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Sanderling
What saffron stylus could but trace
the rusty scallop of the dancing wing,
what sculptor’s chisel sharpened to the quick
could cleave the charcoal pencil of the beak
that stitches grievance in the frigid spume,
a thousand flashing furrows every yard?
In greed it snouts along the sandbar’s edge
the dozen snails asleep within the tide,
the lugworm’s bristled breath beneath the mud,
the sand crab’s skirt atop the shining dune—
they roar and bubble in their glue-green pools,
they crimp the sea-oats stiff with creaking feet.
What oil and brush could gloss those salt-stiff knees;
those sprinting bantam feet what lacquer sheen?
No inkwell, spilled, could stain that shimmering eye;
but, bristling at a glance along the bank,
the pointed wing rears from the painted back
and flips into the dark without a squeal.
.
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Kensley Greene is a student at the University of Florida.
What a vivid, eloquent piece of poetry, Kensley. I loved the image of sanderling’s beak as a ‘charcoal pencil’, and could see quite distinctly in my mind the little bird hunting through the shallow waters, dipping its beak into the mud.
A classic piece of classical poetry, just like the greats penned.
Thanks for the read.
Thank you very much for the comment, Paul! That was extremely touching 🙂
You’re welcome, Kensley. Your poem has inspired me to get back to basics and write a poem about the beautiful water pots found throughout the Saharan region where I live.
In spite of the message, you have managed to paint a linguistic picture of the sanderling and its surrounds in a magical poem that brings the scene to life… and what an incredible scene you create. I just love “the rusty scallop of the dancing wing” and “the lugworm’s bristled breath beneath the mud” – beautiful! Having watched and photographed these amazing birds, your words capture the very essence of the sanderling in this superb poem. Thank you, Kensley!
Thank you very much for the comment, Susan! I absolutely loved your poem about the dodo, so it is wonderful to see you here 🙂
So glad I was able to capture something you appreciate so deeply as well. I love birds so and it’s wonderful to see that others feel similarly.
For what it’s worth, however, I didn’t intend the message of the poem to be critical of the artist. It was entirely intended to praise the sublime design of the bird itself, not to snub those who create works imitating them.
Thank you again for the lovely comment, it means so much!
Kensley, thank you for your kind and informative comment. I’m thrilled you enjoyed my dodo ode. As for praising the “sublime design of the bird itself”, you have done that admirably, and never once snubbed those artists trying to capture that beauty – your respect for them most certainly shines through. Please forgive my rather dry wit. My “in spite of the message” opening was merely a nod and a wink to your talent as a poet, and nothing more. “Sanderling” is wonderful!
Apart from its subject matter (the small bird), this poem provides some interesting clues about what distinguishes a traditional or “classic” poem from a mainstream modernist one, completely separate from metrical issues.
The poem has eighteen lines. The text contains about twenty adjectives. This more than one-to-one ratio is anathema to modernist composition, which hates adjectives on principle and actively discourages their use. In addition, the adjectival usages here are vivid (“saffron,” “rusty,” “charcoal,” “frigid,” “bantam,” “flashing,” “bristled”) and sometimes compounded (“glue-green,” “salt-stiff”). This lavish palette shows that the poet is not afraid of language, and isn’t going to let some word-miserly modernist workshop-director tell him that he has to streamline his verse into something starved and skeletal.
A number of his adjectives are participial, like “dancing,” “flashing,” “sprinting,” “shining ,” “shimmering,” “creaking.” This gives a movement and a vitality to the text that is alien to most modernist products. But he intersperses these with past participial adjectives like “sharpened,” “bristled,” “spilled,” “pointed,” and “painted.” These add fixed stability to the text, which is not just about action that is going on, but also about simple, stable existence.
There is also great syntactical sophistication here:
What oil and brush could gloss those salt-stiff knees;
Those sprinting bantam feet what lacquer sheen?
Has anyone noticed that this is pure chiasmic structure, with a shared main verb? “Oil and brush” and “lacquer sheen” are the subjects; “salt-stiff knees” and “sprinting bantam feet” are the objects; and the shared verb is “could gloss.” Greene didn’t learn a neat trick like this from some stupid modernist workshop. You get this from reading older texts, and assimilating them.
This poem is a full and lucid picture of living reality. It’s not some goddamned little epiphany squeaked out by somebody with a psychological hangup.
I have only one complaint: everything is good iambic pentameter except the first line. I can’t imagine that it is deliberate (why would you want to screw up your own poem?), so I assume it is merely an oversight. I would suggest the following possible fixes for the first line:
What saffron stylus could but faintly trace [or]
What saffron stylus could but weakly trace
The addition of the slightly derogatory “faintly” or “weakly” would not only flesh out the meter. It would also add emphasis to the first stanza’s implicit critique of painters and sculptors, and their inability to deal effectively with a depiction of the sanderling.
Your comments today are particularly trenchant, Joseph. I can only add that the author has emplaced birds in my brain, which is almost never a bad thing. The elegant diction alone was worth the price of admission.
Thank you for pointing out the chiasmic structure, no, I had not noticed. But now that you mention it, I think the chiasmic structure is very tight, even tighter than you have alluded to. The “crossing” of the chiasm takes place between the ninth and tenth lines, showcased by two invertebrates, the lugworm and the sand crab. Further out, eight and eleventh lines, we have the tide balancing the pools. Further out, the sanderling is snouting along the sandbar, and crimping sea oats. Further out, charcoal paired with an inkwell, and finally, lines 2 and 11 deal with the sanderling’s wings. I’m sure if I looked closer I would notice others.
Having looked at the dense chiasmic structure, I think I know why the first line is not pentameter. My guess is that it’s a deliberate flaw, from humility, from one not daring not offer perfection, even though it was within his grasp. Or perhaps, in so doing, he has made it perfect.
