Just Because: 'What the Thrush Said'

Hermit Thrush                             Suzanne Britton, ironphoenix.org

Winter solstice, which this year falls on December 21 or 22, marks the shortest day and longest night of the year, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere. In the United States, the exact time of the solstice is 11:49 p.m. EST, which is 8:49 p.m. PST, according to the handy-dandy Seasons Calculator (http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/seasons.html?n=137). It's been celebrated in different ways for millennia and continues to be in many corners of the world: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/12061231/When-is-the-shortest-day-of-the-year-the-winter-solstice-2015.html and http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/winter-solstice-2015-five-strange-facts-about-astronomical-event-1534232
   And here, in this particular little online corner, we will celebrate with a beautiful winter poem from John Keats (1795-1821, which, as you can see, gave him only 26 years in which to gladden the world with his verse). It was originally written in 1818, in a letter, according to Poem-a-Day, and was untitled. I believe it was given the title it now carries (by whom, I don't know), because, in the letter, the run-up to it reads "I was led into these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness—I have not read any books—the Morning said I was right—I had no idea but of the morning, and the thrush said I was right—seeming to say,

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars,
To thee the Spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,

And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep."

   The thrush (which, btw, is a family of birds; among the many different kinds are the gray-cheeked, Bicknell's, hermit, wood, and until recently, the robin, now considered to be instead an Old World flycatcher) seems to be a symbol of winter for many, and maybe particularly in England. Keats's compatriot Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote an ode to the little guy called The Darkling Thrush: http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-poem-for-new-year.html