What the Thrush Said to T. S. Eliot

Abstract

Although birds and birdsongs have inspired myriad poems for millennia, the thrush has generated a special fascination for English and American poets over the last two centuries. This little-known fact is borne out by a cabal of well-known poets who have written poems in pursuit of the elusive thrush and its ethereal song. In most of these poems, the thrush seems to know something the speaker doesn't, and its song taunts the speaker and reader alike with the possibility of hidden meaning beyond the reach of words. Many examples could be adduced, such as Thomas Hardy's “The Darkling Thrush,” Siegfried Sassoon's “Thrushes”, William Carlos Williams's “To a Wood Thrush”, Robert Frost's “Come In” and others. This fascination did not escape T. S. Eliot, and he dramatically incorporates thrush songs into his two greatest poems, The Waste Land and Four Quartets. These allusions locate Eliot in a conversation between his poetic predecessors and successors, which I would argue has a bearing on both of these poems.