POEMS ABOUT BIRDS

Who can make a delicate adventure
Of walking on the ground?
Who can make grass-blades
Arcades for pertly careless straying?
You alone, who skim against these leaves,
Turning all desire into light whips
Moulded by your deep blue wing-tips,
You who shrill your unconcern
Into the sternly antique sky.
You to whom all things
Hold an equal kiss of touch.

Mincing, wanton blue-bird,
Grimace at the hoofs of passing men.
You alone can lose yourself
Within a sky, and rob it of its blue!

In glory of genesis
the oval universe
took form surrounding me,
and I was born to bliss
inside the mother yolk
where bathed in tranquility
I felt my world immerse
me in soft nectar, soak
me in warm sustenance,
in nurturing abundance.

There is bread not of this world.

But as swollen cells divide,
now multiplied to make
me large, articulated
with heart and lungs inside
my skeleton and skin,
my world is dissipated
and I can only slake
my thirst with bitter poison—
these limbs that I was given
break on the dome of heaven!

There is bread not of this world.


Despairing, my beak cracks
the vaulted firmament,
my rotted paradise gives way;
claws rip it wide and clamber through to climax
in waves of air and light
that flow forever, flow by night and day
to lift the feathered ones in their ascent
to heavens reachable by flight.
Here food and drink are mine; yet still I wonder,
will these new heavens also split asunder?


There is bread not of this world.

O blackbird! sing me something well:
While all the neighbours shoot thee round,
I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground,
Where thou may'st warble, eat and dwell.

The espaliers and the standards all
Are thine; the range of lawn and park:
The unnetted black-hearts ripen dark,
All thine, against the garden wall.

Yet, tho' I spared thee all the spring,
Thy sole delight is, sitting still,
With that gold dagger of thy bill
To fret the summer jenneting.

A golden bill! the silver tongue,
Cold February loved, is dry:
Plenty corrupts the melody
That made thee famous once, when young:

And in the sultry garden-squares,
Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse,
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse
As when a hawker hawks his wares.

Take warning! he that will not sing
While yon sun prospers in the blue,
Shall sing for want, ere leaves are new,
Caught in the frozen palms of Spring.

Come on then, ye, dwellers by Nature in darkness, and like to the leaves' generations,
That are little of might, that are molded of mire, unenduring and shadow-like nations,
Poor plumeless, ephemerals, comfortless mortals, as visions of shadows fast fleeing
Lift up your mind unto us that are deathless, and dateless the date of our being;
Us, children of heaven; us, ageless for aye; us, all of whose thoughts are eternal;
That ye may from henceforth, having heard of us all things aright as to matters supernal,
Of the being of birds and beginning of Gods and of streams and the dark beyond reaching,
Trustfully knowing aright, in my name bid Prodicos pack with his preaching,
It was Chaos, and Night at the first, and the blackness of darkness, and Hell's broad border,
Earth was not, not air, neither heaven; when in depths of the womb of the dark without order
First thing, first born of the black-plumed Night, was a wind-egg hatcht in her bosom,
Whence timely with seasons revolving again sweet Love burst out as a blossom,
Gold wings glittering forth of his back, like whirlwinds gustily turning.
He, after his wedlock with Chaos, whose wings are of darkness, in Hell broad burning,
For his nestlings begat him the race of us first and uppraised us to light new-lighted.
And before this was not the race of the Gods, until all things by Love were united:
And of kind united in kind with communion of Nature the sky and the sea are
Brought forth and the earth and the race of the Gods everlasting and blest. So that we are
Far away the most ancient of all things blest! And with us have the Loves habitation;
And manifold fair young folk that forswore love once, ere the bloom of them ended
Have the men pursued that pursued and desired them subdued by the help of us only befriended,
With such bait as a quail, a flamingo, a goose, or a cock's comb staring and splendid.
All best good things that befall men come from us birds, as is plain to all reason:
For first we proclaim and make known to them Spring and the Winter and Autumn in season;
Bid sow, when the crane starts clanging for Afric in shrill-voiced emigrant number
And calls to the pilot to hang up his rudder again for the season and slumber;
And then weave a cloak for Orestes the theif, lest he strip men of theirs if it freezes.
And again thereafter the kite reappearing announces a change in the breezes.
And that here is the season for shearing your sheep of their spring wool. Then does the swallow
Give you notice to sell your greatcoat and provide something light for the heat that's to follow.
Thus are we as Ammon or Delphoi unto you, Dodona, nay Phoibos Apollo!
For, as first ye come all to get auguries of birds, even such is in all things your carriage,
Be the matter a matter of trade, or of earning your bread, or of any one's marriage.
And all things ye lay to the charge of a bird that belongs to discerning prediction.
Winged fame is a bird, as you reckon; you sneeze and the sign's as a bird for conviction.
All tokens are birds with you--sounds, too, and lackeys and donkeys. Then must it not follow
That we are to you all as the manifest Godhead that speaks in prophetic Apollo?

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.

