Works of Thomas Hardy discussion
Poetry
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The Selfsame Song (poem to be read with TMoC Ch 1)
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Associated quote from "The Mayor of Casterbridge""For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and breves, at any sunset of that season for centuries untold." (from 7th paragraph of Chapter 1)
The poem, "The Selfsame Song," is the first of about a dozen poems we'll be reading that have some relationship--an image, behavior, location, or theme--with "The Mayor of Casterbridge." For each poem, a quote from the novel will be included.
Hardy uses birds quite often in both his poetry and his novels, and there are supposed to be 22 mentions of birds in "The Mayor of Casterbridge." Birds are one of his favorite images to foreshadow events in the future, comment on the present action, or create an atmosphere.
Please feel free to comment on the poem even if you are not reading "The Mayor of Casterbridge" now. We can look at the poems as stand-alone poems, in relation to the quote or anything in the book, or in relation to Hardy's life or ideas. Maybe you'll find a line of poetry that just "speaks to you." Looking at his work from many angles makes it more interesting!
Title of the poemThe title of the poem comes from the seventh stanza of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
Keats wrote an 80 line poem fantasizing that the nightingale is immortal. Hardy's poem is an answer to the idea that the nightingale is immortal, and he has his own ideas about the lovely bird. Hardy could hear the songs of the nightingales at his childhood home, as well as at Max Gate.
What is a Selfsame Song?
A selfsame song can be a song that is unchanged when it's performed again. But the phrase can also be used as a metaphor to describe something that is repetitive and unchanging such as dwelling on something that makes you feel sad, or constantly complaining, or repeating the same pattern of behavior.
Over to you!
Thank you Connie! The quote you mentioned has a sense of foreboding. I noticed such selfsame songs in real life especially as I live in the countryside and the birds are many, and have been very loud since early March. You definitely hear the same notes, the same tone, which is actually amazing.
Reading these poems will be certainly a great experience! I already noticed that when I was reading The Woodlanders.
This is a melancholy or joyful poem. I can see both these things in it.To me, the poem states that things remain the same (selfsame song), yet there is change that isn't seen (different birds, different listeners). In a sense, the World continues and absorbs the changes. One cannot change the Nature of things.
It's melancholy to think that all things come to an end, yet joyous to think that things will continue onwards in a continuous manner despite these ends. The world continues even when the creatures living on it end.
As far as our story goes, there's been a lot of change (different ears?), yet nothing has changed in the larger picture of the world. The peace described at the beginning of the chapter is the same as the peace described at the end (selfsame song?).
I love that word "selfsame." It's a contradiction, in that our selves are constantly changing--physically, mentally, and in so many ways. But we have the feeling that we are the same person, and the expectation that when we hear a selfsame song for example, that our reaction should be the same, but as Petra says, different ears. Whenever we hear a familiar song (from birds or otherwise), it tends to take us back to a time we've heard it before, and it's almost like getting that past back for a moment.
So I agree with Petra that this is both a melancholy and joyful contemplation. What an excellent choice, Connie. Thank you so much for finding and sharing this!
Thanks for your comments Claudia, Petra, and Kathleen. Hardy had the same timeless idea in the quote from Chapter 1 which ended with ". . . at any sunset of that season for centuries untold."
Mod
"The Selfsame Song" made me think of a blackbird I used to know, (I wrote about him at the start of my review of To Kill a Mocking Bird - perhaps you will indulge me if I repeat the beginning here) ...
A blackbird used to sing outside my window. He put a smile on my face when I woke every morning, and he was there when I went to sleep. His song was the first thing I heard when I walked up my path after having been away from home for a while. He would sing all day and even some of the evening and night, proudly chorusing his own short refrains, the songs he had taught himself. He had three songs, all of just five notes each, and one of these was his especial favourite which he would repeat over and over again. Not for him were the complicated warbles and song structures of his fellow birds. Occasionally he would experiment; a twitter here, a different note there, but then he would confidently return to his favourites, and sing them loudly, his heart fit to burst. He gloried in his song, and I delighted in it.
