Five Lines / Issue 21
Poetry as wake-up call, Bynner's battle birdy, Frost's white spider, and Joseph's midlife slowdown. Also: recycling strategies from Naomi Shihab Nye.
Hello friends. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. "The whisper of a multitude / Of happy wings"
“A Mocking-Bird”
Witter Bynner
An arrow, feathery, alive,
He darts and sings;
Then with a sudden skimming dive
Of striped wings
He finds a pine and, debonair,
Makes with his mate
All birds that ever rested there
Articulate.
The whisper of a multitude
Of happy wings
Is round him, a returning brood,
Each time he sings.
Though heaven be not for them or him
Yet he is wise,
And daily tiptoes on the rim
Of paradise.
This poem somehow stretches itself beyond its simple subject and common meter, perhaps a little like the subject of the poem itself.
The mockingbird is capable of reproducing several hundred songs — including machinery, music, and multiple species of amphibian — and has been labeled by none other than Audubon himself as the "king of song." I can personally attest that the pair of mockingbirds that have made our yard their kingdom fit this poem to a tee, even to the finding of some conifer (in our case a blue spruce) to concertize.
They are immensely confident, territorial birds that even engage in dance battles against other birds they don't like. We even routinely see our m-birds divebombing our cat, and if we got close to the nest they've made in the rambler rose on the south edge of our property, we'd get the same treatment.
The words Witter chooses capture this battle birdy perfectly: "an arrow, "darts," "sudden skimming dive," "debonair." He is using language that doesn't just describe the bird, but make its personality come alive. But for all its swagger, the mockingbird is more kingly than anything else, a wise and happy monarch pugnaciously overseeing his kingdom.
Witter would have lived during a time when mockingbirds were often captured and kept as pets prior to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and the best singers were sold at sky-high prices, even up to $50 (around $1800 in today's money). This bird captured the imagination of folks, as birds have always done, I suppose, for those willing to pay the slightest attention to them.
I remember reading a book a few years back about birdsong in which the author came to the conclusion that, despite all the theories about territorial and mating reasons, scientists still had no substantive proof regarding why birds sing. And yet so many scoff at the idea that birds could just be... happy. Or at the very least, satisfied in their current state: well-fed, eggs laid in the nest where their mates wait for them, a warm sunny morning, a tall tree to sit on where you can see for miles.
What is so wise about repeating the songs of others, I wonder? What is so heavenly in this motion of gathering the melodies of other birds? Is it perhaps the compressing of years of birds singing on that spruce before him into a single morning concert? Or the repetition of the best tunes, even those that aren't strictly music, as a sort of blessing on the world?
There's so much we don't know even now. And that's what makes this bird and this poem — and this life! — tiptoeing around the edge of the unknown as they always are, so wild and precious.
2. "to shock us into life, to make us more alive"
from Perrine’s Sound and Sense
This winter I finally read the classic poetry textbook, Perrine’s Sound and Sense, and I do highly recommend it to anyone at any stage in their enjoyment of poetry. There was a lot in it that I knew, and I lot I didn't, and just a whole ton of excellent poetry. As a poet who did not study to be one, it was odd to find myself enjoying reading a textbook. I can't remember the last time that happened...
There were many things that stuck out to me from the book, and I may share some of them at another time, but this one is essential:
"The most important preliminary advice we can give for reading poetry is to maintain always, while reading it, the utmost mental alertness. The most harmful idea one can get about poetry is that its purpose is to soothe and relax and that the best place to read it is lying in a hammock with a cool drink while low music plays in the background. You can read poetry lying in a hammock, but only if you refuse to put your mind in the same attitude as your body. Its purpose is not to soothe and relax but to arouse and awake, to shock us into life, to make us more alive."
This strikes me as an urgent reminder for all of us poets and poetry readers, that there is something definitively enlivening about poetry that cannot be excised from it. Even the comforting poetry of someone like Mary Oliver is comforting for the very fact that it grabs you by the shoulder, possibly spilling your coffee in its excitement, and points to a bird out the window. Good poetry blurts out, "Look!" and in opening our eyes and ears we experience life, we come alive again, out of the stupor we so often fall into in our everyday lives. In that sense, children are the best kind of poetry.
But this means that poetry is necessarily potent enough to reveal something alive — that it lives, in some sense. Christian Wiman (in Zero at the Bone, which is, yes, so very alive that even its prose is a form of poetry) says this:
"Sometimes the mystery of existence — that we exist at all, that we feel so homelessly at home in this place — gets embedded so deeply in life that we no longer feel it as mystery. Language, too, partakes of this sterilizing sameness, becomes in fact as solid and practical as a piece of wood or a pair of pliers, something we use during the course of interchangeable days. Poetry can reignite these dormancies ("words are fossil poetry," as Emerson put it), of both language and life, send a charge through reality that makes it real again."
That charge is also our charge, poets, and also the very important reason for reworking and reworking and reworking our poetry. Don't dampen the voltage of your poetry with unnecessary words, or didacticism for the sake of didacticism, or saccharine sentiment that dramatizes our emotional states and doesn't elevate our spirits. I've been guilty of these things, I know. But the mercies are new every morning. Go and sin no more!
