Page 84 - The Irony Board

Into the World

Flock apart

It really won’t care
(But poem mid-air)
Should song in flight drop
(May suddenly stop)
A bit of the stuff
(And fly low enough)
For nesting its head
(To pick up the thread).

Continuing the ornithological imagery, this work also is the first
of four dealing with the arts. As the title implies, the birds
considered here are not of a feather: the stanza shuffle puts them
together physically and has them use the same rhymes, but
Gluckman has isolated poetry from song-lyrics by means of
parentheses. The difference between these two sorts of versifying,
he suggests, is that a poem does not (or should not) drop the thread
of its meaning, that the poet will go to lengths to maintain that
thread far beyond the considerations of the song-writer. A poem, if
well-metered, may work as a song; the converse, however, is not
true: rhyming and scansion alone do not qualify the words of a song
as poetry. The musical ability of songbirds compensates for their
indifferent nest-building, particularly where the head is to be
supported (semantic consistency, thematic unity, referential
complexity). This may be confirmed by reading song lyrics.

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