Once a week I cycle down a road in Stockwell past a house with a blue plaque for Edward Thomas (1878-1917). He’s sometimes known as a war poet—because he was killed at the Battle of Arras—but few of his poems are about war. His best known poem is Adlestrop, a poem about the stillness of a steam train stopping at a Cotswold station and hearing a blackbird sing and then “all the birds/Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.” The poem below is also about a bird, an unknown bird that only Thomas can hear. Don’t we all have an unknown bird that sings only to us? Where the bird comes from and what he says we don’t exactly know, but when we have “A heavy body and a heavy heart,” we think of our unknown bird and “straightway…become/ Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.” And what does it mean that the bird wanders “beyond my shore”? He comes from something I don’t understand but still has the capacity to make me “light as that bird.”

The Unknown Bird by Edward Thomas

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off—
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is—I told men
What I had heard.

Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
‘Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.