3. "Make an oath, then make mistakes / Start a streak you're bound to break"
“Oldies Station”
Twenty One Pilots
Verse 1:
Only consistency in your periphery
Is fear and the bridge of your nose
And as you move about, you learn to tune 'em out
But they say they continue to grow
Pre-Chorus:
Fear of the past and (Relative pain)
Future's comin' fast, you've got (Nothin' in the tank)
In a season of purging things you used to love
Everything must go, mm-hm
Chorus:
Make an oath, then make mistakes
Start a streak you're bound to break
When darkness rolls on you
Push on through
Verse 2:
Then before you know, you lose some people close
Forcing you to manage your pace
Found your capacity for love and tragedy
Embracing how things always change
Pre-Chorus:
You've had your turns with (Relative pain)
Little less concerned when there's (Nothin' in the tank)
In a season of lessons learned in giving up
You learn what you can and can't take, mm-hm
Chorus:
Add some years, build some trust
You start to feel your eyes adjust
When darkness rolls on you
Push on through
Bridge:
You don't quite mind how long red lights are takin'
Your favorite song was on the oldies station
You have it down, that old fight for survival
You're in the crowd at her first dance recital
Push on through
Chorus:
Make an oath, then make mistakes
Start a streak you're bound to break
When darkness rolls on you
Push on through
Twenty One Pilots' Clancy came out recently, and given that it's Tyler Joseph's seventh studio album, there's some noticeable upgrades. Tyler is pulling from more life experience, more restrained with his musical explorations, and more focused as a whole. This album feels more settled than past albums, while still retaining that TOP vibe I love and still surprising me at multiple points.
Tyler has never pulled punches when it comes to darker, more chaotic topics in his songwriting, which makes those songs where he offers encouragement actually hit. Fans of TOP know that their songs are not just attempts to make the voices stop, they are meant for a community that sticks together and upholds one another in their darkest moments.
I like this song for a few reasons. First, I'm only a few years out from forty, and the feeling of this song is decidedly midlife-ish. You've got some experience fighting for survival, you realize your options have dwindled, but you're thankful for where you are and determined to enjoy the moments as they fly by.
Second, the disciplined nature of the rhyme scheme reflects the tone of the song. In other songs on the album (and throughout their discography) that feature more driving, intense energy — tracks like “Heavydirtysoul,” “Overcompensate,” even “Lavish” — the rhymes come thick and fast, they trip over each other and pile on top of each other. Here, however, we have a satisfying metrical pattern. In the verses we have aab-ccb-, pre-chorus is dedeffb-, and chorus and bridge are each a pair of rhyming couplets. This predictability plays into what the song is about, i.e. managing your pace.
Combined with a hummable tune that feels familiar and fresh at once (which I think is classic TOP), and a music video that puts Josh Dun to work, it's one of my favorites on the album.
4. "What had that flower to do with being white"
"Design"
Robert Frost
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
This poem is a study in contrasts. I don't want to think about spiders having dimples or compare them to snowdrops. I feel weird about how beautiful and white all of this violence is. I don't much care for descriptions of a dead moth looking like a satin cloth or a kite. The death and devouring of the moth occurs on a medicinal plant that symbolizes help for those in dire straits. Welp. Didn't help the moth much, did it?
This is the surface contrast — the ugly-beauty of nature being red in tooth and claw — which serves to usher us into the more existential layer of the poem. Is there a design to the universe, and if so, is it good or evil? This poem could be read as making a mockery of those of us who think a good Divinity is in charge of every little detail, including this scene. Or it could be read as a denunciation of design, a suggestion that our world is more White Fang than Pollyanna.
I read it as a confrontation. The best of poetry takes us and shakes us (as we've said), and that's what Robert is doing here. He's poking at our foundations with this pickax of a Petrarchan sonnet, testing whether they are going to crumble or be strengthened by the reality of the ugly, beautiful world we live in. He's waking us up. What will we do with this when we wake up?
5. "on a shelf where nothing is new"
“The Trashpickers, Madison Street”
Naomi Shihab Nye
On the edge of dawn’s pale eye,
the trashpickers are lifting the lid of every can,
poking inside with bent hanger and stick.
They murmur in a language soft as rags.
What have we here?
Their colorless overcoats drift and grow wings.
They pull a creaking wagon, tinfoil wads, knotted string,
to the cave where sacraments of usefulness are performed.
Kneel to the triple weddings of an old nail.
Rejoice in the rebirth of envelopes.
The crooked skillet finds its first kingdom
on a shelf where nothing is new.
They dream small dreams, furry ones,
a swatch of velvet passed hand-to-hand.
Their hearts are compasses fixed to the ground
and their love, more like moss than like fire.
Naomi has this brilliant observational skill that not only calls it like she sees it but juxtaposes two things you wouldn't think to connect. She surprises me constantly, and it's a delight to be surprised. How is language soft as rags? How do overcoats grow wings? Of course dreams are cute furry creatures, why have I never thought of them as such?
I love the intent grace present in Naomi's protagonists towards the objects they discover. I love that reusing something is considered a sacrament. I love that there's a shelf where nothing is new, because sometimes life is like that. Sometimes life is like this whole poem.
Kids embody this wakefulness to their world, with their wagons full of bark-shed sticks and shiny stones, their pockets full of shells, their fists full of wilted dandelions. You could replace the trashpickers in this poem with children, or maybe you could realize that they are children, just like all of us, and that their dustiness and familiarity with smallness have brought them closer to living like a child again.
And of course, love can be moss as well as fire! And it might be more admirable for the slow, clinging growth over the rapid passion — the kind of love that looks in every garbage can for something of worth, that shares small things out of kindness of heart, that senses and celebrates the sacred quality of everyday givenness. Perhaps we can learn something, Naomi says, if only we wake up to what is right in front of us. Perhaps we can be children again.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
I've never read this Robert Frost poem before. He truly was a master. His poems were so simple, yet complex and layered. In one of my recently finished Literature classes, I wrote a literary analysis of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," one of the most quoted poems at graduations. I wrote about my own experiences on The Road Not Taken here: https://gracegrowswings.blogspot.com/2023/10/returning-to-college-working-toward.html
I'm glad you explained how love can be like moss. I wasn't following that one. Also, understanding that image sheds light on hearts being "compasses fixed to the ground."