Oriole

Down in the woods he sings: oriole, oriole. It's haunting, alluring, maddening. I've seen pictures of the bird but never the actual thing. I wonder if he is Edward Thomas's Unknown Bird. Thomas was a keen naturalist, and if the poem was prompted by a real bird (and why not? All the proof is-- I told men/ What I had heard) it's inconceivable it could have been any regular visitor to the UK, at least in his part of it, at his time. I write this from deepest France, where the oriole is regular but not exactly common. The oriole has been a rare East Anglian visitor for best part of a hundred years. It's not a bird of Thomas country.

A lot depends on how you hear "La-la-la". Whenever I have heard anyone read this poem they place equal weight on all three syllables. But give it a bit of song, la-la-la, and it starts to become possible.

The Unknown Bird

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.

I never knew a voice,
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.