The Cuckoo

That's the cuckoo, you say. I cannot hear it.

When last I heard it I cannot recall; but I know

Too well the year when first I failed to hear it---

It was drowned by my man groaning out to his sheep 'Ho! Ho!'

Ten times with an angry voice he shouted

'Ho! Ho!' but not in anger, for that was his way.

He died that Summer, and that is how I remember

The cuckoo calling, the children listening, and me saying, 'Nay'.

And now, as you said, 'There it is!’ I was hearing

Not the cuckoo at all, but my man's 'Ho! Ho!' instead.

And I think that even if I could lose my deafness

The cuckoo's note would be drowned by the voice of my dead.        

The Cuckoo was written on 15th January 1915. Like some of his other poems of that early period Edward Thomas drew on his past field note books. However it differs from these as there is no one source or event from which it is derived. Instead ET informs the story within the poem from a range of notes he had made about the cuckoo and its call over many years, as well as his knowledge of his poetic forebears' poems about the cuckoo, together with the Celtic snd other mythologies about this mysterious bird. 

His notes, as well as direct observations of the cuckoo’s arrival and its brief sojourn during the English summer, include jottings of possible subjects (for prose pieces) which touch on this mythology. 

The story within the poem is told from a female perspective, the only one of Edward Thomas ‘s poems to do so,  as Edna Longley has pointed out. It tells of a shepherd, his wife and his family, the shepherd’s death, his widow’s deafness and inability to hear the cuckoo; and the calls of the shepherd and the cuckoo, heard or unheard, tolling like a bell marking their lives and memories.

The arrival of the cuckoo, announced by its idiosyncratic call, has always been one of the most notable harbingers of summer. It was the centre of one of ET’s favourite Medieval poems, Sumer is icumen in.

The call has also always prompted memories of previous years’ arrivals and whether it was early or late and what this meant for the summer and the harvest. So the cuckoo’s first note became one of nature’s most important clarion calls that announced the season, marked the passing year and became a memory from years gone by. Despite the clarity of that call, there was much mystery about the cuckoo, a mystery that led to diverse mythologies about the bird. The marking of the passing of the year was developed, notably in Welsh poetry into an awareness of mortality - who and how many would die between the cuckoo’s departure and arrival of the cuckoo the following  year? The winter months especially took their toll of lives in earlier times. And this also created a superstition about the cuckoo’s call being the death knell for those who were sick and heard it.

There were also other traditions linking cuckoos to death. In some cultures the cuckoo was an intermediary between this world and the underworld, summoning the dead or spending the autumn and winter months in a tumulus.  Its disappearance as summer waned, was explained because it spent half its time on earth, half with the gods. As a result the cuckoo had to lay eggs in other birds’ nests in spring so the chicks were looked after when she returned to the Gods later in the year. 

Thus the most well known feature of the cuckoo’s life nowadays, its colonisation of other bird’s nests, was explained by this mythology.  

In his Book of Poems & Songs for the Open Air, Thomas included five poems largely or in part about the cuckoo, reflecting its importance both in poetry and for himself. The aforementioned Sumer is icumen in was the final poem of the collection, evidence of his high regard. It was one he was to echo in his own poem, April, written a few months after The Cuckoo - see previous post. He also included both poems entitled To the cuckoo, by William Wordsworth and John Logan respectively and The Merry Beggars by Richard Brome, in which the cuckoo featured in the chorus. 

He also selected Remembered Spring, an ancient Welsh poem which he almost certainly translated. This poem seems to have had a strong influence on him when he wrote his own later poem, The Cuckoo. 

Remembered Spring came from a song cycle of Llywarch Hen, a prince and poet from the Old North of Britain in the years after the Romans had departed. He is regarded as one of the four great early Welsh poets. It is worth  quoting Thomas’s translation in full:

Remembered Spring (from the Welsh of Llywarch Hen)

Sitting high on a hill, towards battles is turned 

My mind, yet it cannot drive me on.

Sharp is the wind; it is punishment to be alive;

When the trees put on the gay colours 

Of Summer, sick exceedingly am I to-day.

I am not a hunter, I keep no hound:

I cannot get about:

As long as she will, let the cuckoo sing.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing 

On the blossoming branches: 

Woe to the sick man that hears jolly notes.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoo sing.

There are some that hear them and will not hear

them again.

Did not I once listen to the cuckoo on the ivied

tree?

Did I not bear a shield?

What I loved is but a moan; what I loved is no

more.  

ET’s translation stops at this point, though the poem continues for many more stanzas - the two immediately afterwards include further mentions of the cuckoo: 

High above the merry oak, 

I have listened to the song of birds.

