The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains
Poem Information
Other names	Thoughts on Parade, Swallow, The Swallow and the Traveller on the Plains
Written	After 19 July of 1915
Revised	4 August of 1915
Published	The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Swallows

The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains is "a series of rather dark thoughts" written by J.R.R. Tolkien on 19 July of 1915 probably after his Army training began at Bedford.

Poem excerpt

O swallow, black swallow, I gazed up at thee
out of heat and dust and a great weariness;
bravely thou wert beating far aloft
under the sunless clouds in those great spaces
where thunder sits enchained and the winds are cavernously penned.

Background

Sometime in the period from 19 July to "about a month" later in 1915, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the poem Thoughts on Parade after beginning his training for the Army "in a house…with half a dozen other officers" at Bedford. He probably initially wrote this poem, as well as Dark Are the Clouds about the North, as a consequence of being unable "to come and go as he pleased" to see Edith Bratt. The poem was originally written in prose before Tolkien "divided it into lines". Sometime later, Tolkien made "trial workings" in one of his "poetry notebooks" to revise the poem. On 4 August, Tolkien further rewrote the poem, changing its name from Thoughts on Parade to The Swallow and the Traveller on the Plains or The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains. When revising the poem, Tolkien had written lines 48-9 on "a stray manuscript" draft containing the earliest workings of The Pines of Aryador. Sometime near "the end of 1915 or the start of 1916", Tolkien included The Swallow, and the Traveller on the Plains as Swallow in parentheses as part a list of poems he compiled. According to Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, it is possible that the parentheses which Tolkien put the poem in meant that he was uncertain of including it in his list.

In September 2024, the poem was published for the first time as entry 35 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien along with the earliest version. In their commentary to the first version, Hammond and Scull interpreted the name of the earlier version, Thoughts on Parade, as referring to "the poet's thoughts…parading through his consciousness…while he is on parade…among an assembly of troops". In their commentary to the revised poem, Hammond and Scull suggested that, while the "black swallow" probably shouldn't be taken "too literally", such a bird did exist, though not in England. In a note on their "Addenda and Corrigenda to The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien", Hammond and Scull note that, while "Christopher Tolkien read the title on the second manuscript with a comma", they "felt that the mark…was too indistinct to be certainly a mark of punctuation". However, since Tolkien never wrote "out the revised title" anywhere else, they did not have anything to compare to the writing on the second manuscript.

Inspiration

According to Hammond and Scull, Tolkien may have used a swallow in the poem because it was "a familiar, and seemingly fearless, migratory bird" and that "flocks of swallows historically tended to arrive in England in March or April" before leaving "in September or October" for southern Africa; this was "a long journey twice each year". Tolkien would later use the same imagery of "swallows singing in the eaves" in Dark Are the Clouds about the North. Tolkien may have been using this as an allusion to how, while he "was only some sixty miles away from Edith Bratt in Warwick,…it was a 'long road' while he was bound by military law". Hammond and Scull also note that "the language and nature of Tolkien's poem" seems to "recall those of" Alfred Tennyson's The Princess, a poem that inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Something Childish, but Very Natural", which has "lines with a similar sentiment".