To-Whit, Tu-Whoo!, by A. G. Gardiner

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I CONFESS that I find the owl not only tolerable but stimulating. I like to hear the pessimist really let himself go. It is the nameless and unformed fears of the mind that paralyse, but when my owl comes along and states the position at its blackest I begin to cheer up and feel defiant and combative. Is this the worst that can be said? Then let us see what the best is, and set about accomplishing it.

“The thing is impossible,” said the pessimist to Cobden.* “Indeed,” said that great man. “Then the sooner we set about doing it the better.” Oh, oh, say I to my owl, all is lost, is it? You wait till the dawn comes, and hear what that little chap in the red waistcoat has to say about it. He’s got quite another tale to tell, and it’s a much more likely tale than yours.

by A. G. Gardiner 1865-1946

From ‘Tu-Whit, Tu-Whoo!’, in ‘Pebbles on the Shore’, a selection of essays by Alfred George Gardiner (1865-1946), who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough.’ The quotation from ‘To an Insect’ by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) may be found in ‘The Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ (1878).

* Richard Cobden (1804-1865), a vigorous opponent of slavery and of Britain’s wanton baiting of the Russian bear, and the grand architect of the bruising campaign to repeal the Corn Laws, which was successful at last in 1846. The repeal moved Britain towards being an economy based on free markets rather than protectionism, cronyism and arcane trade deals. It must have seemed impossible indeed to persuade Parliament to divest itself of so much self-interest, but he did it. See his friend John Bright’s account of the campaign in The Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Précis

By contrast, ‘Alpha of the Plough’ relished the dark forebodings of his own local owl, for they always stung him into optimism, and made him think that the impossible might be possible after all. He longed to tell his owl about another neighbour, a robin redbreast who rose with the sun and put an entirely different complexion on the matter.

Questions for Critics

1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?

2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?

3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?

Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.

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