On Wings of Song Poems About Birds

by MCCLATCHY, J. D.

• ISBN13: 9780375407499
• ISBN10: 0375407499
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-03-28
• Publisher: Everyman's Library

Summary

From backyard to barnyard, from hawks to hummingbirds, from pelicans to peacocks, from Coleridge's albatross to Keats's nightingale to Poe's raven-all manner of feathered beings, the inspiration for poetic flights of fancy through the ages, are gathered together in this delightful volume. Some of the winged treasures: Emily Dickinson on the jay; Gertrude Stein on pigeons; Seamus Heaney on turkeys; Tennyson on the eagle; Spenser on the merry cuckoo; Amy Clampitt on the whippoorwill; Po Chu-i on cranes; John Updike on seagulls; W.S. Merwin on the duck; Elizabeth Bishop on the sandpiper; Rilke on flamingoes; Margaret Atwood on vultures; the Bible on the ostrich; Sylvia Plath on the owl; Melville on the hawk; Yeats on wild swans; Virgil on the harpies; Thomas Hardy on the darkling thrush; and Wallace Stevens on thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.

Author Biography

J. D. McClatchy is the author of five collections of poems: <b>Scenes From Another Life, Stars Principal, The Rest of the Way, Ten Commandments,</b> and <b>Hazmat</b><i>.</i> He has also written two books of essays: <b>White Paper</b> and <b>Twenty Questions</b>. He has edited many other books, including <b>The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, Poets on Painters</b><i>,</i> and <b>Horace: The Odes</b>. In addition, he edits The Voice of the Poet series for Random House AudioBooks, and has written seven opera libretti. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at Princeton, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, and is now a professor at Yale, where since 1991 he has edited The Yale Review. He lives in Stonington, Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Foreword	13	(6)
THE BACKYARD
Short Circuit	19	(1)
Daniel Hall
The Jay	20	(1)
Emily Dickinson
Jenny Wren	21	(1)
Walter De La Mare
Nuthatch	22	(1)
David Wagoner
The Mockingbird	23	(1)
Randall Jarrell
Mockingbird Month	24	(2)
Mona Van Duyn
Juncos	26	(1)
William Stafford
The Robin	27	(2)
John Greenleaf Whittier
The Starling	29	(1)
John Heath-Stubbs
To a Sparrow	30	(1)
William Carlos Williams
House Sparrows	31	(2)
Anthony Hecht
Pigeons	33	(1)
Vikram Seth
Pigeons on the Grass	34	(3)
Gertrude Stein
THE BARNYARD
Turkeys	37	(1)
John Clare
A Black November Turkey	38	(2)
Richard Wilbur
Turkeys Observed	40	(1)
Seamus Heaney
Chauntecleer	41	(2)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Cock-a-Doo	43	(2)
Stevie Smith
What Do We Geese Wear for Clothes?	45	(4)
German Folk Song
THE REALM OF AIR
The Eagle	49	(1)
Alfred
Lord Tennyson
Wild Geese Flying	50	(1)
Barbara Howes
Humming-Bird	51	(1)
D. H. Lawrence
The Blue Swallows	52	(2)
Howard Nemerov
Swifts	54	(3)
Ted Hughes
The Kingfisher	57	(4)
Amy Clampitt
FIELD AND FOREST
The Cuckoo Song	61	(1)
Anon.
The Merry Cuckoo	62	(1)
Edmund Spenser
The Lark	63	(1)
Anon.
Quail in Autumn	64	(1)
William Jay Smith
The Hollow Wood	65	(1)
Edward Thomas
To the Woodlark	66	(1)
Robert Burns
Woodpecker	67	(1)
Gerald Bullett
A Whippoorwill in the Woods	68	(3)
Amy Clampitt
Black Cockatoos	71	(1)
Judith Wright
The Cranes	72	(3)
Po Chu-I
AT WATER'S EDGE
A Gull Goes Up	75	(1)
Leonie Adams
Seagulls	76	(2)
John Updike
The Heron	78	(1)
Theodore Roethke
The Gray Heron	79	(1)
Galway Kinnell
Cormorants	80	(1)
John Kinsella
Sandpiper	81	(1)
Elizabeth Bishop
Curlews Lift	82	(1)
Ted Hughes
The Flamingos	83	(1)
Rainer Maria Rilke
One of the Strangest	84	(1)
May Swenson
Pelicans	85	(1)
Judith Wright
The Loon Upon the Lake	86	(3)
Ojibwa Song
BIRDS OF PREY
The Twa Corbies	89	(1)
Anon.
Vultures	90	(2)
Margaret Atwood
The Vulture	92	(1)
Hilaire Belloc
Vulture	93	(1)
X. J. Kennedy
Egyptian Kites	94	(5)
Rex Warner
FLIGHTLESS BIRDS
The Wing of the Ostrich Rejoiceth	99	(1)
The Bible
He ``Digesteth Harde Yron''	100	(3)
Marianne Moore
If I were a Cassowary	103	(4)
Samuel Wilberforce
THE NIGHTINGALE
To the Nightingale	107	(1)
John Milton
To a Nightingale	108	(1)
William Drummond
The Nightingales	109	(1)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Philomela	110	(2)
Matthew Arnold
