A Disquisition On Two Poems About Skylarks Poem by Denis Mair
A Disquisition On Two Poems About Skylarks
Shelley apostrophized a skylark...Across the centuries I came upon an answering poem that also goes to the lark's essence.
In Ted Hughes' 'Skylark' the poet takes a modern view, paring that bird down to life-energy that needs to be dissipated.
Yet when I read his poem all the beauty of the bird is intact, for me.
Each kind of creature throws itself into the net of arrangements allowing for the dissipation of life-energy, each in its own way.
Surely it finds joy in taking such action, stimulated by the brain's pleasure centers that energize it and lead it onward.
But the desperation and driven-ness of the quest make it even more poignant. It is similar to those baffling bird migrations we saw in Jacques Perrin's film WINGED MIGRATION.
The albatross spends much of its life aloft, circling the southern hemisphere, breeding on remote islands near Antarctica.
You wouldn't see such absolute commitment of action unless the creature were involved from the inside, as the subjective initiator of its own journey.
Shelley pared the skylark down to its soaring motivation, not wanting to nail it down to the 'sleep' of mechanistic laws.
Still, the bird is a bird. We can never go back to 'Hail blithe spirit, bird thou never wert...'
As Daniel Dennet said, 'The word SPIRIT is an ill-behaved conceptual entity.' (It is not yet potty trained, he should have said.)
Spirit is supposedly different from matter, but who made that law? To use a clumsy word, they are interfused.
Ted Hughes doesn't address the spirit. He recreates the bird's journey inside his own heart, because that is how we humans fly.
Ted Hughes feels the pure wanting of the journey from within; at the same time he admits that it is bound up with mechanistic laws;
Thus he can convey its difficulty to us, including the sagging and ultimate surrender to forces that the bird once skimmed along on.
So the process of paring down provides abundant grounds for empathy between one creature and another.
The 'tolerances' are very close, as my Dad used to say. Upward thrust barely exceeds the pull of gravity. Just a little thinning of the air up there makes it extra hard for wings to gain purchase.
The skylark is going against a barrier, and for what? There are no insects to be caught up there. Could it be a mating display? I wonder.
It is a vertical migration, made for its own sake in a single morning, demonstrating aesthetic intent in the Creation.
We poets are also throwing ourselves against a barrier of attenuated air.
There is so much in your poem; I'll have to read the one by Ted Hughes later. You have done something wonderful with your poem- highly cognitive-highly cerebral, through which we really start to feel the poet's mind las finely engineered as a bird's wings for flying. There are so many layers here. I'll have to spend more time reading. So many nuances. Thank you for referring me to it!
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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6/17/2024 2:01:02 PM # 1.0.0.1119
I like this line a lot: ＂It is a vertical migration, made for its own sake in a single morning, demonstrating aesthetic intent in the Creation.'' Nice imagination and creative thinking...