the thrush by Desmond Graham
the thrush
last night
our old thrush in the square
descended from the ones
who sang to soldiers
as they rested
from the Roman Wall –
safe Syrians
who set their bows aside
and Belgians
brought across the wide
North Sea
to here –
we heard as a nightingale
so long and varied
so deep noted
so out-of-reach
a high sound –
our minds
still full of the continent
and all its warm south ways
we said ‘My God
a nightingale
has landed here
it must be gales’
but we soon knew
it was our own
and looked
and watched it –
song so complex
and originally made
our thrush
in the beech trees
each phrase
and turning taken
with the ease of Spring
though Spring
was nowhere near
DESMOND GRAHAM
…………………………………………………
A couple back from the continent hear a thrush singing in the beech trees near their northern home and briefly mistake it for a nightingale. This would seem to be the situation of Desmond Graham’s poem: so simple, and yet harbouring a wealth of symbolism and historical narrative, but not in a manner that weighs down the poem. Whatever else we read into these lines, what remains prominent is a bird singing in the trees.
Graham isn’t the first poet to record an experience of nature and reflect on others in the distant past having had a similar experience – and he knows it. He is a noted scholar of war poetry and is the Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Newcastle University. John Keats’s justly famous ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, which contains the lines ‘The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown’, is explicitly alluded to in that phrase lifted from Keats’s poem, ‘warm south’. AE Housman’s poem beginning ‘On Wenlock edge…’, from his enormously popular collection A Shropshire Lad, also comes to mind:
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I.
One could point to certain poems by Thomas Hardy, too. If there are literary comparisons to be made, there is also one stark literary contrast: Graham’s thrush, rather homely and evocative of the human, bears no resemblance to the almost robot-killer bird depicted in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Thrushes’ (‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, / More coiled steel than living’). Interestingly, though, Hughes and Graham both owe a debt to the marvellous soldier-poet, Keith Douglas – indeed, Graham has written of his interest in Douglas being ‘a lifelong engagement’; Hughes edited a selected edition of Douglas’s poems, and Graham edited the Complete Poems.
How plausible is it that the poet mistook, if only briefly, the thrush’s song for a nightingale’s? You can hear for yourself the birds’ similarly variable singing in this ‘song thrush vs nightingale’ video. It’s an easily made mistake and one that allows an important if understated theme to enter the poem: the plight of migrants, a theme that is uppermost in all of our minds these days.
Thrushes will mostly stay in Britain through the winter, but the nightingale is a migrant bird that arrives in the spring (the poem’s phrase ‘landed here’ is literally true but also the kind used pejoratively of migrants). The thrush itself evokes a multicultural memory of ancient Britain: the Syrian and Belgian troops stationed at Hadrian’s Wall. The phrase ‘safe Syrians’ sounds ironic in the context of today, and those ‘Belgians / brought across the wide / North Sea / to here’ surely conjure up those migrants currently risking their lives making the crossing to Britain in small boats.
Both the Greeks and the Romans considered the nightingale a harbinger of Spring, and if the hopeful symbol of Spring is invoked at the end it is a false Spring – the real one is ‘nowhere near’. The plight remains a plight…
A few words – from the poet himself – about one technical aspect of the poem: its use of short lines that delicately build the (variable) rhythms of the poem, reminiscent of the American style of free verse pioneered by William Carlos Williams. Graham remarked to Into Poetry: ‘My use of short lines with lineation as the only punctuation comes from a love of the fleeting ambiguity English allows, poems only showing their direction as the sentence moves on after the little breath of a line-break, ruling out other possible directions as we discover where we are going.’