MaryAnn, I used to keep a file of bird poems, which go all the way back. One of the earliest survivors is this, from Hesiod:


Now here's a parable for princes, who know it well,
what the hawk told the speckle-throated nightingale.
High in the clouds he carried her, clenched in his talons.
She cried out piteously, pierced by his crooked claws,
and he replied to her imperiously with this:
"Poor thing, why shriek? The one who holds you is far stronger.
You will go where I take you, singer though you are.
I'll make a meal of you, if I wish, or let you go.
He is a fool who wishes to resist the powerful:
he still loses and struggling only makes it hurt more."
So spoke the hawk, swift-flighted bird, on outspread wings.


It’s curious that this ‘parable for princes’ from 750 BC, mostly intent on human things, describes contemporary American intellectual society’s ‘official view’ of nature (‘red in tooth and claw’). The same official views, propagated from offices and cubicles, instruct us to think Bryant’s vision naïve, misguided, self-deluded. Yet most people who spend serious time in the real wilderness, actual NATURE, and pay attention, come around to thoughts not so far from Bryant’s, though the terms to discuss them come less handy to our place & time than they did in his.

It's remarkable that so many of us have been taught to regard writing in relation to tradition as suspect, so that we need to make excuses for Hardy writing in relation to Keats, rather than understanding that this is exactly the conversion he intends to enter -- a conversation between him, tradition, and the mutual condition.

Hardy says -- in a letter? -- that the best way to find a new poem to write, if you're stuck, is to pick up a good collection of poetry & read until you get an idea, then put the book down & go to work. Of course this doesn't intend to offer a complete account; it's half joking -- half.

One thing I'm thinking about is that when a given reader on the initial page with the poem and my paragraph on it clicks the "Post a Message" button, a new screen appears, ready for the new post. Maybe instead of that, the list of threads should appear?

Robert, at the bottom of the initial page, the one containing the weekly poem, readers are given two choices -- "post a message" or "read messages." All one has to do is click on the latter choice to see all existing threads. Most newbies (people new to discussion boards) learn after a few posts that it's better to begin by clicking on "read messages" rather than "post a message." The PoemsFray is experiencing a rash of newbies, but if they are committed to staying with the PoemsFray, they should have no trouble navigating the fray.

As this idea evolves, that is one of my concerns. Another is continued inclusion of the ordinary readers, in particular the usual Fray participants, along with the poets and scholars.

We "people on the pavement" do not seem to be receiving very much notice. So far, Robert, you are the only Big Cheese that has responded to zinya, Ted, me, or any of the other ordinary readers. Not that the other Big Cheeses have to. The PoemsFray is certainly big enough to have separate but equal discussion threads going on at the same time.

Although this week's discussion of "The Darkling Thrush" has produced many more ideas than I would have thought possible, it is a fairly accessible poem -- as have been the other poems you have participated in the discussion of. I think we ordinary readers would profit from the imput of some of the Big Cheeses on the Slate poems you offer us the other three weeks a month. (And yes, I know that, realistically, that won't happen because it's difficult to critique a colleague's work.)

Or -- perhaps you could post a more challenging poem during those weeks you are participating. As for having to confine yourself to poems in the public domain, I know that Slate pays the poets whose poems it posts every week; perhaps Slate would spring for the royalty fees so you could post a more recent poem. (How does it work for the Washington Post's "Poet's Corner" column?)

Well, Robert, as you can see, I have given vent to some of my frustrations. But I'd rather clear the air than brood.

signed,
just another poetry lover

Here's the post from a few hours ago that Robert suggested I add to this thread:

I'm coming in late on this, but I'm grateful to Robert Pinsky for selecting this poem and reading it aloud so well. There have been some excellent posts on the form of the poem, the meter, rhyme, and occasionally odd word choice or invention, such as "illimited." Let me take a stab instead at what I think Hardy is trying to say.

Very few writers have gotten as much mileage out of pessimism or fatalism as Hardy. In his novels this tends to constrict the freedom of his characters, whose lives are eventually squashed by circumstances, no matter what their initial hopes and dreams. But Hardy lights up his dark views precisely with those tentative, touching, often futile hopes. The end of a century has often been the breeding ground for both apocalyptic foreboding and hopes for rebirth, for a new beginning. Hardy plays on both these themes in this poem, using the traditional romantic trope of the man listening to the song of a bird as a call from another realm, from an ecstatic and unself-conscious nature rather than the troubled mind of man himself.

The first half of the poem is a grim, death-haunted evocation of the old century, saturated with wintry images of aging and dying yet with one tentative pointer towards the future: "the ancient pulse of germ and birth." This is a petrification of the wild but desperate spirit of rebirth in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," but even Shelley's conclusion, posed as an open question, is more qualified then most readers have allowed: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" This is the sentiment of blind hope developed in the second half of Hardy's poem, which allows a shiver of incomprehensible possibility for the incoming century.