Then last week nothing. There is a hole in my life now; something is missing - something of beauty has gone. I feel bereft, as if someone close to me has died.
That's how this poignant poem makes me feel. A sense of loss, but also a sense of wonder and glory shared.
Jean, that's such a beautiful memory of the blackbird outside your window! It brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about that special bird.
Petra wrote: "This is a melancholy or joyful poem. I can see both these things in it.To me, the poem states that things remain the same (selfsame song), yet there is change that isn't seen (different birds, di..."
I so agree with your comments about the poem and how it does reflect the bucolic beginning, and while three humans have made a big change, life goes on pretty much as it always has.
Mod
The title of the poem comes from the seventh stanza of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":..."
Connie, I also want to thank you for connecting this poem with Keats' poem as I too wouldn't have thought of that.
But I should have, because I remember Hardy was very fond of Keats' and Shelley's poetry. On a trip to Rome, Tom and Emma decided to follow in Keats and Shelley's footsteps, retracing what the famous poets did in Rome. Emma was a fan of both poets as well.
I also love the phrase "Selfsame song" and how Kathleen points out it's a contradiction, as we are always changing. My favorite phrase is "rapturous rote". I think that's another contradiction. I don't think I've ever felt rapturous about anything I do by rote. But it's a good way to describe birdsong, which like Jean illustrated with her touching story 🥲, is what birds do. They sing exuberantly and repetitiously (or by rote).
(Jean, I absolutely love that you knew the blackbird had five songs!! I'm not sure I've ever paid that much attention to my backyard, feathered friends, but now I'm going to start listening!!)
Kathleen wrote: "I love that word "selfsame." From Chapter 1: "and the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and breves".As an experienced birder myself, I cringed a bit at the "weak" bird singing a "trite" song. We birders constantly use the memorized calls and songs of birds to identify the species. By "weak" I am assuming he meant soft or low pitched. There is no weak bird song, just as to all bird watchers and bird lovers there is no "trite" song. I assume here Hardy is using the word "trite" to mean overused or frequently repeated. In the US, where I live, trite is a derogatory and rather insulting word.
Birds are identifiable by their calls alone by the experienced birder, and we can claim to know or "count" a bird by sound alone. I am interested to know that Hardy uses birds frequently in his novels as a vehicle for meaning or emotion. He certainly does not impress me as a skilled observer of birds at this point.
Also, the nightingale, as referenced above by Connie does not exist in North America. But those of you in England and Western Europe may have heard its song!
Such interesting and insightful comments. Thank you all. To me, ‘selfsame’, used in Hardy’s context, has me both immediately forming my own opinion and yet hesitating to do so as we have been told that many more references to birds are coming. For now I see Hardy as commenting on the immediate individual actions of people and the universal reality that overarches one’s individual actions. Individuals may act in a certain way, such as the horrid concept of selling your wife. As we have read, such actions were not isolated in bygone times. Then we expand the idea of selling a human and we arrive at the concept of slavery, a much broader concept of humans as objects.
The universal rhythms of life infinitely repeat themselves in minute recurring places and events. Much like expansions and contractions of an object. Both large and small, both infinite and finite.
Sorry for the probable confusing ramble.
Bridget wrote: "Connie wrote: "Title of the poemThe title of the poem comes from the seventh stanza of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":..."
Connie, I also want to thank you for connecting this poem with Keat..."
Bridget, thanks for bringing up Hardy's trip to Rome where he visited the tombs of Shelley and Keats. Donald led us in a poem where Hardy wrote about that Rome visit, "Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats." Our discussion about that poem is here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
"Rapturous rote" is a wonderful phrase--and all those R's are just delicious! We don't usually think of something repetitive as being beautiful until we think of a birdsong or a Bach fugue.
Lee wrote: "As an experienced birder myself, I cringed a bit at the "weak" bird singing a "trite" song. ..."Lee, it's exciting that you're an expert at birdsongs since we'll have other mentions of birds during this novel. Hardy also used images of birds quite often in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hardy left money in his will for work against cruelty to birds (caging wild birds, blinding songbirds so they would perform better in contests).
