22 NOVEMBER 2008, Page 30

Wrong song

Sir: Having reread my letter (Letters, 15 November) about Matthew Parris’s article on (among other things) Australian birds, something struck me as amiss. So I checked the original source rather than repeat my lazy Googling of last week. Alas, it was not the skylark’s song of which Hopkins wrote the lines ‘through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear’ but that of the humble thrush, in the poem ‘Spring’.

My apologies for two mistakes in one letter pointing out the mistakes of another. Pride comes before a fall.

Alison Pressley

Sydney, New South Wales