vultures poem essay

Vultures Summary & Analysis by Chinua Achebe

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

In Chinua Achebe's "Vultures," a pair of grim birds nuzzling each other after devouring a rotting corpse become a metaphor for the uneasy fact that human beings are equally capable of love and evil. Just as vultures can feast on death and still cuddle, the speaker observes, the man who runs a Nazi death camp might pick up chocolates for his beloved children on the way home; cruelty and tenderness can coexist in the same person. Whether that's cause for hope or despair, the speaker can't quite decide—but despair seems more likely. The poem first appeared in Achebe's 1971 collection Beware Soul Brother, and Other Poems .

• Read the full text of “Vultures”

The Full Text of “Vultures”

“vultures” summary, “vultures” themes.

The Uneasy Coexistence of Evil and Love

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “vultures”.

In the greyness ... ... to hers.

Lines 13-21

Yesterday they picked ... ... telescopic eyes...

Lines 22-29

Strange ... ... to the wall!

Lines 30-40

...Thus the Commandant ... ... return...

Lines 41-51

Praise bounteous ... ... of evil.

“Vultures” Symbols

The Vultures

• Lines 4-21: “a vulture / perching high on broken / bones of a dead tree / nestled close to his / mate his smooth / bashed-in head, a pebble / on a stem rooted in / a dump of gross / feathers, inclined affectionately / to hers. Yesterday they picked / the eyes of a swollen / corpse in a water-logged / trench and ate the / things in its bowel. Full / gorged they chose their roost / keeping the hollowed remnant / in easy range of cold / telescopic eyes...”

“Vultures” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Juxtaposition.

• Lines 7-16: “nestled close to his / mate his smooth / bashed-in head, a pebble / on a stem rooted in / a dump of gross / feathers, inclined affectionately / to hers. Yesterday they picked / the eyes of a swollen / corpse in a water-logged / trench”
• Lines 30-40: “...Thus the Commandant at Belsen / Camp going home for / the day with fumes of / human roast clinging / rebelliously to his hairy / nostrils will stop / at the wayside sweet-shop / and pick up a chocolate / for his tender offspring / waiting at home for Daddy's / return...”
• Lines 43-51: “that grants even an ogre / a tiny glow-worm / tenderness encapsulated / in icy caverns of a cruel / heart or else despair / for in the very germ / of that kindred love is / lodged the perpetuity / of evil.”

Personification

• Lines 22-29: “Strange / indeed how love in other / ways so particular / will pick a corner / in that charnel-house / tidy it and coil up there, perhaps / even fall asleep—her face / turned to the wall!”
• Lines 5-6: “broken / bones of a dead tree”
• Lines 9-12: “a pebble / on a stem rooted in / a dump of gross / feathers”
• Lines 20-21: “cold / telescopic eyes...”
• Lines 43-45: “an ogre / a tiny glow-worm / tenderness”
• Lines 46-47: “icy caverns of a cruel / heart”
• Lines 48-49: “the very germ / of that kindred love”
• Lines 1-4: “the greyness / and drizzle of one despondent / dawn unstirred by harbingers / of sunbreak”
• Lines 8-9: “his smooth / bashed-in head”
• Lines 13-16: “they picked / the eyes of a swollen / corpse in a water-logged / trench”
• Lines 19-21: “the hollowed remnant / in easy range of cold / telescopic eyes...”
• Lines 32-35: “fumes of / human roast clinging / rebelliously to his hairy / nostrils”
• Lines 1-2: “greyness / and”
• Lines 2-3: “despondent / dawn”
• Lines 3-4: “harbingers / of”
• Lines 4-5: “vulture / perching”
• Lines 5-6: “broken / bones”
• Lines 7-8: “his / mate”
• Lines 9-10: “pebble / on”
• Lines 10-11: “in / a”
• Lines 11-12: “gross / feathers”
• Lines 12-13: “affectionately / to”
• Lines 13-14: “picked / the”
• Lines 14-15: “swollen / corpse”
• Lines 15-16: “water-logged / trench”
• Lines 16-17: “the / things”
• Lines 17-18: “Full / gorged”
• Lines 19-20: “remnant / in”
• Lines 20-21: “cold / telescopic”
• Lines 22-23: “Strange / indeed”
• Lines 23-24: “other / ways”
• Lines 25-26: “corner / in”
• Lines 27-28: “perhaps / even”
• Lines 28-29: “face / turned”
• Lines 30-31: “Belsen / Camp”
• Lines 31-32: “for / the”
• Lines 32-33: “of / human”
• Lines 33-34: “clinging / rebelliously”
• Lines 34-35: “hairy / nostrils”
• Lines 35-36: “stop / at”
• Lines 39-40: “Daddy's / return...”
• Lines 41-42: “bounteous / providence”
• Lines 43-44: “ogre / a”
• Lines 44-45: “glow-worm / tenderness”
• Lines 45-46: “encapsulated / in”
• Lines 46-47: “cruel / heart”
• Lines 48-49: “germ / of”
• Lines 49-50: “is / lodged”
• Lines 50-51: “perpetuity / of”

“Vultures” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Hollowed remnant
• Charnel-house
• Belsen Camp
• Bounteous providence
• The perpetuity of evil
• (Location in poem: Lines 2-3: “one despondent / dawn”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Vultures”

Rhyme scheme, “vultures” speaker, “vultures” setting, literary and historical context of “vultures”, more “vultures” resources, external resources.

A Brief Biography — Learn more about Achebe's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.

Achebe's Legacy — Read an article discussing Achebe's literary reputation and ongoing influence.

The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.

Achebe on African Literature — Listen to Achebe talking about what it means to be an African reader and writer.

An Interview with Achebe — Listen to an interview with Achebe in which he discusses his writing and his time as a radio broadcaster.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

By Chinua Achebe

In the greyness and drizzle of one despondent dawn unstirred by harbingers of sunbreak a vulture perching high on broken bones of a dead tree nestled close to his mate his smooth bashed-in head, a pebble on a stem rooted in a dump of gross feathers, inclined affectionately to hers. Yesterday they picked the eyes of a swollen corpse in a water-logged trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full gorged they chose their roost keeping the hollowed remnant in easy range of cold telescopic eyes… Strange indeed how love in other ways so particular will pick a corner in that charnel-house tidy it and coil up there, perhaps even fall asleep – her face turned to the wall! …Thus the Commandant at Belsen Camp going home for the day with fumes of human roast clinging rebelliously to his hairy nostrils will stop at the wayside sweet-shop and pick up a chocolate for his tender offspring waiting at home for Daddy ’s return… Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil.

 Summary of Vultures

• Popularity of “Vultures”: “Vultures” by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian poet, is a beautiful piece of poetry. The poem first appeared in 1971 in Collected Poems . The poem obliquely presents the stark reality of colonialism and its impacts on the locals. The beauty of the poem, however, lies in its metaphor of vulture that feeds on dead bodies and still loves each other amid the ruins .
• “Vultures” As a Representative of Colonial Mindset and its Predatory Tactics: Chinua Achebe presents a vulture sitting on a dead tree looking despondently in the rain with greyness in the atmosphere . It is sitting close to another vulture, showing love with each other having bald heads as if pebbles in the grass . Yesterday, they had had their fill with a swollen-eyed corpse. They gulped everything. Now they are waiting for the next onslaught of hunger to be ready to eat up the rest. Yet, they are showing love with each other among the dead bodies, sitting in the charnel house and taking rest. Similarly, the Commandant at Belson also treats his subjects cruelly and predates on them. Yet, when he leaves his duty and goes home, he brings chocolates for his offspring, showing tenderness of his heart. Leaving it to the readers to draw the conclusion , Achebe says that God must be praised for showing love and tenderness residing in the hearts of predators such as ogre as well as showing evil in some the hearts of some “kindred love.”
• Major Themes in “Vultures” : Predation, love and barbarism are three major thematic strands of this poem. Achebe has beautifully presented the predatory rapacity of colonialism through the Commandment at Belson, equating him with the vultures enjoying their feast at the charnel house. Yet, Achebe says that both show the other side of their barbarism that is love. When vultures have their full, they show love for each other and when the commandment is tired of cruelty over his subjects, he shows love and tenderness for his children. The poem, then, asks the readers to praise the Lord that he has put love in hate and hate in love in almost all his creatures.

Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in “Vultures”

literary devices beautify poetically or prose writing to make the text readable. The analysis of these devices in the poem as given below shows this fact.

• Assonance : Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line such as the sound of /o/ in “and drizzle of one despondent”, /a/ in “dawn unstirred by harbingers” and the sound of /e/ in “feathers, inclined affectionately.”
• Alliteration : It is the use of successive consonant sounds in the initials of the successive words such as /h/ in “his hairy” and /th/ in “thus the.”
• Consonance : Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such as the sound of /d/ and /r/ in “dawn unstirred by harbingers”, /l/ and /s/ in “rebelliously to his hairy / nostrils will stop,” and the sound of /g/ and /n/ in “that grants even an ogre.”
• Enjambment : It is defined as a thought in verse that does not come to an end at a line break ; rather, it rolls over to the next line. For example;

for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil.

• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. The poem shows the use of imagery such as “will pick a corner”, “tidy it and coil up there, perhaps” and “at the wayside sweet-shop.”
• Metaphor : It is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between the objects that are different. The poem shows the use of metaphors of vulture or ogre to show rapacity and predation.
• Personification : The poem shows the use of love as a personification as if it has life and emotions of its own.
• Symbolism : Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings that are different from the literal meanings. The poem shows the use of symbols of night such vulture, dead tree, dump, and charnel house to show predation and rapacity of colonialism.

 Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in “Vultures”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

• Diction and Tone : The poem shows very simple but comparative diction with a serious and sardonic tone.
• Free Verse : The poem does not follow any metrical pattern or rhyme scheme . Therefore, it is a free verse poem.
• Stanza : A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are four stanzas with each having a different number of verses.

Quotes to be Used

These lines from “Vultures” are relevant to quote when praising the Lord for his blessings.

Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart.

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Vultures by Chinua Achebe | Summary and Analysis

Critical appreciation of vultures by chinua achebe.

Published by Chinua Achebe in 1971, Vultures is a poem of four uneven stanzas, written in free form. It discusses the elements of love and evil in the world, using a comparison of vultures with the Commandant at Belsen Camp to highlight the link between humans and nature.

Vultures | Summary

The poem starts with a dull, gloomy setting . It is a grey dawn, and the despondence isn’t diffused even by the vultures perched on the branches of a dead tree . There are two of them- presumably mates – nestled close together, and one of them has a pebble on a stem tangled its unkempt feathers. Yesterday, those vultures had found a corpse in a trench , and had picked away its eyes and eaten everything of its bowel. After being full and satisfied, they found a place to rest close by, so that the remnants of the body were still in their line of sight.

After this description, the perspective switches from the vultures to thoughts about the peculiarity of love. It is strange how love, which is otherwise so particular, can still exist in even the eeriest of places- and when it does, it prefers to turn it’s face to the wall rather than to look at the darkness that surrounds it. The third stanza then shifts its focus to the Commandant at Belsen Camp, who at the time is finishing work and going home for the day. He smells like burnt bodies, and stops at the sweet shop on his way home to pick up chocolate for his child, who is eagerly awaiting his return.

The final stanza talks about how there is always light in the darkness, and love in evil. The poet wonders if it should be praised that even an ogre is gifted with a tiny bit of tenderness – a soft glow in its otherwise cold and emotionless heart- or whether it should be despaire d that for every small speck of love, we find huge amounts of evil.

Vultures | Analysis

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He is known for crafting his fiction around elements of reality – similar to how, in Vultures, he uses nature and human beings to depict abstract concepts like love, light, darkness, good and evil. This poem uses strong imagery . Achebe also employs extended metaphors and descriptions to portray emotions . His comparisons also assist in painting the scene in the readers’ minds most vividly. Vultures is split into four uneven stanzas, and does not have a specific rhyme scheme. It is written in third-person free form , and the personification of emotions is employed to form a stronger sense of understanding and relatability.

Vultures Poem Analysis, Stanza 1

In the greyness and drizzle of one despondent dawn unstirred by harbingers of sunbreak a vulture perching high on bones of a dead tree nestled close to his mate his smooth bashed-in head, a pebble on a stem rooted in a dump of gross feathers, inclined affectionately to hers. Yesterday they picked the eyes of a swollen corpse in a water-logged trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full gorged they chose their roost keeping the hollowed remnant in easy range of cold telescopic eyes…

Achebe begins the poem by creating a despondent atmosphere . The use of vultures in the story is symbolic of death and greed . This is further emphasized by the line “ perching high on bones of a dead tree .”- the specification of the tree being dead is to represent the meaning behind the vultures. It is these details that not only set the scene but also help the readers understand the general theme of the poem. The vultures are described with a “ smooth bashed-in head, a pebble on a stem rooted in a dump of gross feathers. ” and were said to have been eating a corpse’s remains . This creates a dark and rough aura around the birds, making them seem uncaring and heartless . However, in subtle contrast , one vulture is “nestled close to his mate” and “ inclined affectionately ”. There is a sharp difference between the cold mechanicalistic nature of the vulture’s appearance and their fond actions towards one another- yet, they coexist. This is a small hint to the larger topic of the poem: the presence of light in darkness and love in evil. Here, the vultures- which represent dark, unforgiving things- are the evil, but the love they have for each other is the light within that cave.

Vultures | Poem Analysis, Stanza 2

Strange indeed how love in other ways so particular will pick a corner in that charnel-house tidy it and coil up there, perhaps even fall asleep – her face turned to the wall!  

The vulture is a symbolic element used to set the scene, and now in stanza two , the focus shifts away from the vultures and towards the abstract themes of love. It is interesting to note that Achebe personifies ‘love’ to a certain degree, referring to the emotions as ‘her’ and describing its presence in one’s heart as though it were a person living on the earth- portraying ‘love’ as ‘light’ and ‘death’ as ‘darkness ’, a clever comparison is made through imagery. “ Strange how love will pick a corner in that charnel-house tidy it and coil up there ”-  a charnel-house is a building where corpses and skeletons are kept- it symbolizes lifelessness and destruction. Saying that love will ‘ coil up there’ is hints at the way love can appear even in the most dreadful times and within the most heartless people. The line “ Perhaps even fall asleep – her face turned to the wall!” suggests that though love will remain there, she is so horrified by the atrocities she sees that she prefers to be blind to it. So she remains there, in the dark place, but faces the wall so she does not have to witness anything. The imagery of ‘love’ as a woman persisting even in a place as terrible as a charnel-house, refusing to look at the dead bodies but also refusing to leave, is the perfect depiction of the presence of love in the most awful and unexpected situations.

Vultures Poem Analysis, Stanza 3

…Thus the Commandant at Belsen Camp going home for the day with fumes of human roast clinging rebelliously to his hairy nostrils will stop at the wayside sweet-shop and pick up a chocolate for his tender offspring waiting at home for Daddy’s return…

The third stanza moves from the description of abstracts to the observation of a human – the Commandant at Belsen Camp . It is very interesting that Achebe chooses to include a description of a man here after two stanzas about nature and emotion – this is what links the concepts of humans and nature together in this poem. He shows how darkness and light exist everywhere – not just nature and animals, but in human beings, too. The Commandant is described rather unfavorably – Achebe possibly uses the Commandant as a human form of the vulture. Both represent death and darkness, and draw the necessary connection between human nature and simply nature.

The Commandant smelled of “fumes of human roast” which tells the readers what he did that day- burnt human beings to death . However, he is picking up sweets for his child. Within the cruelty and ruthlessness of a war criminal, we see a soft side – the affection he holds for his son or daughter . Despite everything he did that day, all the people he harmed and deaths he saw, he returns to a young child with love in his heart . This once again highlights the presence of light even in the darkness. It evokes the thought that everyone has some good inside them, no matter how terrible their nature or profession may be. The contrast between his “human roast” scent, and the use of the words “tender offspring” to describe his child, form a clear picture of the struggling coexistence of two elements in a human being. “ Waiting at home for Daddy’s return…” shows that the child is unaware of everything her father does at work- she just wants to see him. This display of childish innocence and naivety is representative of love and light.

Vultures Poem Analysis, Stanza 4

Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil.

So far, through three stanzas, we have seen and felt the existence of love within the darkness- through nature , through abstract personification , and through human interaction . The affection for the mate was the light in the vulture’s darkness, the ‘woman’ named love was the light in the eerie corpse room, and the “ tender offspring” was the light in the life of the merciless Commandant. In the final stanza, Achebe concludes the poem with a g eneral reflection. He muses these thoughts and wonders whether to be happy or sad about this small presence of love.

He says “e ven an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart .” Ogres are known in mythology for feeding on human beings – once again, bringing in the theme of death represented by the vulture, the charnel house and the Commandant. Either for feasting on remains of corpses, containing corpses, or creating corpses , each stanza had a representation of deat h. In the final stanza, it is the ogre, who eats the human alive. The poem discusses that despite being such a terrifying and ruthless creature, it has a miniscule amount of tenderness in its heart. The phrase ‘ icy caverns’ underlines how brutal and loveless the ogre’s heart is. This depiction once more signifies the presence of light in darkness.