An early critic made a literal objection to Keats's immortal and ecstatic nightingale, arguing that the bird was as mortal as the man. Hardy had responded to that kind of quibble in an 1887 poem trying to imagine the physical remains of the actual skylark in Italy that had inspired Shelley's poem. A few pages before "The Darkling Thrush" in his Poems of the Past and the Present, in a poem called "The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again," Hardy had evoked a bird who mocks man's knowledge and his ability to improve his lot: "Men know but little more than we/ How happy days are made to be." In "The Darkling Thrush," however, the bird, though as aged and battered as the century itself, is allowed a knowledge, or at least a hope, that Hardy himself can hear but not understand.

The source of this hope, for the poet at least, is the contrast between the bird's ""frail, gaunt, and small" being and its "full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited." This is a bird that, unlike Keats's or Shelley's, is subject to the same physical limitations, the same death sentence, as man. Yet he has chosen, irrationally, almost suicidally, "to fling his soul/ Upon the dying gloom." The circumstances are not propitious; the land is barren and cold. It offers "little cause for carolings/ Of such ecstatic sound." Like the early Christian theologian, Tertullian, the bird believes because it is absurd, and this paradoxically gives some credibility to a faith the poet merely reports but cannot comprehend, thus concluding the poem of a delicate knife-edge of ambiguity.

Morris Dickstein

Mary Ann, I am paying close attention to what you say, and thinking about all of this.

Slate's resources are very limited these days-- Microsoft coffers no longer available-- and the monthly public domain poem is pretty much a necessity.

(Within my own limited resources of time and energy, I will continue to try to make something good of this.)

And I will address the matter of indifferent cheeses-- I think it is quite likely more related to unfamiliarity with the format (like my own) than to aloofness. In fact, I am pretty sure of that.

RP

An afterthought, Mary Ann, second reply: the Fray regulars, mostly more familiar with this venue than those you refer to as the Cheeses-- generous, courteous people, those of them I know-- might try addressing them and their ideas directly?

RP

My apologies for forgetting to mention Jim Powell, who has been posting to PoemsFraysters for 3 - 4 weeks now, and to Paul Breslin, who has been posting to us for several months.

Thanks very much, Jim and Paul, for "joining the fray."

Mary Ann

I don't see as much distinction in Bryant's narrator's position vis-a-vis nature compared to Hardy's as Breslin posits (I think both narrator are knowingly projecting on to their respective birds, as I suggested about Hardy's here yesterday, and both are drawing 'lessons' of sorts in terms of either "hope overriding experience" - in Hardy's case - or the beauty of trusting instinct to navigate rightly amid 'illimitable' possible paths to take).

Zinya, I think "The Darkling Thrush" is a better poem than "To a Waterfowl." The latter is pretty obvious in its allusion to God in the last stanza, whereas the former asks us to consider two contradictory ideas (despair and hope) at the same time.

MA

It’s curious that this ‘parable for princes’ from 750 BC, mostly intent on human things, describes contemporary American intellectual society’s ‘official view’ of nature (‘red in tooth and claw’). The same official views, propagated from offices and cubicles, instruct us to think Bryant’s vision naïve, misguided, self-deluded. Yet most people who spend serious time in the real wilderness, actual NATURE, and pay attention, come around to thoughts not so far from Bryant’s, though the terms to discuss them come less handy to our place & time than they did in his.

Jim, I'm not sure I agree with your statement about "red in tooth and claw," although it's true that even the PBS nature programs for kids and families present in a matter-of-fact way animals killing each other. For me, the violence of the phrase is of a piece with Tennyson's 19th century struggle re Faith vs Science.

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

I don't see that struggle nowadays. Biologists and environmentalists who believe in evolution do or don't believe in God. But I don't think they see in terms of those violent last two lines.

(However, I am having two biologists as house guests this weekend. If I remember to so do, I shall ask them what they think about Tennyson's lines. Since they also spend time in semi-serious wilderness, I will also ask them if they feel something similar to what Bryant says in "To a Waterfowl" -- a spirituality or holiness, if not an actual God. I think they just feel a peacefulness, but I shall ask them and report back.)

Getting back to Faith vs Science -- I recently posted a mini-essay on Hopkins' "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection." By now I think it's on page 2 of the PoemsFray. If you have the time, I'd appreciate your looking at it and making a few comments.

Mary Ann

Jim, here's a link for the Hopkins mini-essay --

<link>

It does seem to me as if there are too many threads. I am finding the discussions fascinating but since it is a busy week, with limited time I can only sample in what seems a too-random fashion. In spite of your valiant efforts to act as the matrix of all this poetic ferment, it may be just too daunting for one person! Maybe it would be best if you set up 3 or 5 more general thread topics at the beginning, and posters weren't allowed to start new threads. That's a method I have used successfully for online teaching.

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I thought I'd re-post Mark Halliday's useful comment just added on another thread, as his concern with how we know, and how we might both assert what birds know and doubt that assertion at the same time, seems relevant here.