Pain or Joy	112	(3)
Christina Rossetti
THE PEACOCK
I Saw a Peacock	115	(1)
Anon.
On a Peacock	116	(1)
Thomas Heyrick
The Peacock's Eye	117	(1)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Domination of Black	118	(2)
Wallace Stevens
The Peacock	120	(2)
James Merrill
Peacock Display	122	(3)
David Wagoner
THE OWL
Owls	125	(1)
Charles Baudelaire
The Owl	126	(2)
Walter De La Mare
The Owl	128	(1)
Edward Thomas
Owl	129	(1)
Sylvia Plath
Owl	130	(7)
John Hollander
THE HAWK
The Man-of-War Hawk	137	(1)
Herman Melville
Hawk Roosting	138	(2)
Ted Hughes
Evening Hawk	140	(1)
Robert Penn Warren
Hurt Hawks	141	(2)
Robinson Jeffers
Hawk	143	(4)
Mary Oliver
THE SWAN
The Silver Swan	147	(1)
Orlando Gibbons
Two Swans	148	(1)
Edmund Spenser
The Dying Swan	149	(2)
Alfred
Lord Tennyson
The Swan	151	(1)
Rainer Maria Rilke
Winter Swan	152	(1)
Louise Bogan
The Wild Swans at Coole	153	(2)
William Butler Yeats
Wild Swans	155	(4)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
NESTS AND CAGES
Birds' Nests	159	(1)
John Clare
Birds' Nests	160	(1)
Edward Thomas
A Robin's Nest	161	(3)
Mary Jo Salter
The Cage	164	(1)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Three Things to Remember	165	(1)
William Blake
The Caged Goldfinch	166	(1)
Thomas Hardy
The Caged Skylark	167	(1)
Gerald Manley Hopkins
Marche aux Oiseaux	168	(1)
Richard Wilbur
Fly	169	(4)
W. S. Merwin
BIRDSONG
Never Again Would Birds' Song be the Same	173	(1)
Robert Frost
Bird-Language	174	(1)
W. H. Auden
The Saddest Noise	175	(1)
Emily Dickinson
The Dove	176	(1)
Walter De La Mare
A Minor Bird	177	(4)
Robert Frost
FLIGHTS OF FANCY
The Death and Burial of Cock Robbin	181	(3)
Anon.
Rondel	184	(2)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Magpies	186	(1)
Anon.
Little Birds are Playing	187	(2)
Lewis Carroll
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat	189	(2)
Edward Lear
The Sea-Gull	191	(1)
Ogden Nash
The Penguin Jane Austen	192	(2)
Debora Greger
A Listener's Guide to the Birds	194	(4)
E. B. White
The Bird	198	(5)
St.-John Perse
LEGENDARY AND EMBLEMATIC BIRDS
The Harpies	203	(2)
Virgil
Hundred-Sunned Phenix	205	(1)
George Darley
Leda and the Swan	206	(1)
William Butler Yeats
The Living Quetzalcoatl	207	(2)
D. H. Lawrence
Persuasion	209	(1)
William Wordsworth
from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	210	(2)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Albatross	212	(1)
Charles Baudelaire
To a Skylark	213	(5)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to a Nightingale	218	(4)
John Keats
The Darkling Thrush	222	(2)
Thomas Hardy
The Windhover	224	(1)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
To a Waterfowl	225	(2)
William Cullen Bryant
The Raven	227	(5)
Edgar Allan Poe
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird	232	(3)
Wallace Stevens
The Oven Bird	235	(1)
Robert Frost
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking	236	(7)
Walt Whitman
Sailing to Byzantium	243	(2)
William Butler Yeats
Acknowledgments	245	(5)
Index of Authors	250

Excerpts

"Seagulls"
by John Updike

A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist's material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes--
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes them too many
to make them very well.

Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.

At that hour on the beach
when the flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.

It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them
but which neither quite knows--
walk capricious paths through the scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.



John Updike on "Seagulls":

My distinct memory is that I was pondering gulls while lying on Crane Beach in Ipswich when the first stanza came over me in a spasm of inspiration. Penless and paperless, I ran to the site of a recent beach fire and wrote in charcoal on a large piece of unburned driftwood. Then I cumbersomely carried my improvised tablet home. It must have been late in the beach season, and my final stanzas slow to ripen, for the poem's completion is dated early December.

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Excerpted from On Wings of Song: Poems about Birds
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.