However, the poet wonders whether this is a thing to be praised or despaired . Is it a positive thing that no matter how much darkness there is, we will still find at least a flicker of light? Or is it a misfortune that we can never find light unless it is surrounded by total darkness? These two perspectives are similar to the yin-and-yang, which depicts dualism – the interconnected yet contradictory forces of the natural world: we cannot find one without the other. Another point to note is the way Achebe finished the poem- most specifically, his placement of the lines about praise and despair. This order-structure is a clever way to resonate with the readers, as the closing line of a poem can set the tone for its final perception. It is interesting that Achebe chose to end the poem after stating the despair rather than the praise- it creates a sustaining feeling of bleakness after the poem comes to a close, as the darkness seems enduring and unending.

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Vultures by Chinua Achebe (A Comprehensive Analysis)

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Amanda Holmes reads Chinua Achebe’s poem “ Vultures .” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

Amanda Holmes , the author of the novel I Know Where I Am When I’m Falling, is a columnist and poetry editor for the Washington Independent Review of Books .

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‘ The Vultures ’ by David Diop- Meaning, Summary, and Analysis

About david diop and the poem.

David Diop was a French West African Poet whose works are a part of Negritude Literature. Negritude Literature is a collection of literary works which are a voice of the Africans and aim at raising ‘ Black Consciousness ’ among Africa and its communities across the world.

It is a movement against colonialism, racism, and Eurocentrism. Diop’s works criticize and oppose colonialism. He envisioned the heroic past of his continent as a future of freedom for all humans .

‘ The Vultures ’ is one such poem of his which was written in the background of British colonization of Africa in the late Nineteenth Century. The poet had moved from his country to France when it was written.

From a distant place, he remembers the painful past of his country, when it was but a helpless victim in the hands of the invaders. He pens a poem based on a vivid retrospection of the events that had occurred during that time. With the dual purpose of explaining the adversities they had faced and installing hope in their subsequent generations.

The poem ’ The Vultures ’ by David Diop

In those days When civilization kicked us in the face When holy water slapped our cringing brows The vultures built in the shadow of their talons The bloodstained monument of tutelage. In those days There was painful laughter on the metallic hell of the roads And the monotonous rhythm of the paternoster Drowned the howling on the plantations. O the bitter memories of extorted kisses Of promises broken at the point of a gun Of foreigners who did not seem human Who knew all the books but did not know love. But we whose hands fertilize the womb of the earth In spite of your songs of pride In spite of the desolate villages of torn Africa Hope was preserved in us as in a fortress And from the mines of Swaziland to the factories of Europe Spring will be reborn under our bright steps.

Stanza-wise Summary of the Poem ‘ The Vultures ’

In the first stanza of ‘ The Vultures ’, the poet mentions the events that marked the period of British colonization of Africa. ‘ In those days ’ implies that all the accounts explained henceforth are a memory of the past.

He remembers it as a time when the invaders exerted dominance over the natives in the name of ‘ Civilisation ’. The Africans were forced to abandon their religion and convert to Christianity, through the anointment of holy water on their cringing brows i.e baptism.

The vultures are the British who, under their new regime, brought them under their tutilage or guardianship, the glory of which is stained by the blood of the natives.

The second stanza continues to describe the suffering of Africans and the injustice and cruelty of the British. There were guns and war machinery stationed all around, making the roads look like a metallic hell . Laughter was no longer an expression of joy, but a dying sound is borne out of pain.

The natives were forced into physical labor and thus languish on the plantations. But who could hear their cries? All that was heard was the singing of the paternoster or the Lord’s prayer of the Christians, which, to them, was monotonous.

The British extorted kisses from the native women, which is a direct example of sexual abuse. They made false promises in order to gain their trust and loyalty and then subdued them by pointing guns.

All these made the Africans wonder whether these foreigners were human or not, as they had not the slightest hint of kindness or mercy. They called themselves educated and civilized, but it is love that makes man, not books.

The Africans, on the other hand, were the children of their own soil, who were accustomed to farming and cultivating on their own fertile land.

The Poet concludes the poem by installing hope among the suppressed Africans and promising a renaissance. The British sang songs about the success of their bloody conquest and the villages in Africa were destroyed, emptied, and laid to waste.

Despite all these, the Africans never gave up hope. All of them, from those who were forced to work in their own country to the ones captured and enslaved in Europe, would persevere with bright steps to create a future free of colonization, so that spring or the children born to them could live happily and independently.

Themes in the Poem ‘ The Vultures ’

The central theme.

The main theme discussed here is the Cruelty and Injustice of Colonizati o n . We can observe a detailed explanation of the unfair and selfish nature of invaders and the helplessness and agony of victims.

The introductory lines themselves denote the sudden injustice forced upon the Africans with the onset of colonization. They were forced to accept a foreign civilization and convert to an alien religion. They give an image of killing and bloodshed, and the widespread use of war weaponry.

On the other hand, the phrases drowned the howling on the plantations, bitter memories of extorted kisses, promises broken and songs of pride allude to the indifference shown by colonizers towards natives, and the unethical liberties they took with the common people. The result of colonization can only be destruction, as justified by the phrase desolate villages of torn Africa.

Other themes

Prejudice towards the culture of natives.

‘Prejudice towards the culture of natives ’ is the first theme. Civilization kicked us in the face and who knew all the books are phrases that indicate that colonizers generally believe that they are a higher civilization than the natives, and discredit their culture as unscientific and crude. ‘ To civilize the natives ’ is a popular excuse used by colonizers for besieging any land.

Spread of Christianity by European colonizers

The next theme is the ‘ Spread of Christianity by European colonizers. ’ The phrases holy water slapped our cringing brows and the monotonous rhyth m of the paternoster are evidence of the fact that in the process of subjugating the people they have attacked.

European invaders forced them to abandon their culture and beliefs and convert to Christianity. They had to embrace a religion that was alien to them, which is an allusion to cultural and social exploitation.

The pride of the British regarding their conquests

‘ The pride of the British regarding their conquests ’ is another theme. Examples are monument of tutelage and songs of pride , which say that the British perceived the expansion of their empire through colonization as a prospect of victory and glory. They considered that controlling the Africans was a monument built in their respect.

The instances of slavery in the poem are howling on the plantations and mines of Swaziland to the factories of Europe . The Africans were taken as slaves and made to work in plantations, mines, and factories both in their own countries as well as Europe.

The rustic and agriculture-based lifestyle of the Africans

We whose hands fertilize the womb of the earth denotes the theme of the ‘ Rustic and agriculture-based lifestyle of the Africans ’ before they were colonized. Their beliefs and customs are closely related to the land in which they live, with which they share an emotional bonding that they refuse to part with.

The next theme is a popular concept in many literatures across the world, that is ‘ Hope ’. The line Hope was preserved in us as in a fortress implies that when placed in a challenging circumstance like colonization, or any challenge in life for that matter.

Hope is the ultimate weapon one could use to not give up and face the enemy. In this particular context, the Africans had hope still thriving within them which helped them to stand up to their oppressors and lay the foundation for a better future.

The last theme of the poem is the positive and promising nature of the ‘ Spring ’ season. This particular season in the year is characterized by beauty and freshness, as it is the time when the harsh winter is over and trees, plants, and flowers blossom again to bear fruits and fragrance.

Similarly, the concluding line of the poem, Spring will be reborn under our bright steps , indicates that when there is spring, there is rebirth and a new future for those who have fallen ( here, the Africans).

Line by Line Interpretation of the Poem ‘ The Vultures ’

In those days When civilization kicked us in the face When holy water slapped our cringing brows

The beginning line of the poem, In those days , implies that the subsequent accounts are events that have occurred in the past. Those days are the days when Africa was colonized by the British.

Civilization in the second line refers to the so-called ‘ Superior ’ education and culture of the British, which they used as an excuse to subjugate the natives. Kicked us in the face implies that the Africans were forced to accept their customs and ideologies against their will, abandoning their own beliefs in the process.

The third line denotes yet another change brought about by the British ; conversion to Christianity. Holy water here is the water that baptists use in churches to christen someone ; slapped our cringing brows implies that it was forcefully anointed on the Africans’ foreheads, to which they cringed as they were unwilling to embrace a new religion.

The vultures built in the shadow of their talons The bloodstained monument of tutelage .

The fourth line takes on the subject of the British, referring to them as vultures, on account of their savagery. The sh adow of their ta lons implies that Africa was already within their dark grip.

There they established complete tutelage or control over the natives, which they perceived as a monument or achievement, as said in the fifth line. This conquest of theirs was successful only because of the violence and slaughter of the Africans, and thus, the monument is stained by the natives’ blood. This line marks the end of the first stanza.

In those days There was painful laughter on the metallic hell of the roads

The sixth line marks the beginning of the second stanza. Again, we see the phrase In those days used, so hereby the narration of past experiences is continued.

The next line is yet another description of the agony of British Rule, wherein the metallic hell of roads implies that guns and war machinery, which are made of metal, were present all across the country, giving it a hellish appearance. Painful laughter implies that the situation was so tormenting, even laughter was a painful experience.

