Nobody in "Bird Watching" says the word death, and the poem hardly names ageing either. It starts with a pronoun: "It began at the temples." The details that follow, the spreading over "head, face and chest" and the arrival on the forearm "in ones and twos," suggest grey hair. But the speaker never confirms it. "It" is what a man says about something he has watched for decades without wanting to give it a name. The same vagueness carries through the second stanza, where "it" takes away "the lustre in my eyes" and "strength in my limbs." The poem is about growing old and about facing death calmly, and it keeps its biggest subjects at arm's length so that they can arrive on their own terms.
The first stanza is the cleverest. At the temples, the speaker remembers, the change looked "distinguished / Mature, even attractive." Early on, ageing flatters. Then comes a quiet correction: "it was the foreboding / of things to come." That phrase is a promise the poem keeps. In the last stanza the verb returns twice, "He will come" and "Silently he will come," so the opening warning and the closing arrival frame everything between them. The poem's timeline is also a slow movement down the body, from temples to face to chest to forearm, in the same way that the afternoon slides into night.
That second movement, the day closing, is where the imagery does its best work. "Sunlight slanting, / Shadows lengthening, / Night creeping up, cold" are all present participles, so the sentence never quite finishes its actions. The light is always slanting, the shadows always lengthening. Nothing is sudden. The cold is the only sensation in the stanza that touches the body, and it arrives last. Then the speaker does something deliberately ordinary: "I stretch my legs, take another sip / Of the Whisky." The word "another" shows this is a habit, and the line break before "Of the Whisky" makes the sip slow, almost leisurely. Whatever fear the earlier stanzas hint at, the armchair scene shows a man at ease.
The title now makes sense. A bird watcher is patient and sits still, and he knows that the bird will come in its own time. The speaker is watching for an owl, and "He" has been turned from an abstraction into a visitor. The owl is a well-chosen messenger because owls are widely linked with omens and death in folklore. It is also a real bird that flies almost without sound, which prepares the word "Silently" at the end.
The final stanza changes the poem's mood and its grammar. The poem has been in the present tense until now, and it shifts to the future. It becomes one long, suspended sentence: "He will come / When wind starts / Rattling the windows, / Swirling up dust..." Each "when" delays the subject's arrival, so the reader waits as the speaker does. The imagery begins with a threat, rattling windows and swirling dust, but it softens as it goes. The dust settles "gently on this floor." The rain falls "pitter-patter," a sound from nursery rhymes. The fireflies "start to dance." By the time the owl is mentioned, death has been dressed in domestic and almost playful details, and the phrase "on the wings of" makes it sound more like a lift than an attack.
There is no rhyme here and no regular metre. The free verse is plain and conversational, closer to someone talking in an armchair than a performance. Line lengths shrink and stretch with the thought, short when the body fails ("Strength in my limbs –") and longer when the speaker settles into the evening. The restraint is the point. A more ornate style would make the poem sound like it was protesting, and this one is resigned in a clear-eyed way.
What makes "Bird Watching" worth reading is that understatement. It avoids both terror and false cheerfulness. Its speaker admits the early vanity, the loss of strength and the cold at the end of the day, and he still pours another drink. The poem is signed "Trivandrum 15.11.2009," a small reminder that it is a moment fixed at a particular time and place. Its scene of a man, a chair, some light and a patient wait could belong to anyone.