"Hardy constructs that last sentence of "The Darkling Thrush" to balance disbelief against faith so delicately and evenly that you're never sure whether despair or hope emerges as the dominant mood. I think of it as one of the great poetic epitomes of agnosticism. The thrush does seem to know something, and Hardy doesn't dismiss such knowing as ridiculous, and yet he remains unaware of the hypothetical blessed Hope. Though he positioned himself as a rationalist in response to pious believers, Hardy loved to create these moments of tenable agnosticism; another great example is the end of "The Shadow on the Stone" where he chooses not to destroy his illusion that his wife's ghost is with him in their garden after her death."

We know that birds and animals possess knowledge. Undeniably, the thrush knows how to find food, construct a nest, make songs; what else does it know, and how? To assert too firmly that we can read and interpret their awareness feels false, but likewise to say that all attempts to understand animal consciousness are just vain projections seems too easy. Keats convinces in his ventriloquism because it's so headlong and confident,and the music is so gorgeous that there's a thush-ness rising from the page. Bunting doesn't want to convince us that his is the monologue of a thrush, but rather a witty and artfully dour commentary on human capacity-- specifically the poet's capacity -- for sentimentality and misreading. Hardy does seem to stand, as Mark H notes, in this double ground that feels distinctly modern -- I know the bird sings, I know what the song might mean, and I am also incapable of reading that song's intention, and understand what I'm lending to it as a listener.

I used to know a fellow who studied SIddha yoga, which involves practicing various meditation techniques that are intended to lead one to various capabilities of higher consciousness -- superpowers, basically. One of them is the ability to understand the speech of animals. He said he overheard the conversation of two dogs walking down a road, and that it was really boring, something along the lines of I want to eat that, smells good, yep. I don't know if I believe this story, but it reminds me that there's something about assuming the birds in question here have come to address the poet that's a little on the anthrocentric side. It's a pleasure, in Hardy, that the bird is striking his note of hope without any apparent regard for audience.

It does seem to me as if there are too many threads. I am finding the discussions fascinating but since it is a busy week, with limited time I can only sample in what seems a too-random fashion. In spite of your valiant efforts to act as the matrix of all this poetic ferment, it may be just too daunting for one person!

Annie Finch, feel free to return at another time when you are less busy. Slate's discussion boards are open 24/7. I have been posting on the PoemsFray for about seven years and have found it quite enjoyable.

Maybe it would be best if you set up 3 or 5 more general thread topics at the beginning, and posters weren't allowed to start new threads. That's a method I have used successfully for online teaching.

Slate started in 1996 and is one of the most successful online magazines, in large part because of its 200 + discussion boards, open to anyone at any time. Your suggestion of having a moderator (Robert Pinsky) who determines thread topics and does not allow other posters to start new ones is totally at odds with Slate's mission. In a controlled situation like a college or other school, your technique of limiting threads sounds like a good one, and if I were still teaching, I'd probably try something similar.

However, Slate's discussion boards are not a "controlled situation." Slate, and its owner, The Washington Post, want as many "users" as possible so they can charge more for their advertisements. I cannot imagine that Slate and the Post would go along with your suggestion. The same goes for Salon and the discussion boards at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and most other newspapers and magazines. Without getting overly melodramatic, I'll just conclude with the cliche about the Internet taking power away from the few and returning it to the many.

Mary Ann

MARY ANN, I AM JUMPING IN THERE TO SEE IF YOU WOULD BE WILLING TO OPEN UP YOUR FILE OF BIRD POEMS TO ME. I AM IN THE DREADED FINAL STAGES OF COMPILING AN ANTHOLOGY OF BIRD POEMS FOR COLUMBIA U PRESS. A HAVE OVER 100 POEMS BUT WOULD LIKE A BIGGER FLOCK TO PICK FROM. THE BOOK WILL BE UNLIKE THE (MANY) OTHER BOOKS OF BIRD POEMS IN THAT IT WILL BE ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID SIBLEY AND IT WILL CONTAIN AVIAN INFORMATION NORMALLY FOUND ONLY IN FIELD GUIDES. THE MARKET IS BIRDERS WHO READ POETRY (THERE SEEMS TO BE AN OVERLAP HERE, NOT SURPRISINGLY.) SO, THE POEMS HAVE TO BE VERY SPECIES-SPECIFIC (NOT JUST "I SAW A BIRD") AND SHOULD TAKE THE BIRD AS THEIR SUBJECT, RATHER THAN JUST USING THE BIRD METAPHORICALLY. NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS PREFERRED. IF YOU THINK YOU COULD BE OF ANY HELP, I WOULD MUCH APPRECIATE IT.

BILLY COLLINS

I'm also a college professor who has done some online classes, as well as a Fray poster for about 5 years now. Online teaching and the Fray are two very different animals. People who post on the fray regularly do not think of their relationship to Slate writers as equivalent to teacher and student; the proposal would annoy a lot of people. You'd have to explain it to folks, and at least half of the resulting posts would be either explaining the new system to people or complaining about it.

Also, when threads get very long, they are actually harder to read than multiple top posts.

I understand the impulse for order, but the chaotic nature of the Fray can also be one of its great strengths and pleasures.