And the monotonous rhythm of the paternoster Drowned the howling on the plantations

The paternoster in the eighth line refers to the Lord’s prayer of the Christians, which was sung by the British like a rhythm to disperse the ideals of their religion. It felt monotonous to the African ear. The next line continues this sentence.

Howling on the plantations implies the pitiful cries of those who were forced to work in daunting conditions on the plantations. The cries were drowned, or not heard, for all that the British could notice was the chanting of their holy prayer.

O the bitter memories of extorted kisses Of promises broken at the point of a gun

Bitter memories of extorted kisses in the tenth line imply that the British extorted or forcefully obtained kisses or sexual favors from the native women, which is a bitter memory for the Poet, as he cringes at remembering that agony.

The continued sentence, The British made promises to the Africans to gain their cooperation, only to be broken at the point of a gun; the promises were all false, as once the British had had their ways, the natives were again subjected to threats and violence.

Of foreigners who did not seem human Who knew all the books but did not know love.

The foreigners in the twelfth line of the poem refer to the British, who, after all their merciless and unjust acts, no longer seemed human to the natives, as they had no humane qualities. The next line says that though they knew all the books i.e they were supposedly more knowledgeable than the natives, they did not know love, which, according to the Africans, was the primary quality in any human being.

But we whose hands fertilize the womb of the earth

The fourteenth line makes a positive statement about the Africans. They are people whose hands fertilize the womb of the earth i.e they are village folk who are accustomed to making a living out of their land since a majority of them are farmers. The womb of the ea rth implies that in their culture, they consider their land as their mother, with which they share a bond beyond that of just a geographical boundary.

In spite of your songs of pride In spite of the desolate villages of torn Africa Hope was preserved in us as in a fortress

The next line is directly addressed to the British. Songs of pride indicate the songs sung by them as a tribute to the success and glory of their invasion. The line that follows emphasizes the destruction it had caused; Africa has torn apart due to their warfare and exploitation, and the villages in it were looted and emptied of inhabitants, rendering those places desolate.

But despite having experienced such an assault, the Africans never gave up hope, as said in the seventeenth line; that particular uplifting emotion had been carefully preserved in their minds as if it were guarded in a fortress.

And from the mines of Swaziland to the factories of Europe Spring will be reborn under our bright steps.

The concluding lines of the poem are an attempt by the Poet to inspire hope among the Africans for a better future. They were enslaved and made to work both in the mines of Swaziland ( which is in their own country ) as well as abroad, in the factories of Europe.

Diop promises in the last line that spring ( the next generation of Africans ) will be reborn and lead happy lives untarnished by colonization, as a result of the bright steps of hope and renaissance their ancestors had taken.

Analysis of the Poem ‘ The Vultures ’

‘ The Vultures ’ is a poem that is written in free verse. It has no specific meter pattern or rhyme scheme. The speaker is the Poet himself, who narrates the incidents as if he were in a natural conversation.

It consists of nineteen lines divided into two stanzas, each of an unequal number of lines. The first stanza is five lines, whereas the second one is fourteen lines.

The opening line of the poem serves the purpose of establishing the timeline of the narration; In those days implies that the whole poem is an account of the past. But in the last line, the Poet suddenly switches to the future tense, using will be reborn.

The Poet first narrates some of the major incidents that occurred during Africa’s colonization by the British in the past, then uses it as a background against which he promises that despite such a loss, there is still a bright future ahead for those who had hope.

We can observe that the negative accounts mentioned throughout the poem form a foundation for the positive statement in the end. It is indeed a noteworthy transition from the darkness of colonization to the brightness of freedom.

The first stanza immediately establishes a tone of bitterness to the reader, with its violent images of vultures and blood. The mood here is one of destruction and tragedy, as the Africans had fallen prey to the cruelty of the British.

Note that the second and third lines begin with the word when articulating that the events that are mentioned mark the exact time when Africa was colonized. The third line takes the British as its subject, thereby speaking about what exactly they did during that period. The stanza ends with the word tutelage , thereby introducing the reader to the central theme – colonization.

The second stanza also starts with In those days , as if to justify again that the poem is a historical account. The next line begins with there was, indicating that such events had existed and occurred in the midst of British Rule.

The line after that begins with the conjunction and , which means the sentence is continued to mention another example, which continues to the ninth line, thereby making a whole statement that depicts the unfavorable changes brought about by the British.

The Poet begins the tenth line with O , which is an expression of fear and disgust at the helplessness of the Africans in the hands of their colonizers. The next two lines are again a continuation of that sentence with the conjunction of; these are also examples of bitter memories. The statement is concluded in the thirteenth line.

The poem takes a new turn from the next line, with the conjunction but . Here the Poet changes the flow of the poem from describing their suffering to the promising renaissance.

The repetitions of the phrase Despite in the following two lines establishes a question, and then the words spring and reborn in the concluding line render an optimistic answer to the situation. Note that this is the point where the poem changes into a hopeful and confident tone, from the earlier desolate mood.

Therefore, the poem has a varied but linear structure. The first stanza introduces the reader to the gruesome situation. Then in the second stanza, the poet lists several bitter instances to substantiate the claim of tutelage that was made in the first stanza.

In the end, there is a transition from desolation to hope, as the Poet says that despite being colonized by the British, the Africans’ spirit has not faded and will continue to persevere for freedom. The Poet is speaking on behalf of the Africans when the first-person narrative is present.

In the case of the second-person narrative, he is addressing the British. Overall, the poem challenges and condemns colonization and goads the victims to not give up and fight back.

To conclude, words in Diop’s poetry pierce through the web of the collective unconscious created by Whites. This greed to prosper and selfishness would always hamper the collective growth which is required in the growth of the exploited colonies.

Balance in nature would only be possible if every being flourishes in their gardens simultaneously and not with one fading away for the other.

Poetic Devices

Hope was preserved in us as in a fortress – here, the preservation of hope in the mind is compared to that in a fortress.

1) The vultures built in the shadow of their talons The bloodstained monument of tutelage .

Here, vultures are used to refer to the British and their tutelage is termed as a monument.

2) metallic hell of the roads – The guns and weaponry of the British is termed as metallic hell.

3) Spring will be reborn – The children born to the Africans are compared to spring.

Personification :

1) When civilization kicked us in the face When holy water slapped our cringing brows Civilization is personified as kicking the Africans, and water is personified as slapping their brows.

2) Womb of the earth – Earth is personified like a mother because the Africans came from her womb.

Enjambment :

Some continuous lines in the poem are in fact the same sentence. They are:-

1) The vultures built in the shadow of their talons The bloodstained monument of tutelage. 2) And the monotonous rhythm of the paternoster Drowned the howling on the plantations.

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Prayer to the Gods of the Night, II

Add to anthology.

I.M. of David Ferry

The mouths of the bankers are closed. The secret Police dream of hanging and hang. The gallows

Lay down upon the hill and refuse the money They are paid. The drowsy crows stand on the eaves,

Ridges, and composed light in mudpuddles With their dark, wet gold out, bartering

With the wind. Money is finally no good Here. The offered lamb, only a rumor

Of its death, the black smoke of him now nothing More than the night extended. Sleep. The dogs

Regard the night joyfully because the dead Let them rest in the alleys beneath the loud gods

That have gone quiet in the sky. House and vulture Veil whatever aches or bleeds. The good axe,

The bow, the wagon, the viper forget— As everything at rest forgets what it has

Maimed or killed. The eyes of the poor, for once, Are bruised like eyes of the rich—only with sleep.

Come, Gods of the Night, enter here, touch One of your sleepless clients. His head

Is a rose being burned alive. His mother  Calls out from her urn, telling him to find her, 

As death has, does, finds, walking, not Knowing whether … Gods of the Night,

Take this man I love who’s being promoted Beyond his commas and the little motions

Of light on the ceiling, which is his mother Calling him, take him now to her. Without his rose.

Copyright © 2024 by Roger Reeves. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 30, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

More by this poet

The head of the cottonmouth.

Why would I abandon the hunger-suffering 

Vulture, spread-winged in the middle of the road

Eating a rabbit while it snows? Wouldn’t you

Want to touch, watch his comrades close down the sky

And, in a black circle, eat red on the white Earth?

And when the hiss of something slithers in—

For Black Children at the End of the World—and the Beginning

You are in the black car burning beneath the highway And rising above it—not as smoke

But what causes it to rise. Hey, Black Child, You are the fire at the end of your elders’

Weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof, Stick, stone, several plagues including time.

Children Listen

Inheritance cistern sweet dominion.

