Thrushes Analysis

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,

More coiled steel than living - a poised

Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs

Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce,a stab

Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,

No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stabAnd a ravening second.Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trainedBody, or genius, or a nestful of brats

Gives their days this bullet and automatic

Purpose? Mozart's brain had it, and the shark's mouth

That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its ownSide and devouring of itself: efficiency which

Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it

Or obstruction deflect.With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,Carving at a tiny ivory ornament

For years: his act worships itself - while for him,

Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud andabove what

Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devilsOrgy and hosannah, under what wildernessOf black silent waters weep.

.: :.

This poem seeks to flesh out human nature in all of its contained contradictions. using the image of the thrush all other living creatures apart from humans are defined by its single-mindedness of pursuit- yet while its ruthless survivalist focus is empahsized the thrush is a creature that lives without living- its identity is intertwined with its actions- the thrush is but a flurry of movement.

you would think humanity is treated with indictive acrimonity in this poem. the truth could not be further.mankind for all its futile tendencies, his frivolous meaningless pursuits, has the joy of experience- from despair to delight, for which sin and guilt (religion) and the delirium of transitory pleasure wars constantly and through which the struggle makes one human.human actions in all their glory and guilt rarefy humanity. and the highest ennoblement comes with the self-realization of mortality. if death and vitality are at odds then it is the cosmic paradox of life that to live fully one must have a strong sense of one's mortality.

| Posted on 2005-05-05 | by Approved Guest