Desert Island Poems: The Owl by Edward Thomas

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In this series of posts I’ll be sharing a poem I love and explaining why. I hope you enjoy the poem and my reflections on it, and if you want to make a comment at the bottom or like it, please do. Thanks, as ever, for subscribing.

I’ve always loved poems about animals, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because we’re all a little fascinated by the resemblance to ourselves we see in animals, maybe it’s just a sense of otherness, maybe it’s just the sense of beauty or wonder we find in them. Either way, I was startled by the ways in which this poem moved through each of its stanzas. A poem entitled ‘The Owl’ might not necessarily be the most eye-catching or original on first sight, but what Edward Thomas does in this poem is beautifully handled at every turn. 

I’ve often admired the way in which Thomas plays the line off against the sentence i.e. he’ll keep the sentence going over many lines without it feeling verbose or clumsy or long-winded. How does he do this? Well, I think the answer is through an incredibly innovative use of syntax and punctuation. For example, watch how he goes from ‘All of the night…’ to ‘...as in I went.’ It’s a masterclass in the possibility of the line, as well as in enjambment between stanzas. We can really see the influence of Thomas Hardy in this aspect of Edward Thomas’s craft.

The ending, though, is what I most love about this poem, and I was unprepared for its poignancy on first reading. The poem is titled ‘The Owl’ but, of course, it’s about much more than that. For me, it’s a poem about the limitations of poetry in the face of the natural world. Thomas leaves us with the owl’s cry which melancholically rejoices, for ‘all who lay under the stars’. The implication here is that the poem cannot rejoice in the way an owl’s cry can, and yet how does Thomas convey this and present us with the owl’s cry? A poem. So, it’s a poem of contradictions, then. The poem lays out the limitations of the poem, but uses a poem to evoke what is beyond this limit. 

W.H. Auden once wrote in his famous elegy In Memory of W.B. Yeats ‘In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise.’ This sentiment of praise is echoed in Thomas’s poem with a more humble attitude (after all Thomas is ‘sobered’ by the cry which tells him what ‘others could not’), deferring to the natural world, which rejoices for us and in a more superior manner, despite our learning, our language and attempts at lyricism. 

The Owl

By Edward Thomas

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

Andrew Jamison is a writer and teacher who has published three poetry collections with The Gallery Press. You can buy signed, first editions of his books in paperback or hardback at his online bookshop, or browse his writing subscription services here.