They had their lightning thrones they had their cages. They had their lamb pens and lamb ties not just for lambs but for their own. As soon as I understood the name of my skin sack I was handed the chain. Was told by virtue of my snow-lit skin I was Courtier of the Chain. And could be Lord Chancellor

Remembering Phil Levine

There were times when it seemed to me even you could almost believe something out there was waiting. Something you called massive, irrational, yet so powerful even the mountains had no word for it.

now she’s gone my teacher wants to know  where the speaker enters the poem

the wind blows open the screen door & it catches  on its chain. outback my neighbors are smoking

a pig to make it last. my teacher only became  my teacher after she passed. before that

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May 23, 2024

Current Issue

Transatlantic Flights

May 23, 2024 issue

Denise Levertov and Anne Stevenson; illustrations by Georgie McAusland

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Collected Poems

“All too often, working poets, in their lifetimes, are seen in fractions,” wrote Eavan Boland in her introduction to Denise Levertov’s poems. “But a Collected Poems is different; it offers a panoramic view.” Two retrospectives offer a panoramic view of very different English-language poets, mostly against the backdrop of the second half of the twentieth century. Levertov’s Collected Poems has just been reissued in paperback (the hardcover was published in 2013); it contains all the poetry she wrote over the course of more than six decades, from juvenilia to her nineteenth collection, published after her death at age seventy-four in 1997. Anne Stevenson’s Collected Poems draws on sixteen collections published from 1965 to 2020, the year of her death at eighty-seven.

Levertov was born in 1923 and Stevenson in 1933; they were roughly of the same generation. Their divergence makes a neat chiasmus: Levertov was British and emigrated to the US in 1948; Stevenson was American and went to England after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1954. (She settled overseas for good in 1964.) How emigration affected these women and their bodies of work offers a study in contrasts, and prompts larger questions about the role of expatriation in women’s poetry in midcentury, when we take into account the fact that Stevenson wrote books about Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop—who also happened to be expats.

Priscilla Denise Levertoff was born just outside London to a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish father who had met in Constantinople, married in England, and spent World War I hunkered down in Leipzig, where her father taught Hebrew and Rabbinics, before settling down for good in Ilford, Essex. Descended from a founder of the Chabad branch of Hasidism, Paul Levertoff converted to Anglicanism and earned his living as a priest in the Church of England. Beatrice Levertoff, née Spooner-Jones, was trained as a teacher and homeschooled her daughters, Olga and Denise. Her curriculum included art, music, and literature, and from an early age Denise also enrolled at a ballet school. As a teen she took private art lessons in London and enrichment from the city’s museums.

This idyllic childhood served as an enchanted foundation for Levertov’s poetry. In a poem written after her emigration, “A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England,” she invoked Valentines Park, a locus amoenus , and encoded her own name into it: “I am Essex-born:/Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,/the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves.” It’s hard not to hear an anagram of “Levertov” in “Valentines…resolves”—as though backdating her new, post-immigration spelling and identity. Yet she also wrote, later in life, that she was “among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles…a Jew or at least a half-Jew…among Anglo-Saxons a Celt; in Wales a Londoner…among school children a strange exception.”

This dogged sense of being an interloper, carrying over into her mixed identity as an Anglo-American poet, was fruitful. Her belief in the magic of names reflected her belief in vocation: “Denise,” she claimed, linked her to the god Dionysus; “Levertov” was a second baptism. Descended from holy men on both sides (her mother was a great-granddaughter of the Welsh mystic Angel Jones of Mold), Levertov’s spirituality culminated in her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Despite the cosmopolitanism, the peregrinations, she staked a claim in the dominion of the angels. Rainer Maria Rilke was her idol.

Levertov’s first book, The Double Image— prescient title!—was published in 1946 with the help of Charles Wrey Gardiner, whom she met during the Blitz while she worked in the Civil Nursing Reserve. Gardiner was an editor and publisher associated with the oracular, neo-Romantic New Apocalypse poets, Dylan Thomas foremost among them. But it wasn’t long before Levertov (then still Levertoff) became engaged to the American journalist Mitchell Goodman and began reading American poetry in anticipation of moving to New York. Meanwhile, she was drawn into a correspondence with the smitten San Franscisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, who included her in New British Poets , his 1949 anthology . While in Italy in 1951, she initiated a correspondence with William Carlos Williams, who more than anyone espoused a poetry “in the American grain.” With an ear firmly trained on English verse, Levertov loosened her sense of line and stanza in Williams’s mode, and gained even more admirers. Weldon Kees, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and James Laughlin all vied to publish her first American book, under the name of Levertov.

The distance she traveled, poetically, to arrive at that volume, called Here and Now (1957), can be measured by a poem from each book on the same theme. “Christmas 1944,” from The Double Image , is in blank pentameter, too influenced by Dylan Thomas’s heavy spondaic stresses to be reliably iambic but still beholden to traditional diction and imagery—fusty and somewhat dreary:

Bright cards above the fire bring no friends near, fire cannot keep the cold from seeping in. Spindrift sparkle and candles on the tree make brave pretence of light; but look out of doors: Evening already surrounds the curtained house, draws near, watches; gardens are blue with frost, and every carol bears a burden of exile, a song of slaves.

A decade later the imagery, the tone, the diction, the contraction of “Christmas,” and the use of E.E. Cummings–inspired ampersands, but most of all the sheer speed make “Xmas Trees on the Bank’s Façade” a thorough volte-face:

The tellers survey from their cages the silent swinging of gold-edged doors. Money come, money go. Don’t go in. Look: whether the wind, or lights in daylight, or the cut trees’ lifelike movement, there’s something wild and                                     (beyond clerks & clients.) joyful here. Answerable to no one; least to us.                         An idiot joy, to recall the phoenix joys that mock dead fires    and whisk      the ashes with their wings.

The difference in register reflects not only a change of country and climate but the change from wartime to postwar society: “Phoenix joys.” This is the New York that Frank O’Hara immortalized. (Meeting him and his coterie as a young wife and mother, Levertov understandably thought them “rather slick.”)

Levertov’s correspondence with Williams led to a camaraderie with another of his protégés, Robert Creeley, then Robert Duncan through Creeley’s friend Charles Olson, and thus inclusion in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 , under the section named for the Black Mountain School . Published in 1960, Allen’s anthology marked a break between a traditionalist poetry establishment beholden to the Anglo past and rowdily diverse cohorts—the New York School, the Beats, and the Objectivists, among others—who championed underdogs Ezra Pound and Williams. There could be no firmer proof of Levertov’s assimilation.

Further transformations followed. The tribulations of the 1960s swept Levertov and her husband into leftist activism. She joined a legion of poets protesting the Vietnam War and agitating for the civil rights movement. This came naturally to her: her father and older sister, Olga, had been advocates for refugees and other causes during the Spanish Civil War and World War II; Olga became a committed Communist. Levertov had volunteered for the Civil Nursing Reserve during the war effort, which is how she ended up a nurse at the age of nineteen. But, caught up in the rhetoric of emergency, she began writing poems that some thought were little better than propaganda. Robert Duncan accused her of atrocity porn in these lines, where the jaded consumer of headlines

still turns without surprise, with mere regret to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies, transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments, implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gullies.

The Vietnam era was harrowing in every way; by 1975 Levertov was divorced from Goodman, never to remarry. She lost her sister, Olga, to cancer after a period of estrangement. But she was now famous and a prize magnet. Her books—appearing from New Directions reliably every three years or so—gathered poems woven from recognizable strands: social justice advocacy; confessional, erotic yearning; celebration, in odes or elegies, of literary friends and heroes; and travel. She sought kindred spirits in the lore of saints and angels, and she occasionally confronted the cost of her own spiritual and geographic restlessness, as in this poem from the mid-1970s called “Dream Inscape”:

Mycelium, the delicate white threads mushrooms weave in their chosen earth (or manure or leafmold) to grow from and milkweed silk orioles knit into hammock nests their eggs lilt in and silver timbers of old barns near salt water—

all of these dreamed of, woven, knit, mitered into a vision named “A Visit Home” (as if there were a home I had, beyond the houses I live in, or those I’ve lived in and hold dimly in mind)                            that waking shook apart, out of coherence, unwove, unraveled, took beam by beam away, splintered.

Eavan Boland makes the point that America’s first poet was a woman who crossed the Atlantic from Dublin: Anne Bradstreet, in 1630. Boland’s own transpontine arc brought her to Stanford, but aside from Thom Gunn (born in 1929), who moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, no English or Irish poet transplant—not even Auden, who after all didn’t stay—has remade herself personally and prosodically as Levertov did. When the transplantation goes in the other direction, what happens?

The question is a fraught one: we simply can’t believe that America may be stifling rather than liberating. (H.D. certainly thought it was.) Also, what’s liberatory for a poet may not be so forward-looking as we imagine. T.S. Eliot, a gigantic intellectual presence, signaled his return to a cultural homeland when he settled down in London; Pound went further, to Italy, where his Greek and Latin poetic forebears dwelled. H.D. ended up in Switzerland, nearer her German ancestors and the founders of psychoanalysis. It was a fluke that Anne Stevenson was born in Cambridge, England, while her American father, Charles Stevenson, was studying analytic philosophy with Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore. She had a typical upbringing in Ann Arbor, where he ended up teaching and where she herself matriculated, and under John Ciardi’s influence, she said, “began to write lyrical poems in the manner of Frost and Richard Wilbur…and also of a famous young woman called Adrienne Cecile Rich.”