The birds of Stymphalus
Vexed not so the Arcadians,
As those dead thrushes vexed me
With their dry bones,
Very harpies,
Ten of them,
A dry drachma's worth.
Out on you, wretched creatures,
True bats of the fields.

The parrot, screeching, flew out into the darkness,
Circled three times above the upturned faces
With a great whir of brilliant outspread wings,
And then returned to stagger on her finger.
She bowed and smiled, eliciting applause....
The property man hated her dirty birds.
But it had taken years--yes, years--to train them,
To shoulder flags, strike bells by tweaking strings,
Or climb sedately little flights of stairs.
When they were stubborn, she tapped them with a wand,
And her eyes glittered a little under the eyebrows.
The red one flapped and flapped on a swinging wire;
The little white ones winked round yellow eyes.

YOU were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help you pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover.
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once--could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memory--have you?--
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.

A lone gray bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.

Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,
Out into the gloom it swings and batters,
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
Out into the pit of a great black world,
Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown,
Love of mist and rapture of flight,
Glories of chance and hazards of death
On its eager and palpitant wings.

Out into the deep of the great dark world,
Beyond the long borders where foam and drift
Of the sundering waves are lost and gone
On the tides that plunge and rear and crumble.

Thousands of black leaves in the trees
When there should be none.

Leaves immune to the cold winter wind,
Leaves with tiny yellow eyes.
Silent. Staring.

A clap of thunder and they take flight,
Almost frightening in their numbers.

They darken the sky,
Then turn, as one,
And settle again on the bare branches.

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow white blossoms on my head,
With brightest sunshine round me spread
Of spring's unclouded weather,
In this sequestered nook how sweet
To sit upon my orchard-seat!
And birds and flowers once more to greet,
My last year's friends together.

One have I marked, the happiest guest
In all this covert of the blest:
Hail to Thee, far above the rest
In joy of voice and pinion!
Thou, Linnet! in thy green array,
Presiding Spirit here to-day,
Dost lead the revels of the May;
And this is thy dominion.

While birds, and butterflies, and flowers,
Make all one band of paramours,
Thou, ranging up and down the bowers,
Art sole in thy employment:
A Life, a Presence like the Air,
Scattering thy gladness without care,
Too blest with any one to pair;
Thyself thy own enjoyment.

Amid yon tuft of hazel trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstacies,
Yet seeming still to hover;
There! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
That cover him all over.

My dazzled sight he oft deceives,
A Brother of the dancing leaves;
Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves
Pours forth his song in gushes;
As if by that exulting strain
He mocked and treated with disdain
The voiceless Form he chose to feign,
While fluttering in the bushes.

When the sun rose I was still lying in bed;
An early oriole sang on the roof of my house.
For a moment I thought of the Royal Park at dawn
When the Birds of Spring greeted their Lord from his trees.
I remember the days when I served before the Throne
Pencil in hand, on duty at the Ch'eng-ming;
At the height of spring, when I paused an instant from work,
Morning and evening, was this the voice I heard?
Now in my exile the oriole sings again
In the dreary stillness of Hsün-yang town ...
The bird's note cannot really have changed;
All the difference lies in the listener's heart.
If he could but forget that he lives at the World's end,
The bird would sing as it sang in the Palace of old.

They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke
Is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

My parents’ home, the heavy winter fields
From which they flashed and kindled and uprode

The air in dozens. I ignored them all.
“What are they?” “Oh – peewits – “ Then a hare flowed,

Bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed
Round other farms. I only knew them gone

When, out of a sad winter, one returned.
I heard the high mocked cry “Pee – wit , “ so long

Cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air
To lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.
How had I let this green and purple pass?

Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)
Fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,
Squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

Did I once know the story of their lives?
Do they migrate from Spain? Or coasts’ cold run?

And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

With all the brilliance of their black and white
As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.

What! Is the mocking bird come?
The Spring, he comes to say,
The Spring is here today.
All sounds, all words he knows.
His feathers preen how he will,
He is the same bird still.

Where flowers most thickly screen,
Difficult to be seen,
His varying notes deride
The topmost boughs between.
If out of time he chide.
Lo! slander at your side!

My partridge, wand'rer from the hills forlorn,
Thy house, light-woven of the willow-bough
No more, thou patient one, shall know thee now;
And in the radiance of the bright-eyed morn
Shalt stretch and stir thy sun-kissed wings no more.
A cat struck off thy head--but all the rest
From out the glutton's envious grasp I tore!
Now may the earth lie heavy--so 'twere best--
Upon thee, and not lightly, so that she
May ne'er drag forth these poor remains of thee.

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question he then frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

1

When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

2

When merry milkmaids click the latch,
And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Twice or thrice his roundelay;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

If we were such and so, the same as these,
maybe we too would be slingers and sliders,
tumbling half over in the water mirrors,
tumbling half over at the horse heads of the sun,
tumbling our purple numbers.

Twirl on, you and your satin blue.
Be water birds, be air birds.
Be these purple tumblers you are.

