Poetry special: The Death of the Bird by AD Hope “The Book Show” Transcript Friday 16 May 2008 10:00AM
The Death of the Bird, by AD Hope (Alec Derwent Hope) is the final in our series of great Australian poems. AD Hope is probably the most world famous of the five poets we've featured this week. And as well as being a poet he was a critic, an academic and a satirist. He was born in New South Wales in July 1907 and died in Canberra in July 2000. His most famous poetry collection, The Wandering Islands, came about when he was quite young, and it was this collection that established his reputation. The Death of the Bird is one of his more s traightforward poems. It is, quite simply, about the death of a bird. But it has also become a controversial example of how to read a poem which has been part of the purpose of this series. Like each one of our examples this program features a close reading of the poem and gives different possible interpretations. We've spoken to AD Hope fan, Clive James and visited a poetry conference in Canberra where a quarrel over the poems meaning broke out. And to pin the bird down we added migratory bird expert John Barkla into the mix. The Death of the Bird is a fitting end to this extraordinary series by Lyn Gallacher. Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show on ABC Radio National and the final in our series devoted to the close reading of a group of great Australian poems. Today it's 'The Death of the Bird', by AD Hope. AD Hope is probably the most world famous of the five poets we've featured this week. And as well as being a poet he was a critic, an academic and a satirist. He was born in New South Wales in July 1907 and died i n Canberra in July 2000. His most famous poetry collection, The Wandering Islands, came about when he was quite young, and it was this collection that established his reputation. 'The Death of the Bird' is one of his more straightforward poems. It is, quite simply, about the death of a bird. But it has also become a controversial example of how to read a poem. And some eof its readers have very strong opinions about what it is and i sn't, and what is and isn't a legitimate interpretation of the poem. Lyn Gallacher takes us through the Bird's journey and the arguments as they range from roadkill to romance, and you'll hear a number of voices commenting on the poem, including the author Clive James. And it's Clive who gets us started, as he reads—using his voice and his interpretation—'The Death of the Bird' by AD Hope.
For every bird there is this last migration; Once more the cooling year kindles her heart; With a warm passage to the summer station Love pricks the course in lights across the chart. Year after year a speck on the map divided By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come; Season after season, sure and safely guided, Going away she is also coming home; And being home, memory becomes a passion With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest; Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession And exiled love mourning within the breast. The sands are green with a mirage of valleys; The palm-tree casts a shadow not its own; Down the long architrave of temple or palace Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone. And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger, The delicate voice, more urgent with despair, Custom and fear constraining her no longer, Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air. A vanishing speck in those inane dominions, Single and frail, uncertain of her place. Alone in the bright host of her companions, Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space. She feels it close now, the appointed season: The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason, The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies. Try as she will the trackless world delivers No way, the wilderness of light no sign, The immense and complex map of hills and rivers Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design. And darkness rises from the eastern valleys, And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath, And the great earth, with neither grief not malice, Receives the tiny burden of her death. Lyn Gallacher: Clive James reading 'The Death of the Bird' by Alec Hope. Thank you for that, Clive. Clive James: It's magnificent, and it's magnificent still. And imagine, when I was first reading it in the late 50s— which is a couple of years after 'the book' came out. Alec Hope could have set up as a poet anywhere in the English speaking world after that book came out, because strangely enough the book has very few specifically Australian references. The bird in the poem, for example: what bird? Where is it flying? Which continent to where? It could be anywhere. It's a great poem in any of the English-speaking countries, and I imagine if it was translated in any language it's a mighty poem, beautifully constructed. I could go on about it for a long time. Lyn Gallacher: Do you remember first reading it—do you remember the moment? Clive James: Yes, I was in Manning House Women's Union in Sydney University. I was about 18 years old and that was the first of Hope's poems that really caught me . I just simply loved the majesty of his rhythms. He had these long, sweeping iambic pentameters—quite often modified with an extra syllable here and there, and falling very naturally on to the breath, almost a conversational rhythm and yet elevated diction, like an 18th century approach to the language4—or a consciously hieratic approach like Yeats. He admired Yeats very much. He always wrote in praise of Yeats. He wasn't afraid to elevate the language so it was somewhat oratorical. It's the bird's last flight. The bird's done this e very years. It's what this bird does, it migrates. And it's running out of energy—it's going to die. And he makes a sort of ceremonial of it, almost as if the bird knew, but of course the bird knows nothing. The whole complexity of the bird's behaviour is compared with the intensity of its instinct. It's all instinct, no brain. The brain is the poet's, not the bird's. Lyn Gallacher: Is this a poem that you would have liked to have written yourself? Clive James: You bet your life! In fact I've been trying to write it ever since. If you can't get to the point in poetry where you can compel the reader to read the next line because of the way this line is shaped, because of its force, because of its flow, if you can't force the reader to read the next line as well then you're not doing the business. Hope could do that, you see. He had this wonderful...the only word I can use for it is a kind of rush. It's majestic, it's stately, but it moves. The energy of the man is in it. Lyn Gallacher: And 'For every bird there is that last migration' is the sentence that draws you in —you have to read the next sentence. Clive James: Well, that's called buttonholing in the trade. And in journalism your first paragraph has to get them in and if you're a poet your first line has to get them in. Auden could do it, for example. Auden had first lines like 'The earth turns over, our side feels the cold.' You have to find out what comes next. What happens next? And Hope could do it. 'For every bird there is t his last migration'—see, it's the word 'last' that does it. Birds migrate, we know that, but why is it the last? Well to find out, read the next line.
