Posts Tagged poetry about crows

Regular readers of this space know that MontanaWriter has been featuring poems about crows. “Crow poems” that have previously been featured and “reviewed” here can be found by clicking here.

Though birds are featured quite prominently in the poetry of W.B. Yeat, crows are not. This is something I must confess to having never given a thought to until I found myself recently trying to think of a Yeats’ poem for this crow series.

As someone who has read all of Yeats’ poetry many times, I was not exactly surprised when nothing was coming even a little to mind. but I was certain that there must be a crow in one of the Crazy Jane poems… Yet I kept drawing a blank. And it turns out for good reason: crows appear briefly in only two of his poems, while ravens (another member of the corvus family) appear in just five poems.

I know these numbers as certainties not because I personally counted each reference, but because I am the proud owner of a copy of the Parrish & Painter  A Concordance to the Poems of W.B. Yeats (copyright © 1963, Cornell University Press, 3rd printing 1973).

I first discovered the existence of the Parrish & Painter Yeats Concordance in 1986 at an old used bookstore that was on 4th Street in downtown Minneapolis. It was 25.00 and I was unemployed and looking for work and probably had 20.00 to my name. I put it back on the shelf… but never forgot about it.

Later when I had a job and 25.00, I went back to the bookstore but it was gone. And so my quest began.

For the next 11 years I kept my eye out at every used bookstore I ever visited… but I never got even an inkling of a whiff. After awhile I even began to wonder if I had dreamed the existence of the book up. This was, of course, before the internet, and Abe Books, and eBay.

Then one evening after a dinner and movie Sue and I stopped at a used bookstore in the Uptown area of Minneapolis. Browsing the recent acquisitions shelves I came across a thick, cranberry-colored volume. I read the spine a few times before it finally dawned on me what I was holding in my hand: my holy grail!

I found today’s poem with the trusty help of the best 34.99 (nine years of inflation apparently) I ever spent.

“Two Songs from a Play” has long been one of my favorite poems. Since I know so much of the poem by heart, it is surprising to me that it did not come more readily to my mind. But then again, my memory is hardly what it used to be.

On a warm February day… any any kind of day for that matter… a Yeats’ poem seems like just thing.

Enjoy!

Two Songs from a Play

I

I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God’s death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and set,
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo’s painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called.

II

In pity for man’s darkening thought
He walked that room and issued thence
In Galilean turbulence;
The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.

Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams;
The herald’s cry, the soldier’s tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams;
The herald’s cry, the soldier’s tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed. 

The last stanza is one that only Yeats could write. It is perfect as thought and language… as is the entire poem. Yeats’ understood, like few have, both the transcendent power of language and symbols and their musicality. There are poets who have understood, and even mastered, one or the other. But in the last 100 years, only Yeats has mastered them both.

____

Regular readers of this space know that MontanaWriter has been featuring poems about crows. “Crow poems” that have previously been featured and “reviewed” here can be found by clicking here.

No collection of crow poems would be complete without at least one poem by Ted Hughes… without several poems by him. Hughes is one of the truly “great” poets of our time. With Seamus Heaney, he is one of only a handful of late-20th Century poets that will still be read 100, 200, 300 years from now.

Crows  feature prominently in Hughes’ poetry, as do a number of other creatures. Hughes is a poet of nature. But nature in an Old World way, not a New World way. Animals inhabit his poetry as real and earthy but also as mythological and metaphorical beings.

“Crow’s Theology” comes from his excellent little volume of poems appropriately entitled Crow: The Life and Songs of the Crow. The poems of Crow are highly theological. Published in 1970, Hughes wrote most of the poems during the years following Sylvia Plath’s death. Theologically and artistically then, they have often been read as poems showing an artist – and man – trying to find his artistic and emotional center again after a great loss. Hughes himself viewed them later,  as bridges to his later work.

On another cool February day, a Ted Hughes “crow poem” seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Crow’s Theology 
Crow realized God loved him-
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke Crow-
Just existing was His revelation.

But what Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets 
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows? 
What spoke the silence of lead? 

Crow realized there were two Gods- 

One of them much bigger than the other 
Loving his enemies 
And having all the weapons. 

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Crow realized there were two Gods- 

One of them much bigger than the other 
Loving his enemies 
And having all the weapons.

This poems expresses the issue of theodicy as well as any poem I know.  These particular lines highlight the mysterious nature of faith in the face of physical and moral evil.

____

Winter Cattails (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Re-reading the February 7th MontanaWriter post and my poem “Crow Lesson,” I realized that the version of the poem I originally posted was not the one I had intended. It was an earlier version of the poem. After copying and pasting what I assumed to be the final version of “Crow Lessons” into WordPress, I had never really looked at it again. I edited the rest of the post and pressed the “Publish” button.

