Today’s Poem: The Owl

Edward Thomas, salted and sobered

Caspar David Friedrich, An Owl on a Bare Tree, c. 1834 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Owl

by Edward Thomas

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
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Today is the birthday of Edward Thomas (1878–1917), for whom we at Poems Ancient and Modern feel deeply, and to whose poems we are drawn again and again. Our deep feeling stems at least in part from the pathos of his death near the end of the First World War — a war he didn’t have to enter, which he did enter to lay the demon of his own perceived failures to rest, and which became directly and indirectly his great subject, in the brief three years between his turning to poetry (prompted by his great friend Robert Frost) and the end of his life.

But setting aside the pathos, there are the one hundred forty-four poems, one full gross of poems, a startling body of work, collected in two posthumous volumes, for a slim measure of years. Everybody knows Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” but even a cursory read through his 1917 Poems and its 1918 companion, Last Poems, reveals, in poem after poem, a deftness in rhyme and meter, an intensity of observation, and a subtle complexity of emotion — an attachment to loved places, for example, undercut by grief at their mutability, and of his own exile from them — that makes him as a poet continually affecting and unforgettable.

The first volume, Poems, which includes Today’s Poem, opens with an exhortation to rise for battle and to

Forget, men, everything
On this earth newborn,
Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.

Throughout this collection of sixty-four poems, men march off to war, not to return. Yet the earth is continually crying out its loveliness to them, a mystery in itself, though time and weather changes it, bloodshed mars it, and human lives that inhabit and remark on it are always passing away too soon.

Though drafted in notebooks as early as 1914, before the outbreak of war, the poems read, with a painful consciousness, as a long goodbye to loved things. Four poems — “If I Should Ever by Chance,” “What Shall I Give,” “If I Were to Own,” and “To Helen” — make imaginative bequests to his three children and his wife, with the heartrending generosity of one who loves, who feels he has failed in love, and who expects to die in the shadow of his own insufficiency. In “Sowing,” meanwhile, even the recollected perfection of a day in the fields includes an intimation of mortality in the “chuckling first soft cry” of an owl, that bird of omen who calls the name of the man about to die.

Edward Thomas with his son Merfyn, 1900 (Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout these poems, birdsong recurs among the minutely observed details of the natural world. Early in the collection, the joyful cries of two peewits mystify the ghost of a dead man, exiled from joy. And later, the songs of those “birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” are the last thing the speaker of “Adlestrop” hears as the train pulls from the station. The English birds belong to a world lost to the soldier at war — a world that is beautiful yet continually declining from its beauty, a world peopled not only by the living, but by the mourned and mourning dead.

The owl, a more universal bird, particularly haunts the speaker of Today’s Poem. This is no Shakespearean owl, denizen of the bleak yet strangely cheerful English winter; its call is no “merry note,” nor a “cause of merriment,” but a reminder, “telling me plain what I escaped,” and lamenting “all who lay beneath the stars” in death.

The poem’s pentameter abcb quatrains trace the soldier-speaker’s progress out of the night and into an inn. From the beginning he is careful to define his situation as a still-living person: “hungry but not starved,” cold but still “with heat in me.” His longing for “rest” in the third line of the first stanza is accentuated by the repetition of the end-word as the first line of the next stanza — as if to set up a pattern of repeated end-words. That pattern never materializes, however, just as, behind the barred doors of the inn, the rest the speaker seeks never fully materializes.

How can he rest, when the owl’s cry pervades the night? He has escaped death that day, but he cannot escape the presentiment of death. The dead have fallen, and their silent rest is eternal, but the owl gives them a voice, sounding through the evening’s comforts. That voice “salts” the man’s food and his sleep, both seasoning them and sowing them, like Carthage, with a permanent doom: the savor of existence mingled subtly with the arid taste of what is to come. This night he is granted his life. But we know, as the owl reminds him, that he will not keep it long.

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