EVERY FORCE EVOLVES A FORM

“Jesus said: Split a stick. I will be inside.”

—The Gospel of Thomas [77]

“Split the Lark, and you’ll find the Music,

Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled.”

—Emily Dickinson

1835

A robin entered a Westmorland cottage in which a child lay ill with a fever and an old woman, senile, sat by the fire. The robin was greeted as a daimon, an elemental spirit, whose presence was understood to be a good omen. Of this event Wordsworth, who was sixty-four, made a poem, “The Redbreast.”

1845

A raven entered the room of a man in grief and drove him to madness by replying “Nevermore” to all questions put to it, as the man, aware that the bird was in effect an automaton, a bird capable of vocal mimicry but with a vocabulary of one word only, persisted in treating the raven as if it were supernatural and capable of answering questions about the fate of the soul after death.

1855

An osprey, swooping and crying with a “barbaric yawp” (both words referring to sound, speech that is not Greek and seems to be bar bar over and over, yawp, a word as old as English poetry itself for the strident or hoarse call of a bird) seemed to Walt Whitman to be a daimon upbraiding him for his “gab and loitering.” Whitman replied (at the end of the first section of Leaves of Grass, in later editions the fifty-second and closing part of “Song of Myself”) that he was indeed very like the osprey, “not a bit tamed,” sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” And like the hawk he speaks with the authority of nature. We must make of his message what we will. “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Thereafter in Leaves of Grass birds are understood to be daimons. Poe’s man in grief was sure that the raven was a prophet, but whether “bird or devil” “Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore”) he did not know. Whitman was remembering this line when in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” he asked if the mocking-bird, the daimon of that poem, be “Demon or bird.”

1877

In the fields around St. Beuno’s College in North Wales a thirty-three-year-old Jesuit named Gerard Manley Hopkins observed a kestrel, or windhover, riding the air. Remembering the hawk that fixed a lyric vision in Walt Whitman’s heart (Whitman’s mind, he wrote later, was “like my own”), he took the moment to be a revelation of Whitman’s spirit “somewhere waiting for you.” That his prophetic words would stir the heart of an English poet to see Christ as a raptor of souls would have pleased Whitman. We can also assume that he would have admired the younger poet’s obvious rivalry in the art of fitting words to images and rhythms to emotions. Minion is Whitmanesque. “Dapple dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/ Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/ High there” bests Whitman’s “The spotted hawk swoops by,” the “last scud of day hold[ing] back” for it. Whitman’s osprey is seen with the last of the day’s sun on it, its height enabling it to be still sunlit while Whitman at ground level is in the “shadow’d wilds” of dusk. Hopkin’s windhover is seen catching the first of the sun before dawn has reached the Welsh fields beneath it.

ROBIN

The robin in Wordsworth is a herald of inspiration after a fallow time, of recovery from an illness, and of heaven itself. In Book VII of The Prelude, a renewal of poetic power is announced by

A choir of red-breasts gathered somewhere near

My threshold,—minstrels from the distant woods

Sent in on Winter’s service, to announce,

With preparation artful and benign,

That the rough lord had left the surly North.…

The robin in “The Redbreast” has similarly come into the cottage by the oncoming of winter.

Driven in by Autumn’s sharpening air

From half-stripped woods and pastures bare,

Brisk Robin seeks a kindlier home.…

Note Robin: a proper name. Birds assigned names, as well as animals, constitute a series which Lévi-Strauss discusses in The Savage Mind, in a chapter titled “The Individual as Species.” In French the fox is Reynard, the swan Godard, the sparrow Pierrot, and so on. Erithacus rubecula is already Robin Redbreast in Middle English, by which time it was established throughout Europe as one of the Little Birds of Christ’s Passion (with much folklore about how its breast was reddened by Christ’s blood, hell fire, and the like). It is obvious that Wordsworth hears its name as if it were analogous to Harold Bluetooth, rather than to Jack Daw, Jim Crow, or John Dory. Hence its ruddy breast is “a natural shield/ Charged with a blazon on the field.” This alignment with chivalric insignia is important, as Wordsworth is articulating a tradition whereby the robin can be thoroughly of the matter of Britain: it has an elf in it (Chaucer, Jonson); it is a kind of Red Cross Knight; it is equally Christian and pagan (Spenser), while being principally the bird daimon that we can trace to European prehistory, and which became the chief symbol of poetic inspiration for the Romantics (Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Poe, Whitman).

PARROT OWL RAVEN

Poe’s imagery resolves into three styles, each constituting a dialect with its own grammar and poetic purpose. His own names for these styles were the Arabesque, the Grotesque, and the Classic. In the early stages of planning “The Raven” he considered a parrot and an owl. A parrot would have required that the poem’s dominant style be Arabesque; an owl, Classic. As it is, he managed to have the parrot’s echoic mimicry implicit in the repetition of nevermore (which is not an echo, unless the bird is trying to say “Night’s Plutonian shore”); and the owl was translated into its divine equivalent, the bust of Pallas on which the raven perches.