She went to England, married and had a daughter, and led the peripatetic life of a businessman’s wife until she left him, found another English husband, had more children, and stayed for good (with two more husbands in the course of time). She, too, was assimilated into her adopted homeland and its literary circles, and may now be considered more of an English than an American poet. The Library of America made an intervention in 2008 by publishing her Selected Poems , claiming her for these shores, albeit with an introduction by the former British poet laureate Andrew Motion.

Living in America was the title of her first book, published in 1965. If Levertov’s early neo-Romanticism grafted easily onto the American Romanticism of midcentury countercultural poetics, then conversely Stevenson’s neoclassicism found more nourishment in what we might think of as Philip Larkin’s England. (It wasn’t Donald Allen’s anthology that appealed to her but its foil in the Eliotic vein: Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry. ) It’s hard to imagine what Stevenson’s work would have come to had she stayed in America. We don’t like our poets this gimlet-eyed:

“Living in America,” the intelligent people at Harvard say, “is the price you pay for living in New England.” Californians think living in America is a reward for managing not to live anywhere else. The rest of the country? Could it be sagging between two poles, tastelessly decorated, dangerously overweight? No. Look closely. Under cover of light and noise both shores are hurrying towards each other. San Francisco is already half way to Omaha. Boston is nervously losing its way in Detroit. Desperately the inhabitants hope to be saved in the middle. Pray to the mountains and deserts to keep them apart.

Nor was Britain exempt: “Without nostalgia who could love England?” Her poems on marriage and motherhood are every bit as biting; in “The Mother,” her command of double entendre gives a knife twist to this hybrid of epigram and nursery rhyme:

Of course I love them, they are my children. That is my daughter and this is my son. And this is my life I give them to please them. It has never been used. Keep it safe, pass it on.

If England was—is, still—more receptive to epigrammatic wit, it did not shield Stevenson from the societal upheaval of the Sixties, particularly where the women’s movement was concerned. In 1970 she returned to America for a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute and found the country “in a profound state of discontent…. I was aware of living through a period of acute crisis.” Correspondences (1974) is an epistolary verse novel, Stevenson’s longest work, and a personal response (if an indirect one) to the era. It takes as a framing device the death of a New England matriarch and the conversion of her home into a museum and library housing the family archives, dating from 1829 to the present. The correspondence then unfolds to tell the tale of mercantile, evangelical men and thwarted women: Stevenson based her characters on her own mother’s and father’s families, and the immediate inspiration was the death of her mother, Louise, who had had unrealized writerly ambitions of her own. In the poem Stevenson’s alter ego, Kay, writes to her mother from an asylum after a mental breakdown:

God knows I have fought you long enough… At what price dancing in a sweater set and pearls on the stage sets of your expectations?

But Stevenson’s poem doesn’t just rehearse the modern woman’s all too familiar agon with her mother; it encompasses the specific legacies of Puritanism or Calvinism that shaped successive generations in New England and the Midwest. The men are the more fascinating creatures, in a terrifying way: their principled combination of piety and self-denial fuels commercial zeal and messianic enterprises. Correspondences offers a portrait of American WASP s with their culture of evangelical moneymaking and self-exculpating do-gooderism. The families’ fortunes rise and fall; the lonely and sacrificial wives pay the price. In the end, even Stevenson’s alter ego hasn’t found happiness in the new feminist dispensation, or in the distance she puts between herself and her family’s legacy. As she writes to her surviving parent, “New England is dissolving like a green chemical./Old England bleeds out to meet it in mid-ocean./Nowhere is safe.”

No wonder Andrew Motion called her “a puritan writer who at once honors and contests her inheritance.” There’s also more to the story than what appears in the poem: when Stevenson returned to England after her fellowship, she left her husband and young children for her lover, the poet Philip Hobsbaum. It was while she was suffering from bereavement and a bad conscience that she finished Correspondences , where at the end of the New England family line stands a woman who acts defiantly, if selfishly, no matter the personal cost. “I learned how to put experience into poetry without ‘confessing’ it,” she wrote in her 1979 essay “Writing as a Woman.” Her protest took a different form from those of Levertov and other American peers; despite drawing inspiration from Williams for the free verse of Correspondences , it was this book that signaled her permanent leave-taking, her “good-bye to all that.”

Much of what we know of Stevenson’s life comes from a surprising source: Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman , her 1992 investigation of the long aftermath of Sylvia Plath’s death and the biographies it spawned. Stevenson’s own 1989 biography of Plath, Bitter Fame— instigated at the urging of Ted Hughes’s sister, Olwyn—was both rejected by the estate, in the end, and pilloried by the press. It was a debacle that tarred her reputation for years, and just the kind of entanglement that hooked the psychological detective in Malcolm. She called Bitter Fame “by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date.”

Did Stevenson blunder into a snare set by conniving sophisticates who wished to use the American to settle scores? Malcolm seemed to think so, just as she thought the “gushing girl with the Samsonite luggage”—a reference to a fellow student’s description of Plath in Cambridge—was undone not by Hughes but by England. “Anne Stevenson apparently had not subdued the natives but had been captured by them and subjected to God knows what tortures.” But it was Stevenson herself, in a later conversation in Malcolm’s book, who ruminated on the theory that, “like her, Plath was neither prepared nor cut out for the fast track of English poets’ society.”

Stevenson and Plath were close in age and came from the same educated, middle-class milieu; both emigrated to England, attending Cambridge; both married Englishmen. Yet Stevenson’s elegy in Audenesque verse, “Letter to Sylvia Plath,” is a kind of exorcism in language, taking a Plathian vocabulary ( terrible , blood-red , dawn , devouring , birth , queen ) and working it into disciplined couplets:

Yet life, more terrible, maunches on, as blood-red light loops back at dawn, seizing, devouring, giving birth to the mass atrocity of the earth. Poor Sylvia, could you not have been a little smaller than a queen— a river, not a tidal wave engulfing all you tried to save?

Ultimately it was not Plath who had a lasting stylistic influence on Stevenson but that other famous expat, Elizabeth Bishop. Stevenson wrote one of the first studies of Bishop’s work for the Twayne’s United States Authors Series, published in 1966; she was barely out of grad school, and by her own admission it wasn’t very good. But in Bishop she found a perfect model to match her own sensibility, while her early acerbic tone mellowed with the years. She broadcasts her poetic debt in the ode “Waving to Elizabeth”; you hear it in “Washing the Clocks,” with its echo of Bishop’s “Sestina”: “ Time to go to school , cried/the magnifying lens of the alarm clock./ Time to go home now , the school’s/Latin numerals decided.” Most hauntingly, you see it in “With My Sons at Boarhills,” particularly the close looking:

Their bodies are less beautiful than blue heaven’s pleiades of herring gulls, or gannets, or that sloop’s sail sawtoothing the sea as if its scenery were out of date, as if its photographs had all been taken: two boys left naked in a sloughed off summer, skins and articulate backbones, fossils for scrapbook or cluttered mantelpiece.

Stevenson wrote of Bishop: “Ideas never do get anything right. Just look, just look.” The meditation on maternity in a seaside setting is also strongly reminiscent of “The Bight” and “At the Fishhouses.” Perhaps most poignantly, we hear the confession lurking behind the depiction precisely because it is not stated; just as Bishop’s mother’s troubling death is the subtext of those poems, Stevenson’s abandonment of her young sons’ care to their father and grandparents provides the dark, unspoken undercurrent to the wistful holiday scene, precisely because it is not stated.

In her essay “The Iceberg and the Ship,” Stevenson reminded us: “As David Kalstone observed as long ago as 1977, Elizabeth Bishop is hard to ‘place.’” Likewise Anne Stevenson. Ironic, for two poets who wrote about geography. Is she a confessional poet or a nature poet or a domestic poet; an American or a British poet; a formalist or an old-fashioned vers libre modernist? (It’s entirely characteristic that she wrote an essay titled “The Trouble with a Word Like Formalism .”) “Defiantly independent,” Jay Parini pronounced in Stevenson’s obituary in The Guardian. She herself seemed to understand that she was hard to place, as her poem “Temporarily in Oxford” ruefully acknowledges:

Where they will bury me I don’t know. Many places might not be sorry to store me. The Midwest has right of origin. Already it has welcomed my mother to its flat sheets. The English fens that bore me have been close curiously often. It seems I can’t get away from dampness and learning.