For every bird there is this last migration; Once more the cooling year kindles her heart; With a warm passage to the summer station Love pricks the course in lights across the chart. Year after year a speck on the map divided By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come; Season after season, sure and safely guided, Going away she is also coming home; Catherine Cole: When Alec told me about when he was visiting friends in America, he stood watching the great swarms of birds flying south for the southern summer. There were just millions of them and the sky seemed to be moving with all the birds. And then suddenly, as they swooped he saw just one bird just veer off, and he wasn't
sure why this happened. He imagined it just somehow lost its way. And it flew directly south and would have flown then over the Gulf of Mexico and eventually starved or fallen from the sky. And it was such an image, it inspired the poem 'The Death of the Bird'. Lyn Gallacher: Cathy Cole, professor of creative writing at RMIT, reading 'The Death of the Bird' alongside Alec Hope himself.
A vanishing speck in those inane dominions, Single and frail, uncertain of her place. Alone in the bright host of her companions, Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space. John Barkla: I loved Professor Hope's reference to 'alone in the bright hos t of her companions, because the birds generally never migrate on their own. Lyn Gallacher: Migratory bird expert John Barkla. And one reason for speaking to a bird expert in this program is that I wanted to find out what species of bird t he poem is about. And do migratory birds actually lose their sense of direction. Can their guiding spark of instinct suddenly wink and die? John Barkla: It's quite a common thing, actually, that—take a couple of examples, the buff-breasted sandpiper that breeds in the High Arctic and would normally migrate to Argentina in South America, so would f ly down across the Americas. Occasionally they turn up in Australia, and it's just extraordinary that they're so far off course. Now in Hope's poem he suggests that as the bird ages, it's almost like us, it becomes a little bit demented and loses its way. In the real world it very rarely would happen like that. It's usually the immature bi rds that through lack of experience get caught up in flocks of other species that have a different migration route, and so you would get immature birds, buff-breasted sandpipers, turning up in Australia. But it's usually the young ones that get lost. Lyn Gallacher: Not the oldies... John Barkla: Not the old ones. Lyn Gallacher: If you had to guess what particular bird species Alec Hope is talking about in this poem, what would you guess? John Barkla: Well I looked at this and I immediately felt an empathy with the migratory wading birds. The North Americans refer to them as shore birds. They're the birds like the red-necked stint, or the sharp-tailed sandpiper in Australia, that breed in the Arctic and then fly to southern Australia. The reference to 'driving her at last on the waste leagues of air' appealed to me with the...the red-necked stint is a tiny bird, it weighs 30 grams. And it flies 12,000 kilometres. It's a phenomenal undertaking. It loses 30% of its body weight. So it's an extraordinary thing for this little bird to do. Lyn Gallacher: And the 'vanishing speck', how did you respond to that? John Barkla: Well a 30-gram, tiny bird —a bird the size of a hen's egg—flying 12,000 kilometres is certainly to me a vanishing speck. They have very few stops. There are very opportunities for them to regenerate their strength, so they're making these migrations and have very little opportunity to feed and rest. And they fly non-stop. So flying through 'wastes of air' appeals to me as being flying, and flying, and flying.
Custom and fear constraining her no longer, Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air. Catherine Cole: There's also something in it that is so human and compassionate. It doesn't feel desolate. that's what strikes me very much about the poem, the sadness of the bird's end and the fall to earth, it doesn't contain within it for me a kind of nihilistic desolation. There's something in it that is very human and very much about our fate and our humanity, as much as it's about a bird. Just this notion of the way in which we travel towards something over which we may have no control, or that we lose something of ourselves along the way, some direction. But that, I think, is what makes it very, very special as a poem.
