That Morning Chorus
Every year at this time correspondence in the Press turns to this matter of the birds' aubade. I remarked here recently that I found the robin to be the first bird to break into song. This week 1 have twice had occasion to get up before daybreak, around 4 o'clock. On the first, the chorus began with a distant thrush, his voice still uncertain with sleep, and he had got going with full confidence before a robin piped up his out-of- season little autumn song, to be followed by the blackbird. The human ear can never take this chorus for granted. It comes with such infinite temerity, out of the reaches of the night, as it were still drenched in the nothingness in which our active universe is suspended and to which it resigns itself in sleep. Awe-inspiring echoes-over-arch this lonely heraldry. making its hopefulness sad. Yet the refreshment it brings to the human mind is wholly a mystical experience. It surely must have played a part in suggesting to William Blake that angels were addressing him from the bushes in Battersea.
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