In his guest feature on our literary magazine on Substack, poet Graham Powell discusses the nature poetry of Thomas Hardy, Keats and Clare’s nightingales and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Windhover
When Thomas Hardy surveyed the prospect of a new century, he called upon the ‘darkling thrush’ (1900), as bedraggled as it was to give him the ‘hope’ that just then he could not see for himself. It was always tempting for him to turn to the ‘proud songsters’ to calm his troubled eschatological doubts and uncertainties. And whenever he did so, he invested them with human traits to bolster him and lift his sempiternal gloom. In doing so, he did not allow himself to see – or hear – the birds for what they are. They are props used to embellish his mood. The thrush sings with ‘joy illimited’ though there is nothing to confirm that that is the reason for its song in the dead of winter.
There is a long history of poets using birds to complement their personal musings and dilemmas. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, the lark ascending (1820) isn’t a bird at all but a ‘blithe spirit’ evoking the freedom that those shackled and oppressed by convention and inequality could not. Similarly, John Keats’ nightingale (1819) is merely a cipher to allow him to contemplate the loss of self in otherness; to live untrammelled by doubts and fears as, he senses, the nightingale surely is able to do.
“in an era of ecopoetry, it behoves us now to see them for what they are – precious and endangered – and to celebrate and record them in ways that allow them to stand in their own right for what they are and what our relationship – as a fellow species endangering the world in which they live – affords us”
GRAHAM POWELL
Perhaps it was John Clare, a self-educated countryman, who truly understood the birds for what they are and recorded them in a language that was true to their nature before using them to illustrate and enhance the working of his own mind. He takes the reader into the landscape of birds and – in poems like The Nightingale’s Nest (1832) – literally crawls deeper into the habitat of the bird until it is present at close quarters, to be seen and heard for real. – ‘her wings would tremble in her ecstasy/ and feathers stand on end’. The wonder of the natural world has never been better celebrated. For the most part, he describes the bird and its song just as it is. Nevertheless, despite his commitment to unadorned realism, Clare still conforms to the traits of other poets. A nearby thrush is envious, apparently, and wishes to emulate the wonder of the nightingale; all very human and competitive.
So where do we look for poetry that records and celebrates the wonders of the avian world without using it simply as an allegory of the human experience? And what happens when the poet attempts to capture these wild creatures in order to set them free?
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Read TEMPERA, the new poetry collection by Graham Powell. In bookshops now.
‘Perfection for an instant – just long enough
To hold this fleeting transience …’
A fresco artist prepares an area of wet plaster for his wall – the intonaco – ready to be painted. Between sunrise and sunset, this will be his day’s work, the giornata — knowing that tomorrow he will return and begin again.
Transforming and mesmerising, Graham Powell’s powerful second collection ‘tempera’ uncovers the colour and texture of those fleeting moments and chance relationships that pass beneath the surface of our lives; weaving their path through time, and yet always left as unfinished business at the end of each day.
‘The lines are getting closer all the time
And every cusp and swirl delineates
The landscape across which we must navigate
A path that will not disorient us
But on which, we fear, we will at last be lost’
*Praise for Graham Powell*
‘Poignant’
‘A body of work that deals with life – and death – so sensitively’
‘This is poetry at its most accessible and beautiful, occasionally humorous, but also raw, honest, intimate and elegiac in tone’ – Martin Wallace, Leader magazine