Home again in Garrett Park after spells in Key West and Rehoboth Beach, UD finds in her garden among overgrown holly bushes a low-lying wood thrush nest with an anxious egg-sitting mother and an aggressively patrolling father.

The nest is ugly but clever, composed
of semi-circular twigs that form a deep,

well-rounded bottom, and, for connective
tissue, bits of white paper from human trash.

Having been dive-bombed, UD cedes this part of her backyard to the thrushes, and contents herself with watching through binoculars the big mother bird, the trembling nest, the tyrannical father. And although she misses the raucous chants of the Key West macaws, she knows she’s fortunate to have orchestra seats at the famous sound of the wood thrush.

… [T]he rich, liquid song of a Wood Thrush resonates through the morning air.

… [In the] moist and shady deciduous forests throughout the eastern United States, …the sensory experience of a walk in the woods is enriched by the flute-like sounds of the Wood Thrush. These sounds have inspired many lofty descriptions, such as this excerpt from the writings of a naturalist in the 1930’s:

“As we listen we lose the sense of time—it links us with eternity…Its tones…seem like the vocal expression of the mystery of the universe, clothed in a melody so pure and ethereal that the soul still bound to its earthly tenement can neither imitate nor describe it.”

Perhaps the most famous reference to the Wood Thrush’s song is this quotation from the writings of Henry David Thoreau,

“The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told…Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.”

The legendary “ee-o-lay” song of the Wood Thrush is actually a one-bird duet. Because the Wood Thrush has the equivalent of two sets of “vocal cords,” it is able to sing two overlapping songs at once. In other words, the Wood Thrush sings with two voices simultaneously. The syrinx, or voice-box, of the majority of bird species contains two membranes which when vibrated produce sound. The ability to control each membrane independently makes birds such as the Wood Thrush capable of impressive vocal gymnastics.

Immortal bird.

Sweet bird of youth.

Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and, more recently, Amy Clampitt have all had what to say about the thrush.

The Darkling Thrush, by Hardy, starts with the speaker entirely depressed at the thought of his exhausted civilization, a condition for which he finds a visual equivalent in his lifeless wintry scene:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
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.

Only a poet would stand outside in such a deathly scene; everyone sensible is inside at a household fire. Those strings of broken lyres — a world once musical with beauty and life and meaning now violently broken off into silence — will recompose themselves in the throat of the thrush. But not yet. Next stanza will deepen and clarify the poet’s problem:

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.

The poet’s time is a dead time – war, social upheaval, spiritual confusion, the usual suspects, have made earth and the poet spiritless. But ahoy.

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.

A messy old thrush, his feathers mussed by the wind, nonetheless pours forth. If he can do it, goddammit, so can I!

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.

In Whitman’s gorgeous When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, a threnody for Abraham Lincoln, the thrush sings a death carol that captures both the poet’s grief and his conviction of the country’s immortal soul: ‘The voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.’

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

… (Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses)…

Poetically, the Clampitt piece, A Hermit Thrush, is the least impressive. It’s a garrulous shapeless thing in which the poet worries here and there and everywhere about impermanence. But she’s got a way of talking about the thrush that pleasantly domesticates the high exotic note of the earlier poets. Here are some excerpts:

no point is fixed, … there’s no foothold
but roams untethered

Every summer she returns to a tree at the beach; every summer she worries it’ll be damaged or even washed away, but so far it’s still there.

aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as
in the end untenable.

This is your Buddhist buddy lecturing you on non-attachment as a solution to your worries. The poet finds it unpersuasive.

Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with
thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry’s cool poultice–
and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

So actually even though everything’s always changing (and what doesn’t get said here but what underlies the poem is our misery at our recognition that our changes, once youth passes, are all toward the grave), the earth every year rejuvenates itself, or if it doesn’t find youth again, it finds ways of mending and sustaining its life. And even those earthly objects that do die… you know…

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell…

Clampitt concludes:

we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive–
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human–there’s
hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.

Fragmentary and yet unbroken, the music of the thrush affects us because we intuit a link between its beautiful, inexhaustible — though diminishing — self-expression, and our own human assertion of ourselves in the world. We barely understand this world, but as we move through it we find ourselves — at first hesitatingly, later smoothly — in possession of an ever-renewed voice.