The loud cuckoo-every one remembers what he loves.

Songstress with the solacing song! her voice is grief- exciting:

Subject to wander, with the flight of the hawk, 

The loquacious cuckoo at Aber Cuawg.

On the face of it, Remembered Spring and The Cuckoo are very different, not just in their metre and rhyme scheme, but also in their protagonists - a shepherd’s widow who cannot hear the cuckoo, compared to a warrior prince who can hear the cuckoo at every turn. However there are also similarities - both are ageing, reaching the end of their lives so there is an elegiac tone to both poems, and there is an association in both with the cuckoo with the passing of time, with illness and mortality, and an inability to hear the cuckoo call either because of deafness or death  

Of the verses of Remembered Spring that ET translated, the two that emphasise the cuckoo's song's role in sickness and death, have an echo in his own poem, with the shepherd dying after, and possibly as a result of, hearing the cuckoo's call. In the final stanza of the translated poem, he concludes "What I loved is but a moan: what I loved is no more." This is similar to the widow's memory of hearing her husband's groan long after he had died in The Cuckoo. You can see the themes taken up in the later poem could have also originated in the verses about the cuckoo in Remembered Spring which ET did not translate, but which presumably he was well aware of. The first may have added further to the centrepiece of the poem, that the voice of her husband, recalled by his widow, drowned out the call of the cuckoo because “every one remembers what he loves”. So her love for her husband, both in his last year and since his death, still predominated. In the the second of the untranslated verses,  the cuckoo’s call is said to provide both solace and inspire grief - adding further layer to why, even if the widow in The Cuckoo was to regain her hearing, “the cuckoo's note would be drowned by the voice of my dead.”

Thomas would have translated the poem Remembered Spring at te latest in 1907, seven years before he wrote The Cuckoo. In between these two creations he had jotted down in many notebooks a range of ideas for pieces he might write in future. These included several on the cuckoo. Most relevantly to the poem he wrote a brief note in 1908 which could be a very summary of the later poem “Cuckoo - old woman hearing it last - deaf”. 

Another note delved into a mythological fictional past under the heading Sarn Helen (an old Roman road that crossed much of Wales) “Lived in tower seeing no one - never cut hair or nails etc for 7 years. Poor woman lived with him for sake of money & got his food etc & kept secret as much as possible. Lie on back for 1000 years - hear cuckoo & look at blue sky above mountains.”

Other notes, perhaps also further seeds for the later poem, included “As impossible as to hear the cuckoo in longest silence”; and “Just cuckoo etc memory.” 

Evidently ET was thinking for some time about a number of different ways to write about the cuckoo as a subject. Some of these are touched upon in his country books. In the South Country published in 1910, when in the upper Medway Valley he had observed “The cuckoo is gone before we know what its cry is to tell us or to remind us of.” 

ET's meditations on the cuckoo culminated in the poem The Cuckoo and a prose piece he wrote in the same period, called The First Cuckoo, which appeared in the collection of his last prose writings, The Last Sheaf. The prose piece is a positive optimistic piece about the bird and its call as a harbinger of summer. The poem provides another perspective and, though shorter, is more layered with the darker associations of the cuckoo that ET had been pondering over many years.

Meanwhile he had been observing the cuckoo’s arrival and its summer stay in his field note books. Most of these observations were made during his time in Hampshire around the hangers. They are immediate observations that are fresh and extensive, marking the importance to Thomas of hearing the cuckoo call through all its summer cycle and its effect on him. 

His response to the call could vary widely, as he described in his prose piece, The First Cuckoo, where he wrote of the cuckoo call having .. “a human and also a ghostly quality which earns it the reputation of sadness or joyousness at different times.” 

His many field notes observing the cuckoo reflected his own varying responses to its call.

In April 1908 he noted “Cuckoo calls out of the sunny dim wide valley (the Rother Vale) & the pale sleepy luxurious downs that seem in this sun to have settled down to sleep & all is well with them.”

In June of that year he noted:

“Quiet cool cloudy morn & no songs but a cuckoo calling repeatedly with the Hangers for an echo - a quick light mocking echo.”

In June the following year he wrote his most extensive note about the cuckoo, its call and his most complex response to it, probably from his study at the top of the hangers at 5pm: 

“A still warm afternoon after roaring cold rain - one can’t be quite at ease yet in

the heat - regrets - uncertainties - smouldering hate - & suddenly after no songs 

a cuckoo about 200 yds off with an interrogating note as of old pleasure coming along & hovering near & asking whether it was really I that entertains it or what ?..? . .? again & again he returns & asks & saddens me with gorgeous sadness - a warm but cloudy day with large flocks of grey going over & all that evening.”

