ran parallel to his changing approach to birdsong suggests a study of birdsong in ‘Insomnia’ and his drafted and completed mature poems may illuminate his development as a poet and track his progression from failed attempts at poetry to successfully completed works.
The thrushes in ‘March’ are ‘unwilling’ singers, just like the robin in ‘Insomnia’ (p. 35). The robin’s song occurs in the moments between night and day, in the transitions in light, and the thrush’s song is placed in intervals between different weather patterns. However, in ‘March’, the interaction between the birds and the weather and light patterns is made more explicit, as an examination of its sources indicates. In the Annotated Collected Poems, Longley points to the start of Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, written in early 1913, as a source of ‘March’. The opening of In Pursuit of Spring emphasizes close interaction with the weather, and suggests an ultimate potency of birdsong:
The missel-thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the rain with his rolling, brief song; so rapidly and oft was it repeated that it was almost one long, continuous song. But as the wind snatched away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or another answered him or took his place, the music was roving like a hunter’s
and
with the day came snow, hail, and rain, each impotent to silence the larks (p.148)
In ‘March’, this potency also infects silence. Although the song of the thrushes is set in direct combat with adverse weather conditions, ‘Rain, snow, sleet, hail, / Had kept them quiet’, and, in a moment of meteorological calm, the thrushes earnestly sing to ‘keep off / Silence and night’, silence itself is then depicted as ‘Rich with all that riot of song’. The birdsong not only wards off the silence, but adds to it, inhabiting it, merging with it, surrounded by it. Reminiscent of the ‘harmony of bird, wind, and man’ in ‘Insomnia’, this poem includes an essential ingredient of silence, previously lacking. ‘March’ shows birdsong holding some undefined inexplicable knowledge that the listener, both while listening and for a short period afterwards, is enabled to share, if uncomprehendingly: ‘Something they knew – I also, while they sang / And after’ (p. 35) or, as an earlier draft of ‘March’ puts it, ‘And for a little after’.51
‘The Other’, written about three to five days later than ‘March’, explores further the relation between birds and silence, depicting birds as struggling less triumphantly with silence:
The latest waking blackbird’s cries
Perished upon the silence keen. (p. 42)
The importance of ‘silence keen’ and its primacy over bird or human song or speech is suggested in ‘The Combe’, written a few days later. The mouth of the combe is ‘stopped with brambles’, and it is ‘ever dark, ancient and dark’. All singing birds, except for the missel thrush, ‘are quite shut out’ (p. 48).
Further lines in ‘The Other’ indicate another development in Thomas’s treatment of birdsong. These lines describe birds as imitative: starlings ‘wheeze and / Nibble like ducks’ (p. 42). This characteristic is also implied in the disturbing exchanges in attributes between birds, men and fish in ‘The Hollow Wood’, composed a day later than ‘The Combe’, on 31 December 1914.
A comparison of ‘Adlestrop’, written on 8 January 1915, with a passage in its source notebook, dated 24 June 1914, shows another change in Thomas’s treatment of birdsong. One of his field notebooks refers to a ‘chain of blackbirds [sic] songs’ (p. 176), reminiscent of his description of birdsong in ‘Insomnia’ as a song ‘absolutely monotonous, absolutely expressionless, a chain of little thin notes linked mechanically in a rhythm identical at each repetition’. However, in ‘Adlestrop’, the birdsong coincides with a sense of epiphany. The focus is on not an ‘identical’ and ‘monotonous’ chain-like rhythm but on a specific moment, with the many blackbirds of the notebook becoming one: ‘for that minute a blackbird sang’ (p. 51).
References to birdsong in Thomas’s poems frequently evoke not only the close relation of song and land, weather and silence, but also the emotional charge of that environment for the listener and the singing bird. ‘The Hollow Wood’ emphasizes the effect of sunlight and darkness on birdsong: ‘Out in the sun the goldfinch flits’ (p. 48). The goldfinch has a ‘bright twit’, while the birds in the dark forest are ‘Fish that laugh and shriek’. The word ‘drop’ in ‘the bright twit of the goldfinch drops’ into the wood suggests both downward movement and a drop in mood as the bird enters the darkness.
Thomas’s first mature poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, written on 3 December 1914, investigates connections between the song of the stone curlew and the land. The song speaks with, if not for, the land. The lines relate the song to wildness and a lack of man-made boundaries, and show the bird nesting in half-cultivated fields that hark back to the communality of land:
the land is wild, and there’s a spirit of wildness
Much older, crying when the stone-curlew yodels
His sea and mountain cry, high up in Spring.
He nests in fields where still the gorse is free as
When all was open and common. (p. 31)
This stress on the link between birdsong and the land is countered by an awareness of the distance between human song or poetry and land and birdsong. Such an awareness of, in particular, the inaccessibility of birdsong is already evident in Thomas’s early writings. A letter to his future wife Helen in 1897 runs:
I enjoy the songs of birds at times, but not often: I never could enjoy them much, though doubtless they have combined with other things to cause my delights; perhaps my surroundings are too imperfect for it; but more likely I am incapable of it.52
His later poetry, too, although it often refers to birdsong as a language, emphasizes its distance from human language. ‘If I were to own’, written in April 1916, employs the phrase ‘proverbs untranslatable’ (p. 115) to describe a thrush’s song, encouraging a view of birdsong as a vernacular language, but also stressing its inaccessibility – it cannot be translated. This image recalls Thomas’s implicit criticism of Keats in his critical biography of the poet, also published in 1916, which observes how ‘[t]he great odes, the poems to Autumn, and “The Eve of St Agnes”, could never have been translated out of a thrush’s song’.53 An earlier poem of Thomas’s, composed on 26 December 1914, ‘An Old Song II’, is less explicit about levels of comprehension and accessibility but combines the sounds of human singing and a gull’s ‘mewing’ in the fading light of dusk that threatens oblivion:
The sailors’ song of merry loving
With dusk and sea-gull’s mewing
Mixed sweet, the lewdness far outweighed
By the wild charm the chorus played: (p. 47)
Longley has interpreted these lines as art that has become ‘inseparable from Nature’, art being represented by the sailors’ song.54 However, ‘An Old Song II’ draws its rhythms from traditional song, and the example of human song is a generic sailors’ song of a ‘lewdness’ that is ‘far outweighed’ by the ‘wild charm’ of the birds’ chorus. Such detail undermines Longley’s reading, reversing it to suggest, as Harry Coombes has phrased it in a comment on the robin’s song in ‘Insomnia’, a ‘sense of the alien’ in nature.55 Whichever reading is adopted, however, the emphasis remains on the extent to which human composition, particularly vernacular song, is connected with or divided from the environment, as articulated in
