Not all allusions in Late Migrations are cited in the text. Here is a list of those that aren’t:
p. 2: The title is a paraphrase of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” from “In Memoriam” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
p. 9: The phrase “Life piled on life” appears in “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
p. 30: The final two sentences of “The Snow Moon” are an echo of “mon semblable,—mon frère!” from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.
p. 45: Barney Beagle Plays Baseball, a beginning reader by Jean Bethell, was first published in 1963.
p. 51: “Operation Apache Snow” was a US offensive launched on May 10, 1969, against the North Vietnamese that resulted in massive casualties on both sides.
p. 54: The title is a quotation from the poem “Tell Me a Story” by Robert Penn Warren.
p. 58: In the first sentence, “heavy bored” is an allusion to “Dream Song 14” by John Berryman.
p. 58: The Bible passage that closes the first paragraph is Mark 11:23.
p. 69: The “Beatitudes” commonly refers to a set of teachings delivered by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
p. 72: “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” is a song written by Cole Porter and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, among others.
p. 78: “The world is too much with us” is an allusion to William Wordsworth’s sonnet of the same title.
p. 80: The title of this essay alludes to a line from W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
p. 85: The description of my mother as someone who never prepared for gardening is an echo of E. B. White’s description of his wife, Katharine S. White, in an introduction to her book, Onward and Upward in the Garden.
p. 95: Annie Dillard’s essay is “Total Eclipse,” first published in 1982.
p. 96: The song I mention in the penultimate paragraph of this essay is “Ring of Fire,” written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and made famous by Johnny Cash.
p. 98: The short story we read in class, I later learned, is “Brandenburg Concerto” by Lawrence Dorr.
p. 110: In the final paragraph, “goldengrove unleaving” is an allusion to “Spring and Fall,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
p. 114: “Shaking the caked red dirt from my sandals” is an echo of Matthew 10:14.
p. 116: The title of this essay is an allusion to a line from William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet LXXIII.”
p. 116: “Nothing gold can stay” is an allusion to Robert Frost’s poem of the same title.
p. 118: “Heart of Greyhound darkness” is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
p. 129: “The fog comes on little cat feet” is an allusion to “Fog” by Carl Sandburg.
p. 131: The title refers to an observation commonly attributed to Aristotle.
p. 132: “Two by Two” refers to the way the animals entered Noah’s ark in Genesis 7:9.
p. 138: The title of this essay quotes a line from W. H. Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
p. 151: “He Is Not Here” is a quote from the Biblical Easter story.
p. 159: “You Can’t Go Home Again” echoes the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe.
p. 163: The title of this essay echoes repeated exhortations throughout the Bible.
p. 166: “Dust to Dust” echoes Ecclesiastes 3:20.
p. 175: “Homeward Bound” echoes the title of a 1993 film about three family pets making their way home after an unexpected separation from their people.
p. 187: “No Exit” echoes the title of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre.
p. 195: “Nevermore” is the word the bird repeats throughout Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
p. 219: “Holy, Holy, Holy,” is the title of a Christian hymn published in 1826 by Reginald Heber.
A final note: “In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of the Day She Was Shot” is an edited version of an essay my grandmother wrote in 1983 that was never published. All the other essays in her voice are transcripts of interviews my brother conducted with her in 1990. The excerpts are faithful to the original recordings except where slight changes—adding names, for example, or omitting repetition—contribute significantly to understanding.