Living by the ocean, by sanderlings, loving chiasmus and blank verse in iambic pentameter, this is very good.
Wings in lines 2 and 17, I apologize for any confusion.
Actually Alan, that possibility did occur to me. I have noticed that some formalist poets often deliberately include a bad line in an otherwise perfect poem as a concession to some third party (an acquaintance, a teacher, a girlfriend, or some other less intelligent poet) who counsels them to do so, as a way to show “a modernist spirit” of cameraderie with other non-formalist poets.
To me it’s a bad idea, and a sign of cowardice or a weak backbone. We don’t owe anything to our enemies. If you are going to write a perfect formal poem, do it without apologies. And if you lose a friend, too bad. Your art is more important than your friends.
I don’t notice chiasmic structure in the other places you mention, because there isn’t a very clear x-crossing as one finds in lines 13 and 14.
Joseph, I appreciate your comments on chiasm, and thought I understood chiasm/chiasmus but maybe I really don’t. You seem to be applying it in a way I am not familiar with, more at a grammatical level. I always understood it to refer to a literary device that begins with the ordered presentation of a series of ideas, a “crossing” point, then the recapitulation of those ideas in reverse order, so more of a macro level, applied to an entire work, or part of a work. My understanding is that there are entire chapters of the Old Testament, for instance, that exhibit this kind of chiasmic structure. What am I getting wrong?
Alan, I think of chiasmus as a strictly literary device that arranges certain parallel words in an X-like order. The best example is in our Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson writes of the English people that:
We hold them Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
“Enemies” and “Friends” are parallel, and so are “War” and “Peace.” But the arrangement is this way:
ENEMIES WAR
PEACE FRIENDS
You can draw a diagonal line from “Enemies” to “Friends” and from “War” to “Peace,” creating an X. This is the X (the Greek letter chi) that marks a chiasmus.
In Ms. Greene’s poem, I took the chiasmic structure to be as follows:
oil and brush salt-stiff knees
bantam feet lacquer sheen
However, Greene points out that she is using “sheen” as a verb, which means that I can’t take “could gloss” as a shared verb in the center. To me “sheen” is always a noun, and can only be used as a verb in some dialects. But it’s her poem, so she can do as she wishes.
As for deliberate flaws, I think they are always a mistake. The accidental ones are bad enough.
Thank you very much for the comment, sir. It is deeply moving to see a work of mine discussed with such thoughtful analysis and attention to detail on so many different fronts. I will admit, however, that I approached this poem with no thought to any sense of chiasmus, or anything, really, beyond iambic pentameter (with, of course, one notable exception). I saw the bird in my mind, and I simply put one line after another. I wanted the work to reflect my love of the bird and the lines to scratch the itch for lyricism in my heart. That was the end of any mentally planned structure – besides, perhaps, starting and ending with wings. It comes as a delightful surprise that someone would immediately note a deeper structure to my poem than that which consciously occurred to me. Maybe therein, indeed, lies the true beauty of the subject.
I shuttled back and forth for a while between whether to add an iamb to the first line before settling on keeping the tetrameter. I simply prefer the lilt the four iambs provide. I am young, and the poem reflects the simple joy of my soul to be out on the salt marsh or the open sand flat. It is sincerity, not technical perfection, for which I was striving; and childlikeness, not cowardice, which I hoped to convey. The intent of the poem was positive praise of the design of the sanderling, not negative criticism of human artists, and as such I cannot in good countenance add an extra iambic adjective (!) to the first line. Human art encompasses much, and I intended only to convey a simple sense of its futility in comparison to the perfection behind the artistic design of the living creatures of the world. Who is a better sculptor or painter than the God Who gives breath to His art?
Interestingly, the “oil and brush” line was not meant as a chiasmus at all. In the second line of the last stanza, I intended “sheen” to act as a verb describing the feet (i.e., “what lacquer could sheen them?”) I’m aware it works both ways (another intricacy I did not notice!), but I meant for the knees to be glossed and the feet to be sheened. Of course, the bird doesn’t mind either way.
Thank you again for the tremendously detailed comment – it is heartening and edifying in so many ways.
For whatever it’s worth, though, I’m a girl. 🙂
My apologies – I am still trying to puzzle out this website’s comment section. The above comment was addressed to Mr. Joseph S. Salemi, if that was unclear.
Ms. Greene, from what you have said it would seem that you are a natural poet, with a deep command of English diction and an innate rhetorical sense. Those things are very rare. They mean that you can write verse spontaneously and in part unconsciously. It is a great gift.
Let me just give one bit of advice: “sincerity” is a real danger, and should not be the primary motivation in composing poetry. Sincerity will make you write things that are bad art, because it will interfere with the impersonal aesthetic excellence that a good poem should have. Leaving out that missing foot in the first line is an example of sacrificing art to some kind of moral consideration.
Kensley– Wonderful poem !
You have it all ! An understanding of this bird, and a poetic interpretation of it.
I am amazed at the multi-dimensional approach of one so young. You have it all. Please keep on, and be sure to submit more poems here, because this is where you belong..
Thank you very much for your comment, Sally! I certainly plan to do so 🙂
I really appreciate the explanation of your aims in writing this poem. I think you achieved them and I do love the effective use of blank verse and sequential images, we might say, water colors.
Wow, is this your first time here? I’m impressed, especially given your age. I can see you becoming one of the major poets here in no time at all. I wish I could write nature poems that well!
A lovely close reading of the bird, Kensley, in a painterly style that implies admiration for the creator’s work. You also get the behavior of the sanderling, and even suggest a reason for its name. I know they congregate with other sandpipers on the beach, but trying to identify the species as paler or plumper than others is only a relative consideration. Next time I see a group, I may look for a “thousand flashing furrows every yard.”