“Independent,” for a female poet, is a double-edged compliment. Kenneth Rexroth called Levertov “classically independent,” a way of saving her from the charge that ideology dictated her muse. Stevenson’s innate skepticism—inherited from her philosopher father—disallowed the consolations of faith or political idealism. The fact that both women expressed their independence first by leaving their native countries—like several self-orphaning female poets of the twentieth century, from Plath, Bishop, and H.D. to Mina Loy and Lynette Roberts—tells me that there’s something inhospitable, uninhabitable, in what we call home ground. (Malcolm: “Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.”) Language itself then becomes the foundation on which to build, and on this abstraction we erect a fiction that eventually bends reality to it. Anyway, “American poetry,” “English poetry”—do they mean anything at all, or are they schematically tailored for anthologies and survey courses?

In the end, any collected poems is a world unto itself: for me, a Wunderkammer rather than Boland’s panorama. I think of myself as rummaging through them rather than reading them in the usual sense. I hold one poem up to the light, root around, hold up another, drawn by my own idiosyncrasies, captivated by this or that music. “The difference, perhaps, between a major poet and a minor one,” Stevenson wrote,

has nothing to do with verbal exhibitionism or political righteousness or anything critically definable, but with an inner coherence that mysteriously unifies an entire oeuvre—and confirms it as “tremendously important” in the minds of a great many readers.

I think in this collection Stevenson was better served by her longtime publisher, Neil Astley, who hewed closely to her own selections from each of her books; Levertov’s editors reprint books in toto, making her tome more unwieldy and uneven. But even this reveals something meaningful: the difference between a sensibility that pragmatically acknowledges the limits of a long life’s work (excising, say, “occasional poems”) and one that romantically believes that every word a poet writes is imbued with an “inner coherence.” Is one more British and the other more American? Perhaps both are transformed in the cross-cultural crucible. Isn’t the best-case scenario one in which the language salvages two, three memorable treasures, or even just one, a fractal of the whole, glimmering with an intelligence declaring, in its inimitable way, I lived ?

Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism

‘Give Me Joy’

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• Chinua Achebe: Vultures

Vultures - poem review.

In the greyness and drizzle of one despondent dawn unstirred by harbingers of sunbreak a vulture perching high on broken bone of a dead tree nestled close to his mate his smooth bashed-in head, a pebble on a stem rooted in a dump of gross feathers, inclined affectionately to hers. Yesterday they picked the eyes of a swollen corpse in a water-logged trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full gorged they chose their roost keeping the hollowed remnant in easy range of cold telescopic eyes ...    Strange indeed how love in other ways so particular will pick a corner in that charnel-house tidy it and coil up there, perhaps even fall asleep - her face turned to the wall! ... Thus the Commandant at Belsen Camp going home for the day with fumes of human roast clinging rebelliously to his hairy nostrils will stop at the wayside sweet-shop and pick up a chocolate for his tender offspring waiting at home for Daddy's return ...    Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in every germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil.

The poem begins with a graphic and unpleasant description of a pair of vultures who nestle lovingly together after feasting on a corpse. The poet remarks on the strangeness of love, existing in places one would not have thought possible. He goes on to consider the 'love' a concentration camp commander shows to his family - having spent his day burning human corpses, he buys them sweets on the way home,

This is a preview of the whole essay

The conclusion of the poem is ambiguous. On one hand, Achebe praises providence that even the cruelest of beings can show sparks of love, yet on the other he despairs - they show love solely for their family, and so allow themselves to commit atrocities towards others.

• The title  is in some ways deceptive, like Ezekiel's The Night of the Scorpion . Although the poem begins with a cold and repulsive portrait of the vultures, we realise that they are symbols  of evil and their main purpose is to introduce us to the theme of the poem.
• The description of the vultures is in the past tense  but the Belsen Commandant is described in the present continuous tense , perhaps to remind us that evil is all around us now.
• The concentration camp Commandant cannot escape the evil deeds he has spent the day performing - the fumes of human roast [cling] rebelliously to his hairy nostrils  (line 32). The word roast  makes us think of food, so it is doubly repulsive that he then buys chocolate  for his tender  child (or children) on the way home.

Imagery and Sound

• The opening of the poem is dark. The greyness  (line 1) is heightened by the heavy alliteration in drizzle of one despondent dawn  (line 2) and even the approaching sunbreak  (line 4) does not lift the atmosphere.
• There are metaphors  of horror and death: the dead tree  (line 6) branch on which the vultures are roosting is described in as a broken bone  (line 5), while the male vulture's bashed-in head is a pebble on a stem  (line 9) and its body is a dump of gross feathers  (line 11).
• In the second section, the vultures' affection leads the poet on to muse about the nature of love. Love is personified  as a woman finding a place to sleep. She is in other ways so particular  (line 23) and hard to please, yet, strangely, she chooses to sleep with the vultures, that charnel house  (line 26). Yet why does love sleep with her face turned to the wall  (line 28)?
• We see the Belsen Commandant  - a mass murderer - as Daddy. Why does Achebe use a child's name for him rather than 'father'?
• In the fourth section the poet again uses metaphors : the evil Commandant is an ogre  (line 43) with merely a spark of love - a tiny glow-worm tenderness  (line 44) in the icy caverns of a cruel heart  (line 46). These are fairly clichéd images, perhaps because Achebe wanted to suggest that what he is describing is nothing new: there will always be love and evil in the world.
• The germ  (line 48) of love does not seem to grow as a normal seed would because the perpetuity of evil  (line 50) is bound up with it and prevents it from developing. (Think of wheat germ rather than disease-carrying germs.)
• There is some alliteration  in the poem, but otherwise Achebe concentrates on visual images rather than sound effects to present his ideas.

Attitude, tone and ideas

Much of the meaning of a poem is conveyed by the attitude  it expresses toward its subject matter. 'Attitude' can be thought of as a combination of the poet's tone of voice , and the ideas  he or she is trying to get across to the reader.

To decide on the tone, you need to think about the ideas and attitudes in the poem, and then decide how you would read it aloud.

Should the poem be read:

• in a nightmarish tone, as in a horror film?
• in a cold, dead tone, to emphasise all the horrors described?
• in a warmer tone, to celebrate the love that does exist?

Choose a short quotation to justify your choice.

The ideas in this poem concern the relationship between evil and love. In the first part the vultures are used as a symbol for the paradox that evil and love can co-exist; in the second part Achebe uses the Belsen Commandant as an actual example of this. Have a look at the quotations below, and our suggestions about how they fit in to this theme.

Document Details

• Word Count 1184
• Page Count 4
• Subject English

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Prolific Author Paul Auster Dead at 77

Paul Auster , known for The New York Trilogy — originally published as three separate novels: City of Glass , Ghosts , and  The Locked Room — died on Tuesday, April 30 from lung-cancer complications. He was 77. The news was confirmed by his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden to the New York Times . Born and raised in New Jersey, Auster eventually became a prominent figure in the Brooklyn literary scene (though he was also quite popular in France). Auster graduated from Columbia University with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in comparative literature. He later lived in Paris, translating French literature for several years before returning to the United States. His decades-long career included a stream of novels, memoirs, story collections, plays, essays, and poems. He also wrote several screenplays, winning the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for Wayne Wang’s 1995 film Smoke . His 2017 novel 4321 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Auster’s work has been noted to include instances of chance and coincidence, which could be explained by his real-life experiences. When he was a teenager at a summer camp, he stood next to a boy who was killed by a bolt of lightning. Per NPR, he once reflected , “I think maybe that informs my work more than any book I have ever read.”

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Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77

With critically lauded works like “The New York Trilogy,” the charismatic author drew inspiration from his adopted borough and won worldwide acclaim.

Paul Auster in 2009. The Times Literary Supplement of Britain called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.” Credit... Todd Heisler/The New York Times

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By Alex Williams

• April 30, 2024

Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died on Tuesday evening at his home in Brooklyn. He was 77.

His death, from complications of lung cancer, was confirmed by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.

With his hooded eyes, soulful air and leading-man looks, Mr. Auster was often described as a “literary superstar” in news accounts. The Times Literary Supplement of Britain once called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”

Though a New Jersey native, he became indelibly linked with the rhythms of his adopted city, which was a character of sorts in much of his work — particularly Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined streets of brownstones in the Park Slope neighborhood.

As his reputation grew, Mr. Auster came to be seen as a guardian of Brooklyn’s rich literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and later.

“Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough,” the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke , who was raised in nearby Prospect Heights, wrote in an email. “His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness — that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.

“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” she added, “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”

His reputation was anything but local , however. He took home several literary prizes in France alone. Like Woody Allen and Mickey Rourke , Mr. Auster, who had lived in Paris as a young man, became one of those rare American imports to be embraced by the French as a native son.

“The first thing you hear as you approach an Auster reading, anywhere in the world, is French ,” New York magazine observed in 2007. “Merely a best-selling author in these parts, Auster is a rock star in Paris.”