On the first mowing of hay in June 1910 he noted in a wood close to Butser Hill:

“Whenever I hear the cuckoo buried in woods on a fine morning alone I think how 

foolish is all the business in which yet I shall spend all my life”!

An early note made at Steep  of a first appearance of the cuckoo towards the end of April 1908 reads “over the snow & keep thinking I hear the cuckoo in the sun (as I did hear it once this morning) & at last my ear keeps extracting the spirit of the song - the interval - the idea of it - out of the silence, until I seem to hear it clearly - emerging out of sunshine, out of blue sky, out of white cloud, out of shining grey water (possibly Lutcombe Pond under Ashford Hanger)”

This perception that he could hardly hear the cuckoo calling was one that persisted in later notes. 

The following April he noted on a visit to the Weald: “Leaning over a gate I became aware a cuckoo was singing - so faint I hardly heard it but just recognised the interval.”

In his book, In Pursuit of Spring towards the end of March 1913, normally far too early to hear a cuckoo call, he wrote “The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark and again a cock’s crowing, for the call of a cuckoo mixed with the blackbird’s singing. I strained my ears, willing to be persuaded, but was not.”

In his last notebook he wrote:

“In the wind I thought I heard the cuckoo all day long”

This ambiguity - was he hearing it or not, thinking he recognised the interval rather than the call - creates a ghost like quality to the cuckoo for the listener. Together with its long absences in between summers, this would have helped contribute to its connection with the dead and the world beyond.

In his poem ET added a further twist to whether you can hear the call or not, by having a protagonist who cannot hear the cuckoo at all and cannot remember when she last heard this harbinger of summer.

She only knows of the call when told, previously by her children and now by her current companion. In both cases she hears in her brain the call of her husband “Ho! Ho!” instead. The shepherd’s call, as the sheep are taken up on to the high downs, would have been a stronger harbinger of summer for her than the cuckoo’s call and remembered better because of her love of and familiarity with him. But the cuckoo, heard or unheard, still has an effect. The last time she remembered being told of the cuckoo’s call by her children, it may have been the death knell of her husband. Now the cuckoo’s call, still unheard by her, acts as a prompt to remember her husband’s call again, invoking his memory and providing a link between the quick and the dead, this world and the next. 

The cuckoo’s call  begins to break up as the summer passes, something ET often picked up on. In early notebooks he identified the last call of the cuckoo, as well as the first. This normally occurs in July,  but by end of May and early June the call is already sounding different:

On 8th June 1907 he noted “Spring is over - the cuckoo’s voice is breaking, small birds say ‘whit whit’ in the woods instead of singing.”

A couple of weeks later he wrote “Doughtey’s men & women in rainy beeches and last cuckoo calling.” 

As early as 26th May in 1914 he noted “But already many cuckoos either have a hiccup in midst of call or they have a kind of doddering husky prolongation at end.”

In the summer of 1910,  he had noted down as a subject, probably for a prose piece, but potentially also for a poem, the following: 

“She laughed (up to her pretty eyes in foxgloves) to hear the cuckoo’s note already breaking in the hot June noon - but I almost hated her, turned away sighing, for I loved his round note. 

Little & brown & lovely is my love.

Dress fresh fragrant, bright like May.”

The cuckoo ranked high in ET’s affections for birds. They may have been ghostly at times but at other times they entered dramatically as strong, almost human, protagonists. Some of his field notes bring them to life against scenic, atmospheric, almost theatrical, landscapes.

 On the last evening of May 1908 he noted:

“The night mist peeling of the hills & so letting in the sun on small tracts of wood & exposing blue sky & white cloud & then returning & blotting a hilltop & clouding  the sky smokily - the dull may blossom in mist - the smell - the voice of blackcap - the two cuckoos going over crying above the valley - the drenched goat weed & polished ivy - the frequent loud cuckooing - & no breath of wind at all.”

The following May, later one evening he wrote:

“Sun has set & the air is still & cold…..- the rays seem to flow away on a low broad river & disappear under an unearthly gate - & then cuckoo enters Ludcombe (close to Berryfield ) - calls & calls - our lamp being lit.”

Earlier that month he had written:

“Windy warm day with sky clouded all over with grey which the invisible sun makes bright & molten so that it cannot be looked at — all clear, but not very clear - cuckoo calls & the wind blows away his song & sometimes he changes his places.”

In June 1909, visiting Horsmonden in Kent, he noted “Scent of crushed bracken & wild rose ..amid the bracken & clover. Turtle dove among the oaks at Horsmonden.