The winds buffet her with their hungry breath, And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice, Receives the tiny burden of her death.
Lyn Gallacher: AD Hope, ending his poem 'The Death of th e Bird'. And before that you heard Cathy Cole. Today we're examining the secret life of a small po em which caused a large ruckus at the AD Hope Centenary Conference. It might sound strange, but tempers flared over the different ways of interpreting this small bird's flight. The conference organiser was writer, Sydney University academic and Hope aficionado David Brooks. David Brooks: I couldn't have set it up better i f I'd tried, and I didn't actually set this one up, it just happened. And I think that's partly because we might be on th e edge of a kind of shedding of the skin in Australian criticism. A visiting academic from the United States, Henry Weinfeld, an extremely accomplished person and translator of Mallarme, came over to give a paper in Sydney in a Mallarme and Brennan conference and then went down to Canberra because what he really wanted to do in Australia was to give a paper on AD Hope. He's apparently been a fascination of his since the 1970s. And he gave a very polished 'high criticism' account of the poem, which connected it with Shelley's 'To a Skylark' and Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', and in a sense set the poem into almost a kind of sacred tradition of the Romantic lyric—quite a wonderful paper. And then another paper was given a little bit later the same day by John Kinsella from Western Australia, who's been teaching in Cambridge and other places as well. And Kinsella's reading was utterly different. Just as valid but was a reading that was centred in place, that showed a kind of uncanny prescience in Hope's poem in terms of the environmental impact of aggressive plundering of the land here in Australia. And it showed that the poem had a kind of dark, uncanny underbelly that wasn't recognised or dealt with in the other paper. And so there was a kind of battle, to put it mildly. For a few moments it looked like it might almost come to blows, about how you read this kind of poem. Lyn Gallacher: It was almost as if John Kinsella was accused of reading what was not in the poem. He was accused of making it up about himself. And if I'm right, was the position of Henry Weinfeld saying that if everybody makes up their own version of the poem every time they read it, then we have no shared truth. David Brooks: Well, he probably was right, in a sense, and the irony is I think that this is problem that we experience in so many different levels of our being. If we say that there is only one way we read a poem and we in a sense universalise it and globalise the reading and the globalise the meaning of the poem, then what are we doing with our own space? We find ourselves invaded by this glo balised reading that in fact comes from a different space. It's not global, it's not global at all. It's an assumption because it comes from a kind of hegemonic...centre of power, as it were, culturally...an assumption that that is universal. But it's not universal and we need particular readings coming from particular places, and modes of reading, practices of reading. Lyn Gallacher: But Henry was accusing John Kinsella of making the poem up about himself and that being a grab for power for himself. David Brooks: Well I know that that was the accusation, but I think the interesting thing when you read Kinsella's paper, it's much more sensitive to the poem than Weinfeld was giving him credit for. Lyn Gallacher: And I think we should tell the listeners exactly what...the conclusion of John Kinsella's paper was astonishing. He compared this very lyrical, melancholy elegy to roadkill, when he himself had run over, what was it, a tawny frogmouth. And looked into the eye of the tawny frogmouth that had its neck broken and saw his own reflection. Now that's a very violent reading of a poem. David Brooks: Yes, yes...but poems are dionysiac. Poems are violent in a lot of ways I don't think we get very far if we insist that the poems are melodies t hat calm us and put us into nice places. There's a side of Alec that's never been explored, and that's the sensitivity to animals. And when I heard that bit about the roadkill, the tawny frogmouth and its eyes looking back at the poe t, I thought, well, I think Alec would not reject that. And I th ink that eye of the animal looking back at the poet is something that he was trying to deal with in a number of different poems, sometimes quite violently. Lyn Gallacher: And perhaps this is why John Kinsella accused Henry Weinfeld's reading as 'coming from planet nice'. David Brooks: He did do that. And look, in one sense, I sat there for a moment as the convenor of the conference and the person chairing the paper in temporary, momentary panic. Because I thought my goodness, what do I now have to control? And then I thought no, go with it, because the poem is now leaping into life. This would not be possible if the poem didn't allow it in some way or another. Lyn Gallacher: Also in the audience, watching the argument with wry amusement, was Ann McCulloch, who's the author of a study of Hope's notebooks, and she thinks if he'd been there, Alec would have laughed. Ann McCulloch: He would have loved that quarrel. And I don't think he would have even bothered to be on one side or the other. He probably in some ways would have loved the spirit of both of those men that were involved
