Thrushes, chats and icterids; or, ice cream in the monsoon.

(This post originally appeared in July 2012 but was lost when the server was hacked in 2015. This is a recovered version.)

I woke up this morning with ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ in my head. It has always been one of my favourite poems. Though not particularly subtle, every few years when I return to it there is something new to be learned. However, it was puzzling: neither death, nor sex, nor religion was on the mental stove last night. Why, then, that poem?

The rain was falling hard and long the way it does when the monsoon finally gets its rhythm right, and it was properly dark. When I debleared my eyes and found a clocklike thing, it turned out to be sometime before 5:00. Upstairs the dawn was considering its next move against the steady downpour, and almost all the birds had decided to wait out the rain.

Almost. We have a few Copsychus saularis here, a rather natty mid-sized bird in the chat family that does a thrush’s job, at least at dawn: they sing wonderful cascading melodies. About a month ago they began to pair up and act like parents, and they were singing: one in the gardens to the north, one somewhere off to the west, one at the back of the house: hurling sharp songs through the wet grey curtains.

Stevens stays with me as an American poet: deft with his rhythms and rhymes, well aware of tradition, an adequate citizen of his age, much better at handling the joyful ferocities of life than, say, Larkin. Sorting through the cultural furniture with which we try to furnish the children’s lives—the Old California stuff, the Newar stuff, the New England stuff, the Oxford stuff, the Scottish stuff, the stuff stuff—Stevens, along with lyricists like Tom Waits, strikes me as a good source of truth in language to offer the kids.

Robins and blackbirds, thrushes and chats. In California, it’s a thrush (Turdus migrators, not the most elegant name) that we call a robin—because that thrush has a red breast, and the early English colonists in a desperate grab for the familiar, slapped the familiar name ‘robin’ onto those thrushes. Hence to my mind ‘robins’ should sing bravely and be hearty and sociable. In Britain, the robin—the ‘original’ robin (Erithecus rubella), originally called a ruddock or ruddoch— is a tiny, fearless bird in the chat family that hardly sings, but works close by any farmer or gardener; our robin in the Aberdeen garden is often my only companion when I’m out to break up the frozen earth in the spring garden. The British blackbird (Turdus merula) is a melodious thrush, curious and ubiquitous, ornamenting both dawn and dusk with glorious songs. It’s the closest kin to American ‘robins’ that I ever found whilst living in Europe—that’s the ‘blackbird singing in the dead of night’. In Nepal, the Copsychus is a piebald chat with an upstart tail that likes gardens and sings like a thrush, but it’s got no particular interest in humans. The chats in South Asian got called ‘robin’ by the English, so in the guidebooks Copsychus is a ‘magpie robin’. And to cap it off, three days ago, in the early morning, I saw what I am sure really was a transient Eurasian blackbird here.

Then again, Stevens’ blackbirds—the blackbirds of North America, the Red Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoenicius) and the Tricolored Blackbird (Agelaius tricolour)—they’re not thrushes at all. Like the North American robin, they carry they name of another kind. They’re icterids, like orioles and grackles. Growing up in coastal California, the blackbirds were swarming, colourful creatures of the reed beds in the Central Valley; I never really thought about them as Stevens’ birds. Not much snow in the Central Valley! Did Stevens mean a grackle, that squawking ground-dweller? What is Stevens’ blackbird? It acts far more like a British thrush than a grackle does.

Amongst the confusion, Stevens’ blackbirds poorly understood and transposed, snatches of something familiar resurfacing as borrowed cultural property in the middle of a Bollywood film. First the Copsychus song against the heavy obscurity of the rainfall had given me a thread to follow towards wakefulness; and in so doing, thrushlike blackbirds had settled in my mind. From there, as the mental engine shifted from dreams to semi-deliberate concatenations, ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream.’ A fine morning, waking up already braided into birdsongs and poetry, and another ethnobiological problem of migration, classification and aesthetics.