Analysis The Owl by Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was one of those who most likely would not write archetypally (another being Emily Dickinson). More subversively, Thomas, too, must be seen as producing a surprising lyric poem adding an angle to a picture which is otherwise represented honestly and without any glitter. It gives you a jarring shock to see such a large number of intricacies and deceit embedded in a small poem. Here was the last Thomas poem before the one featured here: a glance from The Thrush poem. This time it's The Owl.
It is not the owl who is the focus of the subject but the subject focuses on the owl. Thomas does not want to touch anthropomorphizing owls and the traditions that go with the representations. Dread and regret is a part of this cry. The realism is subdued. It is in a photograph like nature which is somewhat unexpected yet vivid- the sound of the bird
The shakespearean explanation of, 'Tu whoo; / Tu wit, tu whoo', has been called, "a merry note" but this same argument is reversed in the third stanza: "No merry note, nor cause of merriment." The stanza is broken by the mention of, "the most melancholy cry" and it is depicted that the cry is even, "shaken out long and clear" in the poem. The sweet and tremulous sound that is familiar still to many a heart, a heart that can perhaps cause men and field mice to shudder and vibrate in their echoes, is present there too. So too could the evocation of 'shaken out ... upon the hill' suggest the nip of a flag or banner of war. The essential idea of the poem which is penned in February 1915 surely has a point towards the end and that point is "soldiers", the word that says it all.
The first two stanzas touch on issues of feeling that are also moral issues in this case. The narrator has an acquaintance with something cold, weary and a feeling of hunger as he walks, expecting to get rid of the discomforts while descending, he accepts that those are merely discomforts. The quick pacing and the bounce in the rhythm of the poem (using frequent iambic pentameter interspersed with a couple of dactyls) captures the concepts of health, hope and modern medicine. The second stanza shows the author remembering that he was already in a hotel and the night was being "bared out," showing that he was safe from the night.
Matthew Hollis, in his enlightening biography of Thomas's last years, related that what concerned Thomas at the time was the question of his enlistment. It is this painful thought the owl's cry summons. The many repetitions in the poem suggest, perhaps, such an encircling obsession. But the narrative is less specific. Thomas describes his food and rest as "salted and sobered" because the owl is "[s]peaking for all who lay under the stars, / Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice". The reference to (the) poor opens the poem out beyond its occasion, and beyond the first world war-- in which Thomas was to die. The autobiographical voice initially underlines its honesty. But The Owl becomes something more by its final resistance to autobiography, by a kind of unselfishness, in fact. And thus this brief lyric exceeds bounds of time, place and personality. It continues to conjure a world we know, one in which too many people are at war, and far too many are destitute.