[Tim Murphy]

Last time I recited it, Sailing To Byzantium had two sing/thing rhymes. Repeating a rhyme is a flaw, unlike Alicia's graceful quadruple rhyme in the sestet. But does it make me think any less of that great poem? No.

[Solan]

Jim, I hope you don't think I suggested that L8 was without merit. I can't recall a violet sunset; they tend to be red, or - once in a rare while - green. But I take your word for it.

But let's not let the lines' merits make our studies mere approval circles. I don't think you intended that, but I feel it's important to emphasize this point, since so many of our discussions on mastery tend to degenerate in such a fashion. (IMHO)


------------------

Svein Olav

[Dick Davis]

Wow, what a lovely poem! Two things make it so attractive and haunting I think – the first is the way that the bats really are bats throughout the whole poem, in all their batty particularity, but that they also clearly represent a particular sensibility (as the title virtually tells us); and the second the way that the skittery, helter skelter rhythm evokes the bats’ apparently erratic but in reality purposeful flight. A lovely example of the latter is the run on at the end of line 4. A few of the lines, for me, are hard to scan, or rather they seem to touch at a scansion they don’t quite fulfil – line 2 for example has ten syllables but the last syllable is weak so that it’s hard to scan as a pentameter (one foot seems to have only one syllable in it); line 4 seems to require that "toward" be pronounced the British way (2 syllables) rather than the American way (one syllable), lines 6 and 7 again sound to me to be a syllable short. There are precedents for this: Chaucer has lots of acephalous lines (lines missing the first unstressed syllable), Turner Cassity frequently has a nine syllable line following an 11 syllable line when the last syllable of the first line is weak (so that it reads almost as the first unstressed syllable of the next line – which is what happens with some of Alicia’s lines here). Normally my perhaps hyper-conservative metrical instincts make me feel a bit iffy about this practice, but here it is certainly justified by the subject matter, and the mimetic force it gives to the poem’s jittery, nervous pictures. The obliquity of the scansion fits the obliquity of what is being evoked. And of course the whole metaphorical layer of the poem works beautifully, (and it almost reads as an ars poetica, as well as a portrait of a sensibility). The only other bat I can think of in a poem, that works with comparably strong psychological implications, is the one that puts in a brief appearance in Meredith’s Modern Love, where the trapped couple are "Condemned to do the flitting of a bat". But of course Merdith’s bat evokes simple distress – much more complex and satisfying is Alicia’s evocation of triumphant obliquity. Brava!

[Jim Hayes]

Oops, I meant to further expand in my comment to Svein above that my understanding of 'revising' refers to the constant adjustments, the bat makes during echo location, to it's flight path.

An absolutely wonderful line!

Jim

[Tim Murphy]

I have to confess that although I am not quite the Wintersian purist on matters metrical that Dick is, I have privately remonstrated with three of our best young woman poets--Kate Light, Diane Thiel, and Alicia--on their metrical liberties. In this instance, though, I'm with Dick. The meter is perfectly expressive of the subject, and that's why I think it's one of the best of Alicia's many miraculous poems.

[Roger Slater]

I apologize for "workshopping" this poem, particularly if it gave the impression that I dissent from the obvious point of view that Alicia is one of the very best poets writing today.

Dick's comment, which shows how some of the metrical "flaws" are actually strengths in the way they reinforce the content of the poem, was quite revealing for me. I now see that some of the "flaws" I pointed out were in fact contributing to the poem's theme and metaphor. Specifically, some of the "grammatical" issues I raised actually contribued to a syntax that corresponds, in a way, to the flight of the bats being depicted. I was raising too many "issues" in the workshop sense and not spending enough time simply sitting back and enjoying the poem and trusting Alicia's mastery enough to understand that everything I pointed out was intentional and contributed to the overall effect and metaphor.

I also can't think of another "bat" poem like this one, though this poem did pleasantly remind me somewhat of what Richard Wilbur does with birds instead of bats. (I think Wilbur mentions bats in "The Undead," but just briefly). In "The Event," for example, Wilbur contemplates the swirling movement of a flock of birds and concludes with reflections on the way we use words to understand "by what cross-purposes the world is dreamt." And he has another famous poem, whose name I can't remember just now, about a bird being trapped in a room and flying about until it blunders on the open window and escapes, and he likens the process to the way the mind works. I think Alicia's sonnet carries on in this tradition but with her own fresh metaphorical take, which is particularly sharp in the couplet.

[Tim Murphy]

Dear Roger, "There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents..." The Wilbur poem is "The Writer."

[Catherine Tufariello]

The central metaphor and vivid description in Alicia's wonderful sonnet also reminded me of Wilbur. Roger, the great poem about the trapped starling that you mention is called "The Writer." But Wilbur has a poem about a bat as well, called "Mind," which you might have been recalling at some level too. It begins "Mind in its purest play is like some bat/ That beats about in caverns all alone." Wilbur's emphasis is quite different, however; for him the bat "has no need to falter or explore" because "Darkly it knows what obstacles are there." Alicia, on the other hand, emphasizes the bat's erratic, eccentric course (partly, as Dick and others have noted, by her metrical swervings). Perhaps this contrast reflects broader differences in sensibility between the two poets.

BTW, I'm pretty sure Theodore Roethke has a poem about a bat too, but I can't find it just now.

[Roger Slater]

Catherine, I was in fact trying to remember Wilbur's "Mind" poem. Thanks for pointing it out. Here's the Roethke poem you were half-recalling (I'm not sure if he considered it one of his "children's poems" or not):

The Bat
by Theodore Roethke

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse,
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

[Kate Benedict]

Between the lines of much commentary so far is the batty fact that a poem can be quite fine even when it has some flaws or irregularities.

Sometimes such flaws can be virtues -- for me, the use of the singular "swallow" despite a pluralized sentence construction is one such virtue. It works, it's magic, it's an example of what a skilled poet can pull off without a hitch.

The one image I might question is that of the pirhouette; when you really think about it, a bat just can't do such a thing. Isn't that a balletic turn, highly graceful, in which an extended leg kicks out and in? It's a pretty image, too pretty, borderline twee -- but I've noticed among new formalists a high tolerance for twee. Of course, twee is in the eye of the beholder.

I love this poem. The sestet is just stunning. The whole poem does seems Wilburesque in an hommage sort of way.