in that. John Kinsella was actually wanting to open up the debate and remind us all that Alec wasn't an ordinary person. He was a person who liked debate and ideas. And because his particular interpretation dealt with the uncanny, and the uncanny itself coming from Freud's essay on the uncanny, that we repeat things we don't understand, that we explore ideas that we don't quite get. He would have l oved that. He would have thought a lot of things they were saying were a lot of nonsense i n another way. But he would have liked it. As for Henry, he would have been pleased with Henry too, because Henry was giving a very personal response to his poem. No, he would have sat there smiling his ironic smile. Lyn Gallacher: According to Ann McCulloch the reason Alec Hope would have adopted this attitude is because he had a commitment to maintaining a certain fluidity of mind along with a belief in knowledge being provisional. Ann McCulloch: I think he thought that there was more chance to understand the secrets of life through language if you didn't work on definition. If you didn't work on assumed knowledge. If you worked on the basis that...that's why he uses analogy so much. Analogy is a form of argument that gives you a poetic understanding of the mysteries of the world rather than a definitive one which depends on a branch of knowledge always being correct. And that's what I mean when I talk about...that he believed that all knowledge was provisional—that is provisional on what culture is in place, what time of history we're in, what group of people are viewing something; is it being looked at from a literary point of view of a philosophical or psychological—he collapsed all those divisions. He collapsed categorisation. He wanted to get outside little boxes. He wanted to open up ideas and use the power of the creative language to maybe unlock for a moment the mysteries of the universe—and the beauty of it. And the way that it actually connected with what it felt to be alive—and being alive meant fearing death as much as it did having the joy of existence itself. Lyn Gallacher: This fluidity of mind is also what allows the ambiguity in 'The Death of the Bird' poem. Who or what the bird actually is remains uncertain. In one sense, the bird could even be Hope's wife Penelope. And after her funeral David Brooks was left wondering exactly that. She feels it close now, the appointed season...a guiding spark of instinct winks and dies. David Brooks: I knew AD Hope very well and I'd been his editor for 15 years so I can't get past hearing Alec's voice reading the poem every time I read the poem it stirs something up in me. I remember the poem being read at Penelope's funeral. Lyn Gallacher: What was that like? David Brooks: Well, it was remarkable funeral in a way. A piece of music was played, 'Queen of the Night' and that was very, very strong, very powerful within the circumstance. And then Alec read 'The Death of the Bird'. And I had never imagined that I'd read the poem as it were intellectually read it in terms of literary tradition and so forth and I'd never imagined it could be a love poem or remarkable moving in the way that it was. And ironically what Alec was doing, unintentionally, he was re-orienting the poem as he was reading it. Lyn Gallacher: Because the bird was then Penelope. David Brooks: Yes, and that's what Kinsella was doing, in a different sense, 15 years later—reorienting the poem. But there are other things too, like I am very interested in the French influence on Australian literature and I can't keep completely out of my mind when I read t his poem the way that it picks up themes from French poetry that give it an extra kind of meaning. If we follow the bird image through various French symbolist poems, the bird is a symbol for the poet. And there's a kind of presentation of himself in the poem, in a strange kind of way. I see him as presenting himself in a sort of feminised way, almost as if it's because that allows him to release a certain emotion that he experiences. Clive James: Strangely the bird is a 'her'. He instinctively...if he loves something he makes it female. 'A vanishing speck in those inane dominions...' And some young, green reader might have to look up the dictionary to find out what inane really means. They thought inane meant stupid. It just means empty. 'A vanishing speck in those inane dominions'. And inane dominions is a very Latinate phrase. He almost certainly had Virgil in mind. There's a line in Virgil about...through the hollow halls of Diss and the inane regions. So he probably had the inane regions in mind. He was a very learned poet. Everything he read was in his head and to be drawn upon for its echoes and its memories. When you read his poetry you can tell here's a man who's read classical poetry. And yet the language is perfectly natural. Perfectly modern, perfectly colloquial. The combination is ideal, I think. Ann McCulloch: I think it's important that he read that at Penelope's funeral, because interestingly enough to me that poem has a later correlation and it's one c alled 'The Anniversary'. I don't know whether you know that or not. It's called 'The Unknown Anniversary' and he wrote it about the anniversary we never know and that is the
anniversary of our own death. If I could just read a stanza from that, because you'll see that it connects with 'Death of a Bird', and why I'm relating that to why he read that at Penelope's funeral.
