A D Hope's 'The Death of the Bird'

by David Brooks

A.D. Hope (1907-2000) was one of the finest Australian poets of the twentieth century, and 'The Death of the Bird' is one of his finest and best-loved poems. It's not hard to see why. The poem was finished – for there is reason to think that, like so many of his poems, this poem took a number of years to gestate – in 1948, the same year in which 'Chorale' and 'William Butler Yeats' were completed, when its poet was at the height of his powers. Rhythmically, metrically, formally – in terms, say, of its masterful and unobtrusive management of a difficult feminine/masculine rhyme-scheme (migration/heart; station/chart) – it is hard to argue that it puts a foot wrong, and yet it has that quality Hope so much admired in Yeats ('that noble, candid speech') of being at once formally perfect and yet showing no signs of strain or departure from the rhythm of a person talking.

Not that this is the only reason people have taken this poem so much to heart.  It is also a beautifully conceived poem, turning in every respect about its one central and immediately compelling symbol (another thing the poet admired about Yeats), and a deeply affective one, of a delicate yet remarkable creature called by instinct to make one last incredible journey to the other side of the world but becoming disoriented and falling to her death. An old shibboleth of criticism would say the reader is seduced deeply into the 'pathetic fallacy', feeling the bird's fate almost as if it were a human one, as indeed I think it also is. Consider the title. Not the death of a bird, but of the bird, as if to emphasise the bird as symbol. But for what, and of what kind? The bird, for example, is female, and deeply personified. Few who were there were surprised that Hope read this poem at the funeral of his wife of fifty years, Penelope, or at how deeply moving that reading was. As if she had been bird, but also as if the bird were somehow the bird in us. When we think that from the time of Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' the bird has also been a metaphor for the poet (Baudelaire's 'L'albatros', Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium'), this symbol becomes even more rich and complex. The bird is also, for example, a symbol of the soul.

Although the word 'Australia' never appears in it (it was supposedly inspired by an article Hope had read about starlings whose migration pattern – 'from Canada to Venezuela via Virginia'ⁱ – never took Australia into its scope), it is also, of course, a very Australian poem. Because, to all but its small indigenous population, and arguably even to them, Australia is a land of immigrants, and because a great many of those immigrants have been ghosted, at some time or other – haunted, just like Hope's bird is – by a place a whole hemisphere away. Although, as the succeeding generations settle more and more into their place, this haunting, in its personal aspect, doubtless also settles somewhat, the very structure of the culture and its geographical preconditions ensure that, however much we learn to live with it, however much it may become a part of us, this division cannot ever go away, for those same succeeding generations are brought up reading and watching and thinking about material generated elsewhere, under different skies, that perpetuates, inescapably, this ghosted state of mind. Dorothy Hewett wrote of her own experience of this – growing up in the dry and increasingly salinated wheat-belt of Western Australia with her mind full of the verdant landscapes of Shakespeare and the Romanic poets – as (and in the poem called) 'The Legend of the Green Country'.ⁱⁱ  

Others, picking up on a long line of representations of Australia as the land of the weird or grotesque – have argued that the uncanny is a fundamental feature of its literature.ⁱⁱⁱ Freud famously defined the uncanny as the unheimlich,^iv that feeling of being somehow at home in the most unfamiliar of surroundings, or of being uneasily not at home in the most familiar of them. To immigrants this is all too familiar. Most, when they do revisit their homeland, find that they no longer fully belong there, that they are no longer fully at  home in either  place. It is what one does next that is the challenge. Australian writers – and their characters – have met, or succumbed to, this challenge in various ways, although none, perhaps, so starkly and pertinently as the 'hero' of Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Hope's poem, in any case, presents us with so clear a presentation of this phenomenon that it becomes almost definitive:

And being home, memory becomes a passion
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession
And exiled love mourning within her breast.

The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;
The palm-tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.

One of its greatest strengths, moreover – one of the ways, perhaps, in which this poem seduces even our unconscious – is that (and whether intentionally or otherwise on the poet's part) it takes its subject so deeply into its form. That may sound complicated, but it can be explained easily enough. The poem – much of this first part of it, anyway – is about being haunted, and the poem itself is haunted, in various ways. At the simplest level it is haunted – not too strong a word, since the poem uses it itself – by those places where, because words are repeated in contexts which shift their meanings slightly, we get a sense of things not having been quite, or quite as simple, as they had seemed, as when the 'speck' of

Year after year a speck on the map, divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come

recurs sixteen lines later, where it describes the bird herself:

A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place

But in other places – we could call them pockets of ambiguity, perhaps, or (more technically) instances of catachresis – it is haunted by a more immediate doubleness. Carried along by the story of the bird, the seductive rhythm and rhyme, the apparent confidence of the voice, it is very likely that we would miss them at first, but when one comes back, reads more attently, these moments accumulate to the point where the reader begins to experience – or is it the poet who has experienced this, long before them? – something a little like the disorientation of the bird herself (of the same order, that is, though hardly of the same magnitude).  That slight ambiguity surrounding the first use of 'speck', for example (is it the map or the speck that is divided?), or the more radical one in 'Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession' (what does that mean? does the heart possess something? what? or is the heart itself possessed? in which case aren't the ghosts haunting something that is already haunted? and can we ignore the darker implication of possession here?) – or that strange figure (I don't know what to call it; is it a kind of negative suggestion?) that we find in 'small wisdom' (Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design) or 'tiny burden' (Receives the tiny burden of her death), which at once belittles the wisdom and the burden and defends them, announces that that is what they are.

It's a strange migration, this last one. With the line Custom and fear constraining her no longer we are led to think – but doesn't this contradict so much else in the poem? – that she is making, at last, some kind of bold and conscious departure. With Alone in the bright host of her companions we are led to think that she experiences her disorientation and loss of direction while still with the flock. When we look to the left and right of this poem, at the bright host of its companions in Hope's poetry to this time – to the way the castaways of 'The Wandering Islands' have become so by boldly defying custom, say, or (to take a different tack) the way 'inane dominions' has a post-colonial edge to it, like so much in 'Australia' (that 'stone [British?] lion worn away', that 'chatter of cultured apes … called civilisation over there'), we might even begin to suspect that this last migration has a kind of cultural or epistemological necessity about it: that the death is also an end to dividedness; that, although one might well be overwhelmed by a wilderness of light, there comes a point where the pin-pricks of 'lights across the chart' are no longer enough for one (or the 'bright host of [one's] companions', so deftly rhymed with 'those inane dominions'); that, in some way we haven't yet quite worked out, this death might also be a beginning.

David Brooks,
Australian Literature,
The University of Sydney

1. Catherine Cole, The Poet Who Forgot (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008), p.163.
   
2. Dorothy Hewett, Collected Poems 1940-1995 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995).
3. See, for example, Marcus Clarke's 'Preface' to Adam Lindsay Gordon's Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1876), or Judith Wright's 1961 essay 'The Upside-Down Hut', or Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs' Uncanny Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998). See also John Kinsella, 'An Uncanny Reading of AD Hope’s "The Death of the Bird"', forthcoming in Southerly 68/2 (2008).
4. See his essay 'The Uncanny' (1919).