The Bird

"Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?"

This makes a few things very clear to us. First, we the audience are in the garden. Second, the bird is in the garden with us. Third, there are echos in the garden with us and the bird and the bird encourages us to follow these echos. From these facts, we can draw several conclusions about what the bird represents.

The bird gives us readers an agency we do not posses ourselves. This is accented by the fact that the bird is a thrush. Thrushes are known for eating rose petals (commonly found in gardens) and for having one of the most beautiful singing voices of song birds (wiki). This is not coincidence. Several lines later, Eliot tells us

"the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

LOTS of things are going on here and I hope I don't miss any of the big things. First, to conclude the agency granted to us by the bird, the bird can hear a music which we cannot. The music in the shrubbery is unheard by us and so the thrush is a conduit between us and a beauty we cannot perceive. We already understand the connection Eliot makes between music and epiphany so this is an important achievement for the thrush to act as our ears to another world. This is a great reason for the thrush to be in the garden with us but there is another terrific reason as well.

Remember, this is "our first world" and the thrush lead us to it. We were already in the garden and so were the roses which are now seen as having been looked at and with a music we can't hear. The roses would never have "had the look of flowers that are looked at" without us being present as a witness (and arguably as a voyeur). The bird gives us direction and leads us into an awareness of another world.

The roses which have "the look of flowers that are looked at" is another key line. Roses hold a metaphorical relationship with purity, beauty and virginity. Yet in the garden we can't understand their music. I think this line can be viewed as a veiled analogy for sex and sin. Flowers are meant to be enjoyed just as apples are meant to be eaten. Remember, the thrush is known for eating rose petals. I think this line ties into "the deception of the thrush".

"The deception of the thrush" is interesting to google but the results are confusing enough not to discuss. I think on the surface the relationship with the christian creation story is clear. The snake(bird) and apple(rose) come off as parallel with each other. The snake describes the apple as being a thing not experienced and the thrush allows us to understand a beauty (music) we otherwise would not know existed. Both the snake and the bird lead us out of the garden into another world.

So the thrush acts as a traditional trickster figure to cause such radical change in our reality (wiki and wiki). This push is urgent, permanent and apparently justified. "Go, go, go said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." The understanding of reality is a total awareness equal to an epiphany and an ongoing state of this would be related to the garden or heaven. The bird says we can't bear this state of reality so maybe that's the justification for leading us out of the garden. Or maybe we can't hear the music in the garden but we can hear the music made from roses once we're out of the garden. Either way, we have two dots. We have the dot of the garden and it's rose music and then we have the dot of us outside the garden and what music we can then hear. The space between these two clearly established locations (dots) is where Eliot's poetry attempts to take us as we see evidenced in several methods throughout the rest of the poems, namely the pairing of opposites which seems to frustrate and delight the class.