I'm going to agree with you about Hardy's use of "trite" in our present day usage, although I don't know if the word might have meant "simple" in Hardy's time.
I thought he meant that the bird was "weak" in the sense of being ill or dying. The adjective "weak" is modifying "bird," not the song. Hardy is using the weak bird to foreshadow that something devastating was going to happen.
We have two more bird poems at the end of reading "The Mayor of Casterbridge" so I'll look forward to your opinion on those poems too. Lee, you're living in the perfect place to be a birder since so many birds migrate through Texas!
The same song of the bird may continue for centuries, but it will be different birds that sing the song and different people who hear the song. Birds and people die, other birds and people are born, but the same song continues in the cycle of life.Peter, your expression, "the universal rhythms of life," is a similar way of expressing it. Claudia, Petra, Kathleen, and Pamela also mentioned the repetitions in the cycle of life. Each of us is just expressing it a little differently as we bring in our experiences.
Some people will think of the poem in terms of birdsongs, and others will expand it to include other things in life that repeat.
It is a marvelous poem and something I have pondered many times: the "culture" of animals that is learned but also encoded into their DNA. How do birds know how to do all of the amazing things they do?I love Hardy's use of alliteration in the lines of the poem: sings...selfsame...song / fault...flow / strain...such...rapturous...rote.
On my first reading, I read the third line as That we listened to hear.... That meaning (as in "strained to hear") works as well, so if the poem is read aloud a listener could go either way. I might actually prefer my misinterpretation!
Erich, thank you for pointing out the beautiful alliteration in the poem.Hardy was very interested in science, and read Darwin's books. Since Charles Darwin published his The Origin of Species / The Voyage of the Beagle in 1859, Hardy would have some knowledge of inheritance. There was not a field of genetics as we know it.
I wish I knew more about some "instinctive" behaviors that are inherited like birdsongs. Birdsongs seem to be partially learned and partially inherited, and some species depend more on learning than others. There are so many things in life that are both mysterious and miraculous!
About the words here/hear, they would both work in the poem. I wonder if Hardy purposely used a word that had a double meaning. It seems like something clever he would do!
Mod
Oliver Messiaen was a passionate ornithologist and is well-known for notating and incorporating birdsong into his musical compositions. He meticulously transcribed bird songs, sometimes using recordings, and translated them into his unique musical language, creating some of the most original and striking music of the 20th century.
Messiaen's fascination with birdsong began in the 1950s and continued throughout his life. He filled countless notebooks with bird song notations, viewing birds as "the musicians of God". His works often feature detailed depictions of bird songs, sometimes even referencing specific species.
I did write down "my" blackbird's 3 songs, but as each was only 5 notes, it was easy enough to do on manuscript paper! I wondered, since blackbirds' songs are usually so elaborate, whether he was not very clever, and his limited range was the basis of all blackbirds' songs. It sounded a little little like that in a way; his self-same song.
Oliver Messiaen though invented a whole new notation system for birdsong.
Connie, I was happy to hear that Thomas Hardy left money to help against cruelty to birds. That's good to know. He will have seen the notorious street market in East London for caged wild animals and birds, when he lived there.
Jean, Olivier Messiaen sounds like a fascinating man! If anyone wants to read more about him, this is the Wikipedia link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier...
Works of Thomas Hardy
Books mentioned in this topic
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (other topics)To Kill a Mocking Bird (other topics)
The Woodlanders (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Oliver Messiaen (other topics)Thomas Hardy (other topics)
John Keats (other topics)
A bird sings the selfsame song,
With never a fault in its flow,
That we listened to here those long
Long years ago.
A pleasing marvel is how
A strain of such rapturous rote
Should have gone on thus till now
unchanged in a note!
—But its not the selfsame bird.—
No: perished to dust is he…
As also are those who heard
That song with me.
from "Late Lyrics and Earlier," published 1922