I have since corrected this mistake. But it has got me thinking that a post about how a poem is made… or rather “polished”… could potentially be interesting.

Where once I filled notebooks with my illegible scrawl, today I write almost exclusively on a computer. The only exception to this is the beginning of some poems.

Since ideas and lines for poems seem to come anytime and anywhere, I have learned to write these lines down whenever they come to me. And since I do not have an easy way to carry a notebook and pen with me during my day, I tend to dash these lines down onto any scrap of paper I can find… the back of some report, a post-it note, the corner of a napkin. I have tried to “write” them down on my iPhone but that has never worked.

The scrap of paper that gave birth to “Crow Lessons” is the back of a blue post-it note that I was using as a place-holder in a notebook at work, that I am still using there. In thick-lead pencil at an angle I had written these lines:

I have seen the crows coming across the field
and dropping into the grass

Over time and rewriting that line became:

I have seen crows coming across the fields
seen them drop into the grass

One of the consequences of the digital workshop is that there are no easy manuscript “trails” anymore. When I used to keep handwritten notebooks and journals, I could follow the progression of a work: word changes and strikethroughs spiraling  across pages and dates. But in this digital age, trails just disappear with a simple keystroke… false starts and rewrites so easily returned to the ether from which they had come. What I do have sometimes is multiple copies of works that have been saved at different times up to various cloud databases. In the case of “Crow Lessons” I see that I have slightly different versions saved in multiple places.

I imagine that the original line was changed quite early in the writing process for two reasons. First, the original line as written seems to me to be a “closed” one… difficult to keep going. This is a subjective thing I realize, but even now as I try to think of what could follow these lines I find myself entering a dead-end path. Second, the “seen” in line 2 echos that in line 1 and sets a structure and tone.

Re-writes of the middle of the poem are lost to me for all the digital reasons listed above. So let’s concentrate on the last line, the line that was posted originally at MontanaWriter as:

and I know the loneliness of being human

Looking through versions of the poem saved up to various cloud databases I see that the line was also at one time:

and I know the true-loneliness of being human

What made me decide in the end… for now anyway… to make it the current version:

and I have felt the true-grief of being human

Let’s begin with the movement from active to passive voice. Most of the poem, of course, is in the passive voice. Even the original lines. So a passive ending to the ultimate line seems a natural fit… but not a necessary one for a poem. In a poem, I believe anyway, you are free to take liberties with language, grammar, and form. An abrupt shift of line break, stanza break, and tense can emphasize something beneath the language. I do not in this case think it does.

Now let’s look at the movement from first “loneliness” to “true-loneliness” and to finally “true-grief.”

First of all, the hyphen of “true-loneliness” and “true-grief” mirror the hyphen of “black-edged” in the previous line/stanza. Whether this is a “legitimate” reason to make a change, I do not know. But it does lay in back of the change. And, what the hell, it was a good enough reason for me to think of it.

Second, the vowel sound of “true” is an assonance match for the vowel sound in “human”…just as “grief” becomes finally with vowel sound match to “being.” I like assonance for the same reason I like repetition, it helps provide an interior structure to free-verse poetry. It also provides a “musicality” that carries tone that runs beneath the words.

Finally, let’s look at the meaning differences between the words loneliness and grief. Both are part and parcel of the human condition yet the former seems to me more general while the latter seems an emotion occasioned by a specific event.

Obviously much of the artistic process happens on the sub-conconsious level. There is not “a reason” behind every word choice and tense choice any poet makes, no matter how poor or imperfect the poet. Ultimately there is a mystery to the creative process that makes it unintelligible to all, but especially those of us who struggle to create.

____

Here in the North Country, our dry winter continues. Unseasonably warm temperatures, grey skies, and barren ground mirror the way we feel. February, the shortest month, remains psychologically the longest one here in the Land of Cold. March means the beginning of spring and so is easily borne while  February means nothing but more winter and so weighs upon our souls.

MontanaWriter has been reviewing poems about crows. Here is one of my own.

To lay one of your poems next to Sandburg’s and Frost’s and Dickinson’s is a humbling thing. But what the hell! That is why I have a blog.

Enjoy!

 

Reddo 

The poem that once 
appeared in this space
is being re-drafted
and re-typed.

It will be re-posted
someday soon
at MontanaWriter.com.

Stay tuned!

