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Part V of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, titled "What the Thunder Said," contains what Eliot himself, in a much-quoted letter to Ford Madox Ford, identified as his favorite part of the poem, "the water-dripping song."1 The designation is misleading in several ways. Most obviously, in this exceedingly dry passage there is no water that might be allowed to drip. But perhaps even more confusing - at least to anyone with even faintly developed ornithological interests - is the fact that Eliot's celebrated water-dripping song is attributed to the hermit thrush, a bird that, accord- ing to the experts, does not at all sound like dripping water. Indeed, there are no descriptions in the vast literature on this North American species that make that claim.
Poets do enjoy, of course, the liberty to say what they wish. But Eliot, as a young man, was a keen bird-watcher, able to distinguish as many as seventy different species of birds in Massachusetts (Gordon 8). Trac- es of these early ornithological interests can be found in the ecstatic, breathless catalog of birds offered in Eliot's "Cape Ann" (1935), with its invitation to "hear the song-sparrow / Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow / At dawn and dusk." Only a lover of birds could have asked his readers to "Follow the dance / Of the goldfinch at noon" or to "Greet / In silence the bullbat" (1969: 142). Eliot knew his birds, in other words; at times, he even was a bird, albeit a flightless one: three of his reviews published in 1918 he signed as "T. S. Apteryx," a reference to the genus name of the New Zealand Kiwi bird - appropriately, a shy, wary species (Apteryx, March, April, and May 1918).
Why, then, would bird-savvy Eliot represent such an iconic American bird as the hermit thrush - a species often considered as the New World answer to the European nightingale2 - in a way that most bird-watchers would at least find debatable? This essay is a fresh attempt to sort through this puzzle, hoping to shed new light on this "much-uncrumpled" poem (a phrase I am borrowing from Wallace Stevens).3 I am aware that a va- riety of sources have been suggested for Eliot's dripping water,4 but in this...