Cuckoo (cwcw fach) upon the gorse.”

ET was clearly familiar with Cwcw fach (Little Cuckoo), a Welsh traditional song, whose first verse goes:

“Little cuckoo, but you’re foolish

Nesting amongst the spikey gorse

Come to the gentle parish of Dolgellau

There you’ll have green bushes.”

He may also have been familiar with another Welsh Cuckoo folk poem, The Poet and the Cuckoo, which has a strong theme of transience and mortality, like Remembered Spring. 

The Poet and the Cuckoo

O little grey–blue cuckoo, where have you been so long,

So long without returning?

You have been silent.

So long without returning?

You have been silent.

THE CUCKOO:

O, don't misunderstand [me] now and have foolish thoughts,

It was the cold wind from the north that held me back.

It was the cold wind from the north that held me back.

April and May are my singing time,

And half June, as you all know.

And half June, as you all know.

Farewell to you this year, farewell to you all,

Before I return thousands will be lost.

Before I return thousands will be lost.

Many a young girl will hang her head

Before I return to sing in the tree.

Before I return to sing in the tree.

The Cuckoo also fits into this tradition, telling the tale from the different perspective of a deaf woman but with similar themes of mortality, transience, love and remembering as these earlier poems. Connecting all is the human and ghostly presence or absence of the cuckoo, marking the season and the years, and linking family and folk memories and the living and the dead. 

Walks 

The lament of the widow in The Cuckoo, who couldn't hear the cuckoo's call and could not remember when she last heard it, sadly rings true today for everyone, not just the deaf. The cuckoo is no longer as consistently present as in ET’s day or indeed in recent times. To hear the cuckoo now is becoming a rarer and rarer event, possibly because their customary host birds have also been in decline. 

In contrast Edward Thomas came across the cuckoo and its call in many places and landscapes including Wiltshire, Kent, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Cornwall, Cumbria and Wales throughout the summer months. The poem suggests sheep grazing landscapes in Wales or Wiltshire, although there is no evidence to suggest that the poem is tied to an actual place.

One walk is suggested by the poem Remembered Spring where Aber Cuawg is invoked. The Cuawg is supposed to be in the Dulas valley in mid-Wales, close to Machynlleth, the old Welsh capital briefly under Owain Glendower. There is no evidence that Thomas ever visited this area. 

There are other walks in the Weald (round his old home south of Sevenoaks), Gloucestershire (round Ryton) and Wiltshire (along the Ridgeway and Icknield Way). The place where he heard the cuckoo most often and most memorably was in the hangers of East Hampshire, specifically round his first home at Berryfield and up Ludcombe (Ashford) stream, and from his study at the top of the hangers above Ludcombe. 

The most detailed description by him of an encounter with a cuckoo occurred in the last section of  The First Cuckoo in The Last Sheaf. He had walked all that day in late April 1914 through Carmarthenshire. He was between St Clear and Laugharne on the coast, his objective, heading south on the Taf estuary. Rather than walking all along the road which ET walked, it is now possible to follow the Welsh Coastal footpath, which dips from the road to the estuary and back.

His notebook entry provides a brief summary:

“Cuckoo & corn crake 6.45 below Morfa Bach (a farm). One is generally alone - some on one side, cuckoo (by Trefenty a farm on the other side of the estuary) on other lovely hillside woods (which Taf winds under) between St Clear with hillside dark bare oak tufted with green birch.”

In his more extended prose piece as he walked up and down hill on the road with the lovely views over the river, he first expected to hear the cuckoo, then thought he heard it, then “Not a sound”. He thought he heard it again, but by the time he was still, it had gone. The third time he had no doubt. The cuckoo was singing on the other side of the estuary, perhaps three quarter of a mile away. 

“For half a minute he sang, changed his perch unseen and sang again, his notes as free from the dust and heat as the cups of the marigolds, and as soft as the pale white-blue sky, and as dim as the valley into whose twilight he was gathered, calling fainter and fainter, as I drew towards home.”

For Thomas, the cuckoo and its call, sometimes human, sometimes ghostly, had become an integral part of the landscape, embraced by it and enhancing it. 

Acknowledgements

Edward Thomas field notebooks copyright Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York.

Please note transcriptions of many of Edward Thomas's field note books can be studied at the Edward Thomas Centre at the Petersfield Museum.

Edward Thomas's The First Cuckoo is published in The Last Sheaf. I have also quoted from The Book of poems and songs for the open air, The South Country and In Pursuit of Spring.

My thanks to Ben Mackay as ever for editorial support.