Dip and get away
From loops into slip-knots,
Write your own ciphers and figure eights.
It is your wooded island here in Lincoln park.
Everybody knows this belongs to you.

Five fat geese
Eat grass on a sod bank
And never count your slinging ciphers,
your sliding figure eights.

A man on a green paint iron bench,
Slouches his feet and sniffs in a book,
And looks at you and your loops and slip-knots,
And looks at you and your sheaths of satin blue,
And slouches again and sniffs in the book,
And mumbles: It is an idle and a doctrinaire exploit.

Go on tumbling half over in the water mirrors.
Go on tumbling half over at the horse heads of the sun.
Be water birds, be air birds.
Be these purple tumblers you are.

Art thou the bird whom Man loves best,
The pious bird with the scarlet breast,
Our little English Robin;
The bird that comes about our doors
When Autumn-winds are sobbing?
Art thou the Peter of Norway Boors?
Their Thomas in Finland,
And Russia far inland?
The bird, that by some name or other
All men who know thee call their brother,
The darling of children and men?
Could Father Adam open his eyes
And see this sight beneath the skies,
He'd wish to close them again.
—If the Butterfly knew but his friend,
Hither his flight he would bend;
And find his way to me,
Under the branches of the tree:
In and out, he darts about;
Can this be the bird, to man so good,
That, after their bewildering,
Covered with leaves the little children,
So painfully in the wood?

What ailed thee, Robin, that thou could'st pursue
A beautiful creature,
That is gentle by nature?
Beneath the summer sky
From flower to flower let him fly;
'Tis all that he wishes to do.
The cheerer Thou of our in-door sadness,
He is the friend of our summer gladness:
What hinders, then, that ye should be
Playmates in the sunny weather,
And fly about in the air together!
His beautiful wings in crimson are drest,
A crimson as bright as thine own:
Would'st thou be happy in thy nest,
O pious Bird! whom man loves best,
Love him, or leave him alone!

A flash of silver wings in the sun,
And I see, with divine surprise,
Here in the Midlands quiet and dun--
Sea-gulls up in the skies!

Sea-gulls! I am content no more
With tame little fields and woods:
My thoughts are set to rock-bound shore,
The sea, and the sea's wild moods.

God! for a headland far away.
Bare to the autumn gale,
Where the great waves roar, and the wind-whirled spray
Drifts out like a torn white veil.

And the wild white horses toss their manes
Far out as the eye may reach,
While the sea-birds cry in the winds and the rains,
(The boats moored high on the beach).

* * * * *

Back go the sea-gulls, splendid and free,
In rhythmical, ordered flight,
And my heart goes with them, home to the sea,
As I watch them out of sight.

Away! away! my birds, fly westwards now,
To wheel on high and gaze on all below;
To swoop together, pinions closed, to earth;
To soar aloft once more among the clouds;
To wander all day long in sedgy vale;
To gather duckweed in the stony marsh.

Come back! come back! beneath the lengthening shades,
Your serge-clad master stands, guitar in hand.
'Tis he that feeds you from his slender store:
Come back! come back! nor linger in the west.

Behold, within the leafy shade,
Those bright blue eggs together laid!
On me the chance-discovered sight
Gleamed like a vision of delight.
I started—seeming to espy
The home and sheltered bed,
The Sparrow's dwelling, which, hard by
My Father's house, in wet or dry
My sister Emmeline and I
Together visited.

She looked at it and seemed to fear it;
Dreading, tho' wishing, to be near it:
Such heart was in her, being then
A little Prattler among men.
The Blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

Gentle swallow, thou we know
Every year dost come and go;
In the spring thy nest thou mak'st;
In the winter it forsak'st,
And divert'st thyself awhile
Near the Memphian towers, or Nile:
But Love in my suffering breast
Builds, and never quits his nest;
First one Love's hatch'd; when that flies,
In the shell another lies;
Then a third is half expos'd;
Then a whole brood is disclos'd,
Which for meat still peeping cry,
Whilst the others that can fly
Do their callow brethren feed,
And grown up, they young ones breed.
What then will become of me
Bound to pain incessantly,
Whilst so many Loves conspire
Of my heart by turns to tire?

Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind!

I have walked through wildernesses dreary,
And to-day my heart is weary;
Had I now the wings of a Faery,
Up to thee would I fly.
There is madness about thee, and joy divine
In that song of thine;
Lift me, guide me high and high
To thy banqueting-place in the sky.

Joyous as morning,
Thou art laughing and scorning;
Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,
And, though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy Liver,
With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to the almighty Giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both!

Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done.

Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renew'd on thy prodigious pinions,
(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended'st,
And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)
Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating,
As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee,
(Myself a speck, a point on the world's floating vast.)

Far, far at sea,
After the night's fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks,
With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene,
The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun,
The limpid spread of air cerulean,
Thou also re-appearest.

Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)
To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,
Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,
Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
At dusk that lookist on Senegal, at morn America,
That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine!