This week’s choice is “A Blackbird Singing” by R.S. Thomas which I have chosen because the blackbird is one of the heralds of spring.
It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.
- R.S. Thomas (1913—2000)
Poem 316. A Blackbird Singing
It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.
You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.
A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.
This short poem contrasts the dowdy black plumage of the blackbird with its rich, mellifluous song.
Thomas begins with this contrast: how can this creature with its black feathers suggesting an association with evil spirits or hellish places produce such beautiful music, the orange bill seeming to transmute the base metal of the individual notes into a golden song.
He brings to mind the sound of the blackbird’s song carried on the warm Spring air into a room where we are working, and its power to seduce our minds from the mundanities of life, its slow melody laden with the emotions and sensations of the historical events the bird’s tribe have always witnessed and which seems to inform their song, endowing it with sweetness and melancholy.
I like the poem because it reminds me that birdsong can lift our spirits and to remind us that the natural world has the power to pluck at our emotions with the simplest things.
Links
- Listen to Thomas read his own poem on YouTube.