Today’s Poem: The Wild Duck

John Masefield acknowledges the otherness of the non-human world

Roland Clark, Manitoba Marshes, 1923 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

The Wild Duck

by John Masefield

Twilight. Red in the West.
Dimness. A glow on the wood.
The teams plod home to rest.
The wild duck come to glean.
O souls not understood,
What a wild cry in the pool;
What things have the farm ducks seen
That they cry so--huddle and cry?
Only the soul that goes.
Eager. Eager. Flying.
Over the globe of the moon,
Over the wood that glows.
Wings linked. Necks a-strain,
A rush and a wild crying.

A cry of the long pain
In the reeds of a steel lagoon,
In a land that no man knows.

---

As present and ubiquitous as birds are, in the world we think of as ours — sparrows pecking crumbs under outdoor tables, pigeons squatting on statues, starlings swirling in great liquid masses on the evening sky as they filter down into the trees — they remain a mystery to us. What sounds to us like ambient noise outside the window is to them a multitude of separate languages, each one distinctly intelligible to its speakers, if to no one else. They carry on their societies in the branches above our heads. They see migratory highways where we see only sky. They are an entire order of creation whose society overlaps ours but rarely touches it. Whatever human beings achieve in the way of flight, we still don’t know what it is to be a bird. 

Given all that, it’s hardly surprising that birds should be a source of fascination for writers. Birds may fascinate us generally, of course but it’s writers who record that fascination, in all its forms. The English writer J.A. Baker (1926–1987) kept a diary, though his 1967 The Peregrine is really more a long-form prose poem of surpassing beauty than it is anything else, setting down his daily quest not only to observe the hawks hunting over the Essex saltmarshes, but to find in himself the primal desire for survival which animates them. 

We also have children’s novels of human-bird coexistence, including Farley Mowat’s 1961 Owls in the Family and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, published in 1959. On one level or another, these prose works — admittedly a small sample size — ask what if? What if the worlds of birds and humans not only overlapped, but touched? If we can’t know what it is to be a bird, still we can, through some kind of established relationship, know what birds are like. Chiefly we can know the ways in which they are like us, and we are like them. Or so we speculate. Such speculations are, at least in part, what drive these narratives.

John Masefield (Wikimedia Commons)

Poets, by and large, seem not to think this way so much. In his “Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins sees a figure for the mystery of God’s sacramental presence in created reality. The bird of Keats’ “What the Thrush Said” embodies in itself the principle of negative capability: mystery as a form of extra-rational knowledge. If the thrush is like us at all, it’s only like us in knowing things that human language can’t articulate — things we know, but can’t say. Likewise, Thomas Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” accesses and expresses a joy from which the human speaker, with his human self-awareness, is pointedly excluded. In Lew Sarett’s “The Loon,” featured here on August 29, the half-glimpsed bird’s distant cry is a wail of unreasoning despair, chilling in its alienness from the rational human sphere (as a human madman also might be, for the same reason). 

And as Andrew Hudgins’ imagined Sidney Lanier makes clear in “Raven Days,” the raven may be a repository of “useful skills” that ensure its survival, but remains “an ambiguous bird,” near to us — evocative of us, even —  but never quite familiar, and certainly not comfortable as a figure for the human condition. Where J.A. Baker strives, with an increasingly naked monomania, to be one with the hawk, Hudgins’s fictional Lanier is cagier about the raven, far less eager to find himself in its natural habits. 

So, too, we have “The Wild Duck,” by John Masefield (1878–1967). Read alongside Masefield’s more famous “Sea-Fever,” “The Wild Duck” might seem like the same kind of poem, about the human longing to be away, wandering the globe. But as this trimeter poem itself makes clear, the “souls” of wild ducks are “not understood” — at least not by us. 

Even the rhyme scheme, the opening lines rhyming abacbdce, and so on, point to a frustration of the natural human desire for easy patterns and connections. We like to anthropomorphize everything, but that’s not the true pattern of the larger reality we inhabit. The pattern is there, but it’s not, maybe, the first thing we’re primed to expect and find comforting. We can observe their flight and hear their cries, but the pain of their migratory longing is not our pain. The “farm ducks,” though domesticated, can intuit it. But we can’t, not really. Their life, their experience, their world is “a land no man knows.” 

---