Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails. (The rudiments of tropics are around, Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.) His lids are white because his eyes are blind. He is not paradise of parakeets, Of his gold ether, golden alguazil, Except because he broods there and is still. Panache upon panache, his tails deploy Upward and outward, in green-vented forms, His tip a drop of water full of storms. But though the turbulent tinges undulate As his pure intellect applies its laws, He moves not on his coppery, keen claws. He munches a dry shell while he exerts His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock, To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock. THE BIRD WITH THE COPPERY, KEEN CLAWS WALLACE STEVENS When I was a girl in my twenties, I had no idea what to make of Wallace Stevens’ mid-life poem “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws.” I had come to feel indebted to Stevens’ work; I knew there was always a valuable presence inside every poem. But I postponed thinking about “The Bird” because it seemed too surreal, too unrelated to life as I understood it. The birds I knew in verse, from Shakespeare’s lark to Keats’ swallows. were mostly “real” birds, easily metaphorical birds, flying and singing. Stevens’ enigmatic bird, by contrast, was not recognizably drawn from the real thing. The bird is offered as a parakeet, but resembles no real parakeet, if only because he is the “parakeet of parakeets,” a Hebrew form of title for a supreme ruler (“King of Kings, Lord of Lords”) and because he is characterized, Platonically, as “perfect.” I couldn’t make sense of the described qualities of the “bird” because they were wholly inconsistent with those of real birds, with those of any imaginable “perfect” bird, and with each other. Stevens’ bird (a “he,” not an “it”) is especially disturbing, because he possesses the powers of intellect and will, powers thought to distinguish human beings from the “lower animals”: his “pure intellect” applies its complement of “laws” and he consciously “exerts / His will.” And it is only late in the poem that we learn that the bird has intellect and will. What strikes us more immediately is that the bird lacks almost everything we expect in birds: he cannot fly, or see, or mate, or form part of a flock; he remains blind, perched immobile “above the forest” on “his rock.” Put to such puzzlement, I fled, at first, the enigma. And there was also the problem of the peculiar stanza-form: three five-beat lines per stanza, rhyming in no form I had even seen before — an unrhymed line followed by two lines that rhymed (abb). I had seen tercets in Stevens and other poets, but never this kind. In those other tercets, sometimes all three lines would rhyme (aaa), or sometimes they would interweave to form Dante’s terza rima (aba, bcb, etc.). There were reasons behind the rhymes — aaa becomes emblematic in George Herbert’s “Trinity Sunday,” and terza rima was chosen to point to Dante in Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life.” But what could be the reason for this strange abb? There were abba poems, there were aabb poems, but there were no abb poems. It was an emblem of a lack of something, but of what? I was left guessing about content and form alike. And the stanzas were peculiar in another way: each of the six stopped dead at a terminal period. The reader is instructed, by the insistent conclusive period closing each stanza, to take a full breath between stanzas. Stiffly isolated, stopped after each venture, they did not seem to belong together, nor was there any ongoing narrative to connect them. Most stanzaic poems are more fluid than these representing the bird. Here, one encounters obstruction after obstruction. “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws” made me ask why a poet would write a poem that seemed unintelligible even to a habitual reader of poetry. Why, I wondered with some resentment, would a poet offer me a poem that presented such obstacles? Only later did I learn that Stevens had said that “the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully”, with the “almost” saving the day by its compliment to the persistent reader. There was, then, work to be done by the reader before the linear string of stanzas could be wound up into a perfect sphere. I knew Blake’s promise from Jerusalem: I give you the end of a golden string Only wind it into a ball It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate Built in Jerusalem’s wall No memorable poem is devoid of art — and the art in the artless is often as difficult to find as the solution of the enigmatic. The “work” of the reader is normally a joyous one; but I was recalcitrant before “The Bird” because I did not yet know how to do the work Stevens expected of me. To be at ease in the poem seemed impossible. What was the work the poet was demanding of me? It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world. To do that, one must believe that every word in a poem is, within the poem, literally true, and the first step must be to collect the literal facts from the words. From the title, we know that there is a bird, and the bird has claws. Facts of absence are as important as facts of presence. It is clear that the bird — because he does not sing in the poem — cannot sing, that the bird — because he does not fly in the poem — cannot fly. Although some catastrophe has massacred all the other parakeets of the forest, the parakeet of parakeets has escaped that collective death. Once I understood that I had to take the bird literally, peculiar as that seemed, I became his ornithologist,
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence