.

I read Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush when I was in college, a few years before I became a birder. I understood that a thrush was some sort of bird but had no clue about anything beyond that.

There’s no bird known to ornithologists as a darkling thrush. Hardy used the term metaphorically, suggesting his first-person character’s long dark night of the soul. Yet even metaphorical birds tend to be based on something the real world; Hardy’s inspiration is almost certainly England’s beloved Song Thrush, a species belonging to the same genus as the Eurasian Blackbird and our good old American Robin, Turdus (the Latin word for thrush).

German ornithologist Ludwig Brehm gave the Song Thrush its specific epithet, philomelos, for the Athenian princess in Greek mythology. Philomela’s brother-in-law raped her and cut her tongue out, she and her sister took an ugly revenge, and the gods rescued them, transforming them into a nightingale and a swallow. Romans tended to say Philomela was the one turned into a nightingale, but Greeks somewhat more correctly, ornithologically speaking, turned the sister without the tongue into the swallow, which twitters but doesn’t sing. Apparently Ludwig Brehm was in the fine singer camp, naming the Song Thrush with its lovely song for Philomela.

I’ve never seen a real, live Song Thrush, or even an Athenian princess, and at this late date it’s hard to predict whether I ever will, but I love that Thomas Hardy brought this lovely bird to my attention.

Well, actually, Hardy did not bring it to my attention—as I said, I read the poem in English Lit before I was a birder. I understood the poem well enough to get an A on the paper in which I discussed it, but not at all well enough to accurately visualize the real bird’s softly somber plumage, nor to hear its melodic caroling.

The person who brought the poem to my attention, right when I needed it in the midst of my own dark night of the soul, was a kind reader named Linda Peplinski. She sent me a link to the BBC live broadcast of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, performed this Christmas Eve. A composer named Rachel Portman wrote a beautiful carol set to Hardy’s lovely poem about the despairing man who suddenly hears the ethereal song of that darkling thrush. Hardy wrote the poem in 1899, and his original title when it was published on December 29, 1800, was “By the Century’s Deathbed,” so it seems appropriate to read it on this dark, dark New Year’s Eve.

The Darkling Thrush

By Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Here’s my wish that we all may find natural moments of joy and peace when we need them most in the coming year.