Comments on: The Owl

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:10:03 +0000

Thanks for all these thoughts! Jeremy Green is of course quite right to point out the Love’s Labour’s Lost reference, Winter’s Song:
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
What a way to wear an allusion lightly–it doesn’t matter if we pick up on it or not to appreciate the poem–yet if we do hear that echo, and think back on it a moment, we get another layer of contrast–for Shakespeare’s winter scene is, for all its description of the cold, one of cozy domesticity (logs for the fire, and milk, dull sermons at church, roasting crabapples). The owl here is that outside note that makes the inside inside, and thus festive. How perfectly Thomas has reversed this, and how unobtrusively. (This puts me in mind also of how Shakespeare’s songs were one of Housman’s declared influences.)
John, I’d love to hear your piece. I think Emily W. can e-mail you my e-mail…or vice versa. Unless you’d like to attach the piece here to share with all of us? (can that even be done? she wonders…)
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By: john

john — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:41:59 +0000

Confidential to Alicia: I wrote music to “The Owl” and would be happy to email you an MP3 if you’re curious to hear it. It’s a simple, stripped-down, minimal, quiet, quasi-folkish, melancholy, through-composed waltz.
Love love love the poem. I worked in homeless services for many years and was doing that when i wrote the music.
I also wrote music to J.M. Synge’s “Prelude,” which always feels like a prequel to “The Owl” — the long hike preceding the respite at the inn.
Thanks for the post.
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:19:34 +0000

Alicia,
If owls and pomegranates are commonplace there, no wonder Greece is one place where poetry originated.
Emily
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By: Steve Mackin

Steve Mackin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:51:02 +0000

That is one of the most melancholy and ominous things I have ever read. It has an Anglo-Saxon despair to it. Reminds me of Pound’s translation of The Seafarer, “how I in harsh days / Hardship endured oft. / Bitter breast cares I have abided,” bouyed by the memory of the warmth of the Mead Hall and an implied Christian duty to endure. Have read about Thomas, as he figures in Forst’s bio, but I’ve not made the journey to him. Something I now feel a need to rectify. Thanks!
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:26:54 +0000

I love that Thomas poem. Here’s the quote from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I wrote this poem about the (silent) screech owl outside my window. Just the other day, I saw him again, collecting snowflakes on his lip.
The Oak Tree Owl of Owl Creek Cove
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
~ Love’s Labour’s Lost
I wash the dishes in the sink
And watch the owl’s indifferent blink
As he sits silent in the tree.
Oh little owl, please talk to me.
He suns himself on winter days,
But if it rains or snows, he stays
Atop the branch with mighty grip
Collecting snowflakes on his lip.
I’ve seen him spit. I’ve seen him yawn.
At dusk, I’ve seen him on the lawn
As if to pounce on hapless mice.
I’ve seen him scratch his feathers twice.
I call to Hoot, but not a peep.
Perhaps Hoot’s hooting while I sleep.
He sits so silent in the tree.
Oh little owl, please talk to me.
O yawn. She’s in the kitchen doing dishes
again? Be still, be still, be still, O daughter
of Eve, and tell me, what are your three wishes?
Tonight, sweet flight from hidey-hole by water,
by Owl Creek Cove, to pounce, to catch, to who
my hungry claws can find to feed me, feed me.
O read the messages I blink to you,
dish-washer, see me dance so freely, freely.
Come ride with me in golden-feather fun,
say yes? O sleep me now inside the oak
but wait, the heavens open so, when sun
sink set. O yes, I listened when you spoke
my name: to Hoot, you called. I shed a tear
and called you too, as best I could, O dear.
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By: Jeremy Green

Jeremy Green — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:15:11 +0000

Most likely it’s a Tawny Owl–the same one Shakespeare heard sing “a merry note” (in the winter song from Love’s Labour’s Lost). For this reason, I can’t help hearing “barred” as “bard.”
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By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:03:44 +0000

No pun on “owl” and “awol” intended…
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:59:11 +0000

Thanks all for your comments. And a thanks also to Clive Watkins, who helped me with the date of this poem. I’m indebted too, to Steve, for his snowstorm post… Emily, “barred,” does put me in mind of a barred owl, though I have no idea if that could be the owl of the poem… (is it an American owl?) I’m a sucker for owl poems and keep trying to write one, to no avail. It is the one bird sound you hear everywhere in Greece at night, sometimes even in the concrete city (as in the phrase, “like bringing owls to Athens”). (Those would be Little Owls, Athene Noctua.) Whenever I try to describe an owl sound in a poem, I keep going back to this, with its cry “shaken out long and clear”, and can do no better and throw up my hands.
Thank you for that thought, Henry, on Herbert. That deserves pondering over.
Ange, I appreciate the holiday frenzy, and look forward to your post, when you have a free moment!
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By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:16:36 +0000

Yes, thanks Alicia! I’m sorry to have been so awol; between family and the holidays, it’s suddenly gotten very hard to have a coherent thought. So I’m actually going to save my (lengthy) comment for an actual post (coming soon).
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:17:26 +0000

I seem to hear the ghost of George Herbert in this fine poem.
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:40:35 +0000

Thanks, Alicia, for this poem that does so wonderfully balance hunger, cold and weariness with the sheltering inn, and its warmth, in turn, contrasts and directs us to those without shelter or solace.
His use of the phrase “All of the night was quite barred out…” and your admitting that melancholy carols appeal to you most reminded me of RIchard Wilbur’s poem “A Barred Owl,” which is about comforting a child after she’s been wakened by an owl’s cry. The cry, as is Edward’s poem, is meant to remind us of the fear that our flimsy domestic shields mask.
Thanks, too, for raising Ange’s post to the surface just when it seems most apt.
Emily
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By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 17:10:40 +0000

When I saw that you had an Xmas post I was expecting Hardy’s “The Oxen,” which you indeed quote– surely one of the great Xmas poems of the past century-and-a-half; I had to look up to be sure the “O” stood for “Owl.” I think the two poems emotionally similar, too, though Thomas, unlike Hardy, can keep nostalgia for orthodoxy in the background, rather than spelling it out.
You might not see it in the poems, but Stevens thought about Xmas too, and not in a happy way. From a letter to Barbara Church, 12. 26. 1950: “Everyone can understand how an every-day sorrow becomes unbearable at Xmas, which is all emotion.At moments I feel like shutting the day and all its feelings out, although that would only make bad worse.”
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