'the hermit thrush'

Robert Browning, under a Mediterranean sky, recalled an English thrush with its 'first fine careless rapture!'  I now turn to the song of the North American hermit thrush in T S Eliot's The Waste Land.  In Section V 'What the Thunder said' the poet, domiciled in post-World War One London, longs for the sound of water in a desolate land, 'Here is no water but only rock'.  He remembers the song of the hermit thrush:

"But sound of water over rock
Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water..."

In his notes to the poem Eliot tells us that he has heard the thrush himself, cites the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America  - 'purity of tone and exquisite modulation...' and notes that 'Its water dripping song is justly celebrated'

Here is Eliot the scholar, citing his references and making sure of the facts; here is Eliot the poet responding to a memory of birdsong and water in a dry and cracked internal landscape.

"That's the wise thrush..."

A friend has decided that this season of 'lockdown' is the time for poetry and is compiling and emailing poems to our library's Poetry Circle and others week by week.  My poem comes from the compilation made during World War Two by the late Field Marshall A P Wavell containing the poems he had learned by heart.  Poetry sustained him on campaign from India to North Africa.

In my childhood the fashion for getting poetry by heart was declining.  This was not so for earlier generations and indeed I have heard a sufferer from dementia, in her eighties, recite an entire narrative poem, the 'Three Jolly Farmers' by heart.

Verses especially lyric poetry, canticles and hymns tend to stick if I have sung them.  Being set to music aids recall.  However the poem by Robert Browning Home Thoughts, From Abroad is one that I tried to commit to memory in primary school and seems appropriate for this period of history.  Here, close to our back garden we have our own 'wise thrush'.  He perches high up in the birch trees, situated above the warring blackbirds in the park and is the first to start the dawn chorus.  I have heard him at 4.00 am or earlier, before the first light of dawn.  He is also the last to conclude in the evening.  

Perhaps in other springs I would have been annoyed to have been woken so early, but now I am consoled by birdsong, as Browning, in self-imposed exile in Italy was consoled by the memory of an English spring.