On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375407499 ISBN 13: 9780375407499

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2000

Synopsis

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 Chü-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.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"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.

Review:

A Gull Goes Up by Leonie Adams
Philomela by Matthew Arnold
Vultures by Margaret Atwood
Bird-language by Wystan Hugh Auden
The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire
Owls by Charles Baudelaire
The Vulture by Hilaire Belloc
Job 39: 13-18 by Old Testament Bible
Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop
Three Things To Remember by William Blake
Winter Swan by Louise Bogan
To A Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant
Woodpecker by Gerald Bullett
Address To The Woodlark by Robert Burns
The Cage by Geoffrey Chaucer
'the Nun's Priest's Tale: Chauntecleer by Geoffrey Chaucer
Rondel by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt
A Whippoorwill In The Woods by Amy Clampitt
Birds' Nests (2) by John Clare
Turkeys by John Clare
Storm by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hundred-sunned Phenix by George Darley
The Dove by Walter John De La Mare
Jenny Wren by Walter John De La Mare
The Owl (3) by Walter John De La Mare
The Jay by Emily Dickinson
The Saddest Noise, The Sweetest Noise by Emily Dickinson
Little Birds Are Playing by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
To A Nightingale by William Drummond Of Hawthornden
A Minor Bird by Robert Frost
Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same by Robert Frost
The Oven Bird by Robert Frost
The Silver Swan by Orlando Gibbons
The Penguin Jane Austen by Debora Greger
Short Circuit by Daniel Hall
The Caged Goldfinch by Thomas Hardy
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Turkeys Observed by Seamus Heaney
The Starling by John Heath-stubbs
House Sparrows by Anthony Hecht
On A Peacock by Thomas Heyrick
Owl by John Hollander
The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Peacock's Eye by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wild Geese Flying by Barbara Howes
Curlews Lift by Edward James Hughes
Hawk Roosting by Edward James Hughes
Swifts by Edward James Hughes
The Mockingbird by Randall Jarrell
Hurt Hawks by Robinson Jeffers
Ode To A Nightingale by John Keats
Vulture by X. J. Kennedy
The Gray Heron by Galway Kinnell
Cormorants by John Kinsella
Hummingbird by David Herbert Lawrence
The Plumed Serpent: 11 by David Herbert Lawrence
The Owl And The Pussy Cat by Edward Lear
The Bird by Marie Rene Auguste Alexis Saint-leger Leger
The Man-of-war Hawk by Herman Melville
The Peacock by James Ingram Merrill
Fly by William Stanley Merwin
Wild Swans by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To The Nightingale by John Milton
He 'digesteth Harde Yron' by Marianne Moore
The Sea-gull by Ogden Nash
The Blue Swallows by Howard Nemerov
Hawk by Mary Oliver
Owl by Sylvia Plath
The Cranes by Po Chu-yi
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
The Harpies by Publius Vergilius Maro
The Flamingos by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Swan by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Heron by Theodore Roethke
Pain Or Joy by Christina Georgina Rossetti
A Robin's Nest by Mary Jo Salter
Pigeons by Vikram Seth
The Nightingales by Percy Bysshe Shelley
To A Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Cock-a-doo by Florence Margaret Smith
Quail In Autumn by William Jay Smith
The Merry Cuckoo by Edmund Spenser
Two Swans, Sels. by Edmund Spenser
Juncos by William Edgar Stafford
Pigeons On The Grass, Fr. Four Saints In Three Acts by Gertrude Stein
Domination Of Black by Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
One Of The Strangest by May Swenson
The Dying Swan by Alfred Tennyson
The Eagle; A Fragment by Alfred Tennyson
Birds' Nests by Philip Edward Thomas
The Hollow Wood by Philip Edward Thomas
The Owl by Philip Edward Thomas
The Cuckoo Song by Anonymous
The Death And Burial Of Cock Robbin by Anonymous
I Saw A Peacock by Anonymous
The Lark by Anonymous
The Loon Upon The Lake by Anonymous
Magpies by Anonymous
The Twa Corbies by Anonymous
What Do We Geese Wear For Clothes? by Anonymous
Seagulls by John Updike
Mockingbird Month by Mona Van Duyn
Nuthatch by David Wagoner
Peacock Display by David Wagoner
Egyptian Kites by Rex Warner
Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren
A Listener's Guide To The Birds by Elwyn Brooks White
Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking by Walt Whitman
The Robin by John Greenleaf Whittier
Impromptu by Samuel Wilberforce
A Black November Turkey by Richard Wilbur
Marche Aux Oiseaux by Richard Wilbur
To A Sparrow by William Carlos Williams
Ecclesiastical Sonnets: Part 1: 16. Persuasion by William Wordsworth
Black Cockatoos by Judith Wright
Pelicans by Judith Wright
Leda And The Swan by William Butler Yeats
Sailing To Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans At Coole by William Butler Yeats
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375407499
• ISBN 13: 9780375407499
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: McClatchy J. D.