____

I have a memory of someone writing or telling a story about an experience they had had in an MFA writing class. When discussing favorite poets one day in class, the name of Emily Dickinson came up. The reaction from most of the class, maybe even the “instructor,” was one of mocking ridicule.  Several members of the group even began to “sing” some of her songs to the theme of Gilligan’s Island. The fact that it was her extraordinary musicality that allowed them to sing her poems was an irony apparently lost on the room full of future poetic giants

I do not think Dickinson would have been particularly surprised by such an occasion. For as today’s “crow poem” makes clear, no poet knew better how fickle fame truly is… particularly poetic fame. Some day – one can only hope – those MFA students will also know.

Dickinson is one of a handful of American poets who can truly be called great. Great is term overly used in our hyperbolic media age. In the world of art, which like history and theology should always be taking the long view, the adjective “great” belongs only to those artists and works of art that are essential. Only time and distance can distill the essential from the merely interesting.

On the first day of February, a crow poem by Emily Dickinson seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Fame is a Fickle Food
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set.

Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s Corn –
Men eat of it and die.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s Corn –
Men eat of it and die.

As always with a short poem it is difficult to pick just a few lines. But the crow lines have come to my mind more than a few times over the last few weeks and so I choose these. Immortality vs. mortality…. the human condition… the poetic condition.

____

A bit of winter has finally come to the North Country… a dusting of snow that has stayed a few days. The lawns are, for the most part, white – at least those with not too much southern exposure.

Snow is part of winter. Here in the North Country it is its very essence. A winter without snow is like an autumn without gold… discombobulating to say the least. We enjoy the lack of cold and shovelable snow, yet still acutely feel their absence. We live conflicted. But conflicted living is, it seems, the essence of modern life.

Today’s crow poem comes from Sandburg’s third volume of poems, Smoke and Steel (1920). It is pure Sandburg… in tone, in language, in theme, and in subject.

Sandburg does the small poem well. His most well-known (and loved) poems tend to be his smaller ones: “Grass,” “Fog,” “Happiness.” This is because of Sandburg’s great ability to find the emotive heart of a thing. Clarity of vision leads to efficiency of language and meaning.

Sandburg’s depth continues to surprise and delight me. Over and over I ask myself, why did I wait so long to read Sandburg seriously?

Enjoy!

Evening Waterfall
What was the name you called me?—
And why did you go so soon?

The crows lift their caw on the wind,
And the wind changed and was lonely.

The warblers cry their sleepy-songs
Across the valley gloaming,
Across the cattle-horns of early stars.

Feathers and people in the crotch of a treetop
Throw an evening waterfall of sleepy-songs.

What was the name you called me?—
And why did you go so soon?

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

The crows lift their caw on the wind,
And the wind changed and was lonely.

and

Across the cattle-horns of early stars

I love the image of “the cattle-horns of early stars.” Only someone who had spent time on the great prairies, far from the ambient urban-glow of cities, could have come up with such a descriptive line.

Note: As I finish typing this, a family of four crows has just landed in the yard across the street. I fancy they have come to hear me reading Sandburg out loud….

____

bark writing (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

A snowless winter in the North Country has meant brown and barren yards. Not the most beautiful or poetic of vistas… yet with the exception of nordic skiers, who is really going to complain about a mild winter. Certainly not the birds.

Most winters, my feeders see steady action from cardinals and blue jays. This year they have been quite scare. Ground feeding is a easy thing when there is no snow to get in the way.

Crows though have been quite noticeable… not at my feeders, but around the neighborhood and yard. Small family groupings moving around, walking and squawking, playing as only crows do. I have always loved crows, and after reading  Crow by Boria Sax, I love their presence even more.

In honor of the under-appreciated crow and crow family, MontanaWriter will be featuring a small selection of poems over the next few weeks featuring the Corvus, beginning with this Robert Frost favorite.

“Dust of Snow” is a staple of literature classes. One of those poems that English teachers love to “unpack.” A short poem pregnant with multi-layerd meanings, with chances to show off your critical dexterity:  ”hemlock” and Socrates… “hemlock” and Shakespeare… “dust” and death… “rued” and death… black of crow and white of snow…. Few who have spent much time in a classroom have managed to carry this poem away un-sullied.

And yet is is a wonderful poem for all the reasons that the usual analysis completely misses. Easily memorized and fun to recite, it is one of those poems that comes naturally unbidden anytime we see a crow in the winter-time. It is as near a perfect poem as any Frost ever wrote… as any American poet ever wrote.

Enjoy!

Mood is important in poetry. It is the kernel at the center of all poems… especially a short one like this. Success is a short poem depends on getting the mood/emotion exactly right with just a few words and phrases. This is the challenge of haiku and of shorter works like this one.

Now listen to Robert Frost reading these lines: link to Frost reading this poem.

____