In Britain, his 2017 novel, “4321,” which examined four parallel versions of the early life of its protagonist — who was, like Mr. Auster, a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947 — was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize .

His career began to take flight in 1982, with his memoir “The Invention of Solitude,” a haunting rumination on his distant relationship with his recently deceased father. His first novel, “City of Glass,” was rejected by 17 publishers before it was published by a small press in California in 1985.

That book became the first installment in his most celebrated work, “The New York Trilogy,” three novels later packaged in a single volume. It was listed as one of the 25 most significant New York City novels of the last 100 years in a roundup in T, the style magazine published by The New York Times.

“City of Glass” is the story of a mystery writer who is reeling from personal loss — an ever-present theme in Mr. Auster’s work — and who, through a wrong number, is mistaken for a private detective named, yes, Paul Auster. The writer begins to take on the detective’s identity, losing himself in a real-life sleuthing job of his own while descending into madness.

In some ways the book was a classic shamus tale. But Mr. Auster chafed at being limited by genre. “You could also say ‘Crime and Punishment’ is a detective story, I suppose,” he said in his 2017 book, “A Life in Words,” a self-analysis of his own work.

With its fractured narrative, unreliable narrator and deconstruction of identity, Mr. Auster’s approach at times seemed primed for analysis in college courses on literary theory.

‘Beautiful, True and Good’

“Auster played brilliantly throughout his career in the game of literary postmodernism, but with a simplicity of language that could have come out of a detective novel,” Will Blythe, the author and former literary editor of Esquire, said in an email. “He seemed to view life itself as fiction, in which one’s self evolves exactly the way a writer creates a character.”

As Mr. Auster put it in “A Life in Words,” “most writers are perfectly satisfied with traditional literary models and happy to produce works they feel are beautiful and true and good.”

He added: “I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out.”

While to some critics such experimentalism brought to mind the deconstructionist approach of Jacques Derrida , Mr. Auster often described himself as a throwback who preferred Emily Brontë over the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, as he said in a 2009 interview with the British newspaper The Independent.

He eschewed computers, often writing by fountain pen in his beloved notebooks.

“Keyboards have always intimidated me ,” he told The Paris Review in 2003.

“A pen is a much more primitive instrument,” he said. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”

He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts. He immortalized the trusty machine in a 2002 book, “The Story of My Typewriter,” with illustrations by the painter Sam Messer .

Such antiquarian methods did nothing to slow Mr. Auster’s breathless output. Writing six hours a day, often seven days a week, he pumped out a new book nearly annually for years. He ultimately published 34 books, including 18 novels and several acclaimed memoirs and assorted autobiographical works, along with plays, screenplays and collections of stories, essays and poems.

His novels include critically acclaimed works like “Moon Palace” (1989), about the odyssey of an orphan college student who receives a bequest of thousands of books; “Leviathan” (1992), about a writer investigating the death of a friend who had blown himself up while building a bomb; and “The Book of Illusions” (2002), about a biographer exploring the mysterious disappearance of his subject, a silent-screen star.

Among his memoirs are “Hand to Mouth” (1997), about his early struggles as a writer, and “Winter Journal” (2012), which, while written in the second person, examined the frailties of his aging body.

By the 1990s, Mr. Auster had set his sights on Hollywood. He wrote several screenplays, some of which he directed.

“Smoke” (1995), directed by Wayne Wang from a screenplay by Mr. Auster, was based on a Christmas story by the author published in The Times. It drew deeply from his life in Park Slope, where he shared a brick townhouse with Ms. Hustvedt .

The film, heavy with philosophical musings, stars Harvey Keitel as Auggie, the proprietor of a Park Slope tobacco shop that is a locus for a colorful assortment of neighborhood dreamers and eccentrics. One is Paul Benjamin (Mr. Auster’s early pen name; Benjamin was his middle name), a cerebral, cigarette-puffing writer ( William Hurt ) whose life is saved when a young man (Harold Perrineau) pulls him from the path of a truck.

The same year, Mr. Auster, with Mr. Wang, directed a loose-limbed comedic follow-up, “ Blue in the Face,” sprinkled with cameos by a host of stars, including Lou Reed musing on cigarettes, Long Island and the Brooklyn Dodgers and Madonna delivering a saucy singing telegram.

Mr. Auster would go on to write and direct “Lulu on the Bridge” (1998), about a jazz saxophonist (Mr. Keitel) whose life takes a turn when he’s hit by a stray bullet at a New York club; and “The Inner Life of Martin Frost” (2007), about an author (David Thewlis) who retreats to a friend’s country house for solitude, only to become entranced by a young woman there (Irène Jacob).

In some ways, Mr. Auster’s detour into film was the culmination of a dream he had as a youth. In his early 20s, he had considered going to film school in Paris, as he told the director Wim Wenders in 2017 for Interview magazine.

“The reason I didn’t pursue it was, fundamentally, that I was so grotesquely shy at that point in my life,” he said. “I had such difficulty speaking in front of a group of more than two or three people that I thought, ‘How can I direct a film if I can’t talk in front of others?’”

Son of a Landlord

Paul Benjamin Auster was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in Newark, the elder of two children of Samuel and Queenie (Bogat) Auster. His father was a landlord who owned buildings in Jersey City with his brothers.

Paul grew up in South Orange, N.J., and later nearby Maplewood, but his home was not a happy one, he wrote. His parents’ marriage was strained, and his relationship with his father was remote. “It was not that I felt he disliked me,” Mr. Auster wrote in “The Invention of Solitude.” “It was just that he seemed distracted, unable to look in my direction.”

He took refuge in baseball, a lifelong passion, as well as books. “When I was 9 or 10 ,” he told The Times in 2017, “my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: ‘In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.’”

After graduating from Columbia High School in Maplewood, he enrolled in Columbia University , where he participated in the student uprising of 1968 and met his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis, who was a student at Barnard.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature in 1969, followed by a master’s in the same subject, he did a stint working on an oil tanker before moving to Paris. There he scraped together rent money by translating French literature while starting to publish his own work in literary journals.

He published his first book, a collection of translations called “A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems,” in 1972. In 1974, he returned to New York City and married Ms. Davis. He was soon trying such ventures as marketing a baseball card game he had invented before his writing career began to blossom in the 1980s.

Along with success over the years came critical barbs. James Wood of The New Yorker used a 2009 review of Mr. Auster’s book “Invisible” to parody the tough-guy talk, violent accidents and “B-movie atmosphere” that Mr. Wood perceived in Auster novels. “Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction,” he concluded, “the prose is never one of them.”

In 2017, Vulture published a tart appraisal of his work with the headline “What happened to Paul Auster? A decade ago he was a Nobel candidate.” Dismissing his novel as fodder for college-age neophytes, Christian Lorentzen, the article’s author, described Mr. Auster’s work as a “ gateway drug to stronger stuff — Beckett, DeLillo, Auster’s own ex-wife Lydia Davis.”

By that point, Mr. Auster had largely stopped reading reviews, arguing that even the positive reviews often miss the point. “No good can come of it,” he told The Independent. “I spare my fragile soul.”

For a writer whose work was filled with themes of pain and loss, far greater pain would come his way.

In the spring of 2022, his son Daniel Auster, 44, died following a drug overdose 11 days after being charged in the death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby. In a deposition, Daniel said he had shot heroin before taking a nap with his daughter and, on waking up, found her dead from what was determined to be acute intoxication of heroin and fentanyl.

His father issued no comment on the death.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Auster is survived by his daughter, Sophie Auster; his sister, Janet Auster; and a grandson.

Mr. Auster remained prolific, publishing several books in recent years, including “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (2021) and “Bloodbath Nation” (2023), a meditation on American gun violence. His final novel, “Baumgartner,” came out last year.

As the novelist Fiona Maazel noted in The New York Times Book Review, “Baumgartner” is replete with many classic Auster touches that bring to mind his earlier works: the earnest, bookish male protagonist, the narrative instabilities. But it is also a novel that reflects the inner struggles of an author in his later years dealing with age and grief.

“At its heart, ‘Baumgartner’ is about warring states of mind,” Ms. Maazel wrote. “Our hero is a philosophy professor (for clarity I’ll call him Sy, as his friends do) who lost his wife nearly 10 years ago in a freak accident and has been caught between hanging on and letting go — or even pushing away — ever since.”

Despite his long and productive career, Mr. Auster at times expressed irritation that much of his career had been assessed in relation to “The New York Trilogy,” his breakout work.

“There’s a tendency among journalists to regard the work that puts you in the public eye for the first time as your best work,” he said in “A Life in Words.” “Take Lou Reed. He can’t stand ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ This song is so famous, it followed him around all his life.”

“Even so,” he added, “I don’t think in terms of ‘best’ or ‘worst.’ Making art isn’t like competing in the Olympics, after all.”

Orlando Mayorquín contributed reporting.

Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Alex Williams

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