But there is one another day Masked by the circling year Strange anniversary nobody knows what it is. Yet it waits for each one of us a destiny certain and true. Unknown, yet we know for a fact that it has to be there As it brushes the cheek with a cold, unconditional kiss And whispers, are you ready for me? I am ready for you. So in this 'The Unknown Anniversary' he's talking about the death that we're all going to have which is going to feel like a cold kiss in the wind, you see the feeling of that in 'The Death of the Bird' where the bird returns to its nest each year, it returns to its home. But as it comes to the end of its life it no longer has much value for cu lture and ritual, but is rather actually contemplating the essence of the meaning of existence itself.
And darkness rises from the eastern valleys, And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath, And the great earth, with neither grief not malice, Receives the tiny burden of her death. So prior to that, 'Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design', there is fear of the unknowable because there's this fear that we can't change it. We can't control it. We can have our memories. We can mourn lost love. We have a control of all that we do in our life but in the end the 'hungry breath' of the universe, without even any malice, without even intent, without any reason—all the things we use and need so much to make sense of our own life in its daily living—is irrelevant to the design of the universe. It's a great lesson, isn't it? We try to control, we try to make sense, we love, we have pain, we remember lost love and we know it's meaningful. We think there's going to be an end to the story. But there is an end to the story and the end of the story is the fact that it ends. And in the end he says we really only know the meaning of one's life at the end of one's life. Only then can we possibly put any of it together. Well how has he put it together here? It's acceptance but it's not without its fear. It's not without its mystery. And that I think to Hope makes it bea utiful. That's my view, that he sees death and life as being beautiful, even though he doesn't see death as being meaningful in the Christian sense, because he doesn't see death as being the means towards eternity and a life beyond this life. Lyn Gallacher: Another reading of this poem is to see it as the inverse of the Gospel passage in Matthew which says 'Not a sparrow shall fall without God's notice.' Here, in this poem, that's exactly what happens. So therefore the Gospel message, that God cares about every hair on your head, and we 'need not fear because we mater more to Him than a sparrow,' is invalid. The poem is an acceptance of a life that ends. And in that way the bird is given its own divinity. Clive James: There's a bit of a tragedy there. A writer in some ways is like a ballet dancer. You could lose control of your technique just at the very moment when you most want to use it. A male ballet dancer—I think it was Michael Soames, who used to dance with Margot Fonteyn, says the 'tragedy of the ballet dancer is that your body gives up on you just at the moment when you really know what you're doing. It actually happened to Hope, I think. His later work was going to be richer and richer, but somehow it lost its rhythmic force. It lost the essential rhythmic force. And that often comes from youthful vigour. Knowing how to preserve that is quite a trick. Lyn Gallacher: How, then, can life's limitations be turned around into something liberating? Ann McCulloch: Sometimes we may not understand, but as we draw to the end of our lives, I think, we start to acknowledge that it's not going to be forever and we start to be less interested in the things that hold it together — the patterns, the economy, the politics, the religion, and s tart to actually come into our own self and facing our own fears. And to me, that last line of that poem is, in the end, the universe is indifferent to us. As we are in the end indifferent to it. That we like to think there's a design in our life and a meaning that can be put into some creed, but perhaps in the end there is just our life —not just our life—there is the life, filled with its joy, and its patterns and its rituals, but also filled with the fact of limitation; that it is limited and it does end and it ends for all of us.
...without reason, The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.
Try as she will the trackless world delivers No way, the wilderness of light no sign, The immense and complex map of hills and rivers Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design. And darkness rises from the eastern valleys, And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath, And the great earth, with neither grief not malice, Receives the tiny burden of her death. Ramona Koval: Clive James, concluding 'The Death of the Bird' by AD Hope. And before that you heard Ann McCulloch, David Brooks and Cathy Cole. Each of these people have written books on Alec Hope, and we'll p ut the details on our website. But here's a list of some of their publications. Ann McCulloch penned a study of the selected notebooks of AD Hope, it was published by Pandanus. It's called Dance of the Nomad. Catherine Cole recently produced The Poet Who Forgot. It's a book which documents the letters and the friendship that she and Alec shared. It's published by the University of Western Australia Press. And David Brooks acted as Alec Hope's editor for many years. In 1991 he worked on AD Hope Selected Poems and in 2000 he edited AD Hope: Selected Poetry and Prose published by Halsted Press. Also he edited The Double Looking Glass: New and Classic Essays on the Poetry of AD Hope published by the University of Queensland Press. Also in the program mix was migratory bird expert John Barkla and the series producer was Lyn Gallacher. That was the final of our special poetry series. Thanks to the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Limited whose support made the series possible.
