Like love, death, and sunsets, birds seem to almost every poet to require yet one more poem. And like love, death, and sunsets, birds tempt the unsuspecting poet to write something sentimental, or to personify birds, as I just did when I wrote “birds tempt.” Actually, of course, poets tempt themselves to write sentimentally about birds, who have more important things to consider than poets. As with the rest of poetry and the subjects of poetry, a chief rule for bird poems is this: there are no rules. However, before writing a bird-poem, a poet might want to do what a bird-watcher does: observe; and then observe some more. That is, as long as the poet doesn’t rush to the writing with stock images of and prefabricated ideas about the bird in question, things should go all right.
The ultra-famous bird-poems include, of course, Poe’s “The Raven,” Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and Hopkins’ “The Windhover.”
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a fair percentage of students react negatively to “The Windhover,” partly because Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and heavy alliteration create some difficulty, but also perhaps because of the epigraph, “To Christ Our Lord.” Obviously, the poem does have its religious dimensions, but mainly it’s about that hawk up there, gliding, pausing, diving. It's also about the explosiveness of language itself. Even when I was only 17, I took easily to this poem and Hopkins’ work, for some reason. I think I simply sensed that Hopkins was doing in verse what jazz musicians do in music, and so I just found myself enjoying everything he was doing with words and lines, stresses and alliteration. It was pleasurable to me, even on the first reading. I also liked what he was doing with the hawk in the poem. I felt he really was trying to see the bird and to help us see the bird as the bird is. So although I don't try to argue students out of their resistance to the poem, I don't entirely understand the resistance.
Other fine bird poems include William Everson’s “Canticle of the Water Birds,” which I heard/saw Everson read several times; Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks"; Emily Dickinson’s poem about the sparrow and the twig; and Ted Hughes’s book-length work, Crow. Dickinson also has the one that begins “A bird came down my walk.”
Karl Shapiro wrote an interesting poem in which he depicted a bird counter-intuitively in terms of a mechanism, a machine, and he wrote another one about having been attacked by a crow in Chicago. They’re both in his Collected Poems from Random House, published in the late 1970s.
At the risk of committing literary heresy, I'll admit that I believe Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" to be a hugely over-rated poem--and a problematic one, insofar as it glorifies rape, but also insofar as it's a bit silly. I know geese and swans can get mean, hiss, and bite, but if one really attacked a woman like Leda, I think Leda would simply wring its neck or kick it. The whole scene has always seemed a bit unintentionally comic to me. If Zeus appeared in the form of a lion, that would we one thing--but appearing as a large bird, but not even an eagle or a vulture? I mean, really. And finally, the question, "Did she put on his knowledge with his power?" seems not terribly pressing, and I've always wanted to answer, "Who cares? The woman was raped by a bird!" A more basic question might be, "Can a swan really have sex with a human?" Or: "Who does this lousy bird think he is--Zeus?!" It's one of those myths that I wouldn't mind a parodist like Mel Brooks retelling on film. . . .
. . . . In an homage to Dickinson, whom I regard as one of the great literary observers of nature, I played off “A bird came down my walk”:
Homage to Emily Dickinson
A bird came up
My mental walk.
It pinched a Dickinson
Scholar in half.
In my scrappy hometown,
I knew weirdos like you,
Liked them. They
Lived their lives,
And just their lives.
How rare that is
I began to know
Even at age six.
Your poems are prim
Graffiti scratched
On the back of Piety’s pew.
Good old you.
Your poems know more
Than ever they let on,
Were postcards sent
From privacy, anon.
© 2007
I also wrote a poem not just about a wren--but a Bewick’s wren (now that's specialization):
Wren
A Bewick’s wren landed on a fence-rail,
presented its image to my surprised view.
All of natural history had contributed
to this bird’s mere form, gray-brown
finish, up-slashed tail, and quick
departure into an atmosphere that is
no longer visible to us. When I saw
a Bewick’s wren today, I sensed
spirits nearby smiling wryly
at my mere thimbleful of awe.
© 2007
And here’s a link to “An E-Anthology of Avian Poems”:
Happy birding.
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