The Birds

    (To Edmund Gosse)

    Within mankind's duration, so they say,
    Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.
    Asia had no name till man was old
    And long had learned the use of iron and gold;
    And æons had passed, when the first corn was planted,
    Since first the use of syllables was granted.

    Men were on earth while climates slowly swung,
    Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long
    Subsidence turned great continents to sea,
    And seas dried up, dried up interminably,
    Age after age; enormous seas were dried
    Amid wastes of land.    And the last monsters died.

    Earth wore another face.    O since that prime
    Man with how many works has sprinkled time!
    Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads;
    Building ships, temples, multiform abodes.
    How, for his body's appetites, his toils
    Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils;
    And in what thousand thousand shapes of art
    He has tried to find a language for his heart!

    Never at rest, never content or tired:
    Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired,
    Most grandly piling and piling into the air
    Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where.
    And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange,
    More grand, more full of awe, than all that change,
    And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears,
    That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years,
    And even into that unguessable beyond
    The water-hen has nested by a pond,
    Weaving dry flags into a beaten floor,
    The one sure product of her only lore.
    Low on a ledge above the shadowed water
    Then, when she heard no men, as nature taught her,
    Flashing around with busy scarlet bill
    She built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.

    O let your strong imagination turn
    The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn,
    And then unbuild, and seven Troys below
    Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow,
    Till all have passed, and none has yet been there:
    Back, ever back.    Our birds still crossed the air;
    Beyond our myriad changing generations
    Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations.
    A million years before Atlantis was
    Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass,
    Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade;
    And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid,
    High amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts,
    And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts
    Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then,
    And still the thumbling tit and perky wren
    Popped through the tiny doors of cosy balls
    And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls;
    A round mud cottage held the thrush's young,
    And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung.
    And, skimming forktailed in the evening air,
    When man first was were not the martins there?
    Did not those birds some human shelter crave,
    And stow beneath the cornice of his cave
    Their dry tight cups of clay?    And from each door
    Peeped on a morning wiseheads three or four.

    Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern,
    Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern,
    Chaffinch and greenfinch, wagtail, stonechat, ruff,
    Whitethroat and robin, fly-catcher and chough,
    Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk and jay,
    Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way.
    And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame,
    As I this year, looked down and saw the same
    Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft
    With grey-green spots on them, while right and left
    A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying,
    Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying,
    Circling and crying, over and over and over,
    Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover.
    And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted,
    Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted,
    Cormorants stood in a wise, black, equal row
    Above the nests and long blue eggs we know.

    O delicate chain over all the ages stretched,
    O dumb tradition from what far darkness fetched:
    Each little architect with its one design
    Perpetual, fixed and right in stuff and line,
    Each little ministrant who knows one thing,
    One learnèd rite to celebrate the spring.
    Whatever alters else on sea or shore,
    These are unchanging: man must still explore.