ONE CALVINIST CROW

Poe’s raven is an automaton, a machine programmed to say a single word. If a man, half mad with grief, takes it for an oracle and asks it questions, he can see his error or he can persist in projecting onto the raven his desperate hope that he has the use of an oracle. Thus the raven, asked its name, answers, “Nevermore.” The grief-stricken man observes bitterly and hysterically that not even his loneliness will be alleviated by the bird named Nevermore, for it, too, like his friends and hopes, will abandon him “on the morrow.” To this the raven replies “Nevermore.” It is here that the man realizes that the raven’s vocabulary consists of one word. Madness, however, has its own logic. The bird, for instance, may have been sent by God to help him forget his grief, and if sent by God, may therefore have theological wisdom. So he asks it if there is balm in Gilead. Meaning? “Will I be comforted in my loss by faith? Will I be united with Lenore in Heaven? Is there a Heaven? Is there life after death? Is Lenore with God? Does God exist? The question is Jeremiah’s, at 8:22, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Jeremiah was asking, by way of rhetorical flourish, if Newcastle has no coal. Poe transformed the meaning to: is there really a Newcastle, and is there coal there? To which Nevermore replies, “Nevermore.” The next question is blunter: will he ever be reunited with Lenore? “Nevermore.” The speaker orders the raven out of his house, and the raven refuses ever to leave. And never is also when the speaker’s soul will be disentangled from the raven’s shadow; his despair is permanent.

Poe had met the situation before. In Richmond he had seen Maelzel’s machine that played chess, and saw through it (guessing, rightly, that it had a man concealed in it). In both the chess-playing machine and the univerbal raven Poe was looking at Presbyterian theology: all is predestined, or some human intermediary wants us to believe that it is. Worse, we are disposed by our helplessness in grief, despair, or bewilderment to cooperate with the idea of mechanized fate. After reason has acted, we can still find a residue of superstition. There is a part of our reason willing to believe that automata have minds. In that dark space Poe wrote. The ape in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an automaton, as Roderick Usher is a zombie when he buries his sister alive. Calvin and Newton both gave us a machine for a world, a gear-work of inevitabilities.

DARWINIAN MOCKING-BIRD

Whitman’s reply to “The Raven” is “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Again, an oracle is questioned. The answer (from bird and the sound of the sea together) is polyphonic, love and death together. Life and death are a Heraclitean rhythm, independent. Whitman returns to the Greek sense that love is deepest in its tragic awareness of the brevity of life, of youth, of beauty.

TIME

Time for Poe was the monotonous tick of the universe, the unstoppable tread of death, coming closer second by second (like walls closing in, the swing of a pendulum, the sealing up of a wall brick by brick, footsteps evenly mounting a stair). Whitman’s time was tidal, migratory, the arousal and satisfaction of desire. Hopkins knew that time was over at the moment it began, that it had no dimensions, that Christ on the cross cancelled all adverbs. There is no soon, no never. There is only the swoop of the hawk, the eyes that say follow me to the fisherman, the giddy ecstasy of I stop somewhere waiting for you.

11 MAY 1888: WHITMAN IN CAMDEN, TALKING

“Do I like Poe? At the start, for many years, not: but three or four years ago I got to reading him again, reading and liking, until at last—yes, now—I feel almost convinced that he is a star of considerable magnitude, if not a sun, in the literary firmament. Poe was morbid, shadowy, lugubrious—he seemed to suggest dark nights, horrors, spectralities—I could not originally stomach him at all. But today I see more of him than that—much more. If that was all there was to him he would have died long ago. I was a young man of about thirty, living in New York, when The Raven appeared—created its stir: everybody was excited about it—every reading body: somehow it did not enthuse me.” [Whitman had given “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” its final revision (it was written in 1859) the year before, and placed it at the heart of the new “Sea-Drift” section of the 1881 Leaves of Grass.]

QUICK, SAID THE BIRD, FIND THEM, FIND THEM

The history of birds taken to be daimons traverses religions, folklore, and literature, In Europe it begins with the drawing of a bird mounted on pole in Lascaux. In the New World we can trace it back to the Amerindian understanding of the meadowlark as a mediator between men and spirits of the air. Poe’s raven, Keats’ nightingale, Shelley’s skylark, Olson’s kingfisher, Whitman’s osprey, thrush, and mocking-bird, Hopkins’ windhover are but modulations in a long tradition, a dance of forms to a perennial spiritual force.