Heaven and Home

Curlews called in the creeks, and out from great plains of the bay came a gabbling of shelducks. Everything suggested spring; even the sound of your squealing as you rode your bike between the dykes to Almorness. You were going too fast to see the frogs which coddled the ditches with spawn. I had to wait until you stopped so I could show you the pussy-willows, and a pair of custard-yellow catkins like lamb’s tails. But you were having your own time, and the account you later gave of the day was only of speed and the terror of crashing.

Later, a song thrush sang and the doubled-up phrases rang above the silage stacked in the yard at your grandparents’ house. A song thrush will make a big sound in an otherwise empty world, and it’s only natural to be stirred by thrilling inspiration. But even the best of us can set off ill-equipped, soon finding ourselves lost in blunt poetics and heavy, ham-fisted interpretations. 

I’m so aware of Hardy’s Darkling Thrush that it comes immediately to mind in early spring; I’m haunted by his description of a thrush’s “happy good-night air… [and] Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware”. I resent this poem more than I can say. It’s good, old-fashioned wrong, and yet I cannot stop it coming back into my head and blocking the path when I reach for the words to describe a song thrush. I would love to go further, because the song thrush does not mean to share anything like HOPE in some softened, anthropomorphic pose of optimism. I know the bird I heard was singing because the days are longer and perhaps another bird was singing nearby. Beyond that, I am rapidly, terrifyingly out of my depth in terms of chemistry and biology which pool far deeper than any human being can sound. The song contains a strand of almost every thing which can be felt, and it weakens its value to call it only HOPE. 

Writing is no escape from reality. At its best, it can facilitate a closer engagement with the world, just as it can often rob us too.