Edward Thomas: Birdsong

I had just learned of Edward Thomas a few years ago, thanks to Stephen Pentz, at his blog, First Known When Lost  (see sidebar for link).  Consequently I knew little of him except for his poetry.  According to the brief biography, he was already known for his many fine essays, critiques, and writings in natural history, when he met Robert Frost in 1914 who encouraged Thomas to write poetry.  Thomas took his advice and had produced many fine poems when, unfortunately, he was killed in action in WWI in 1917.

Therefore, I was surprised to find him in Nature Writing: The English Tradition, another of the unexpected authors in that anthology whom I had known from other genres.  The following comes from the excerpt found in that anthology, and I can see why Frost had encouraged him to write poetry.


"At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging branches form blue caves, and out of these emerge the songs of many hidden birds.  I know that there are bland melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins whose earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that has burst through a more passionate silence, hedge-sparrows of liquid confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, chaffinches and yellowhammers saying always the same thing ( a dear but courtly praise of the coming season), larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes of infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, never thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, scolding, cheering, flattering, coaxing, challenging, with merry-hearted, bold voices that must have been the same in the morning of the world when the forest trees lay, or leaned, or hung, where they fell.  Yet I can distinguish neither blackbird, nor robin, nor hedge-sparrow, nor any one voice.  All are blent into one seething stream of song.  It is one song, not many.  It is the spirit that sings.  Mixed with them is the myriad stir of unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences of heart and root of tree, voices of hope and growth, of love that will be satisfied though it leap upon the swords of life." 

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
"Hampshire"
from The South Country
Excerpt comes from Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder 


What do you think?  Is there something "poetic" about the above excerpt?  Was Frost being perceptive?