A single missing word in the 1902 poem sparks a deeper look at rhythm, dialect and longing
Sea-Fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by. And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying.
I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
A drunk old man’s report of sighting an angel opens on to much broader mysteries
Nest Box
When the drunken old fool saw the barn owl,
he swore blind it was an angel. ‘Half-human, half-eagle,’
he told someone in the town square. ‘White flames in mid-
a ghost with wings,’ he crowed to the gathering crowd.
‘A weird presence that materialised out of the heavens,’
he said to the scrum of reporters before he keeled over.
They searched the meadow and heath but found only pellets of small bones and teeth
and skulls and part-digested fur and knotted hair.
Which was strange, because when the young girl saw the angel she swore blind it was a barn owl,
but when birdwatchers went to the copse and looked in the nest box
they found tinselly silver threads and luminous turds
and a warm meteorite and a few feathers made only of light.
***
Nest Box is from Simon Armitage’s Dwell, a slim hardback collection illustrated by the talented Cornish artist and printmaker, Beth Munro.
The briefly titled poems, such as Drey, Den, Hibernaculum and Insect Hotel, focus on the safe places, natural or devised, inhabited by the wildlife of the restored Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Eventually, we’re told, the poems will be “manifested physically at site-specific locations and in different guises” – as installations, treasure-trails, sculptures and so on. Dwell, therefore, is an illustrated print preview, an informal, engaging, often humorous short collection that will appeal to younger readers, and occasional readers, and sharpen every reader’s ecological conscience.
The Lost Gardens project, today and in its future planned restorations, has supreme ecological significance, as Dwell makes clear. It’s a story with major historical-political dimensions, too, concerning class, regionalism, and the first world war. I’m already speculating, and hoping, that a full-length collection might emerge later from the poet laureate’s heartfelt engagement with the “Willow Garden” (as its Cornish name translates). It is rich material.
While the poems in Dwell are simultaneously grounded and freely imaginative, Nest Box addresses more fundamental questions about what we define as real. It reminded me, on a first reading, of similar questions raised by one of my favourite children’s books, Skellig, by David Almond. There, the eponymous protagonist might almost be any homeless man, but, as he eventually admits to the children who have helped rescue him, he’s really “something combining aspects of human, owl and angel”. Almond acknowledges the influence of a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, usually classified as magic realism.
Armitage’s poem is more oblique: not contained easily in any genre box, it’s essentially concerned with questioning the human response to natural phenomena, and asking how we can provide “evidence” to challenge our possible illusions. There is an ecological force to the inquiry: humans need some enchantment to draw them into a less than self-centred concern with the environment, but we need to know what we see when we see “nature”, to best be able to preserve it. It’s a big question for ecopoets, too.
Nest Box begins when the “drunken old fool” (or supposed one) swears “blind” that he saw an angel in the sky. He burbles a riff of conflicting images: “half-human, half eagle”, “white flames in mid-air // a ghost with wings”. The reporters investigating the story, after the man has “keeled over”, search for evidence, but find only the remains of an owl’s last meal.
Armitage’s narrative, casual but determinedly objective, pursues the qualifications of rhetorical argument, the “strange” and the “but then”… A second observer, a young girl, swears her own sighting to have been a barn owl. But are the two visions incompatible? The evidence for the sighting of the angel consists of the remains of small mammals (“pellets of small bones and teeth, // and skulls, and part-digested fur / and knotted hair”). The evidence for the barn owl is pursued by birdwatchers, a breed of narrator we’d expect to be less unreliable than reporters. They check the nest box and find a mysterious, mixed assemblage: “tinselly silver threads / and luminous turds // and a warm meteorite / and a few feathers made only of light.” Are the angel and the owl sharing the nest box by any chance?
There are lively if not unpredictable “turns” as Armitage’s fast-moving, rhymed and half-rhymed couplets unroll, blending journalese and lyric tones. No adjudication is imposed: ultimately, the evidence for the nest box angel may be as unreliable as the old drunk’s sighting of the creature itself. The young and not-so-young reader’s imaginative intelligence is well-nourished. What evidence, we wonder, would show that an angel had used a nest-box meant for an owl? What is an angel? What is this one like? It’s clearly not a grumpy old man with wings, and not as grand and strange as what was seen by the “drunken old fool”, either. It’s an angel the size of a barn-owl, or smaller. Should we think of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica? Perhaps it’s not any traditional kind of angel, but, in view of the “warm meteorite”, not essentially supernatural. The muscles of ratiocination and imagination need to be continually exercised by us earth-dwellers, not least because life-forms on planets other than ours are almost certain to be discovered one day soon.
Armitage’s “Welcome Note” to Dwell is relevant to Nest Box. He describes how his grandparents fought to guard the eaves of their proudly well-maintained council house against messy nesting house martins. “This kind of inhospitality,” Armitage writes, “has increased in direct proportion to soaring human populations, and the consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction. House martins are now a red-listed bird.” It’s something to bear in mind as we enjoy the magic and humour of the angel-owl but ponder the last traces of its residency in the well-meant nest box.
The Harlem Renaissance poet brings classical craft to a pair of works reflecting on the ‘cultured hell’ of a black US citizen
Monday 2 June 2025
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, nor a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
America said …
America said: Now, we’ve left Europe’s soil With its deep national jealousies and hates, Its religious prejudices and turmoil. To build a better home within our gates. English and German, French, Italian, And Jew and Catholic and Protestant, Yes, every European, every man Is equal in this new abode, God grant.
And Africans were here as chattel slaves, But never considered human flesh and blood, Until their presence stirred the whites in waves To sweep beyond them, onward like a flood, To seek a greater freedom for their kind, Leaving the blacks still half-slaves, dumb and blind.
Written more than 20 years apart, these two sonnets by the Jamaica-born, Harlem Renaissance poet, novelist and political activist Claude McKay(1890-1948), take differently angled critical positions to their common subject, and emphasise a different poetics. In America (first published in the Liberator magazine in 1921) conflicted emotions take metaphorical shape: the sonnet has stylish literary manners. America said … (number 34 in a sequence, The Cycle, written around 1943 but only published posthumously) bears the strong trace of the poet’s earlier political thinking, although written after his conversion to Catholicism and scathing rejection of Marxist ideology. The pared style is almost journalistic compared with America.
The cruel betrayal of being fed the “bread of bitterness” by a maternal, female America, and subjected to the throat-wound of her “tiger’s tooth” forms the faintly biblical-sounding starting point for the earlier poem. Its development expands the verbal complexity. Still early on, the speaker “confesses” dramatically, “I love this cultured hell that tests my youth”. The brilliant oxymoron “cultured hell” inscribes the poet’s love-hate for America, and may suggest a nation’s “cultivated” hatred for his people. But the young poet’s invigoration becomes a moral testing that leads to calm self-possession “as a rebel fronts a king in state”: true civilisation is the ability to “stand within her walls with not a shred / Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer”. This line suggests the power of passive resistance, or resistance channelled into the creative accommodation of opposition via language.
McKay’s smooth deployment of the Shakespearean sonnet form and metre also makes room for its Romantic ancestry. Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandiasseems to haunt the gratifying vision of the decay of “bigness”, the physical collapse of an emblem of tyranny into “sand”, as the speaker looks at the future fall of America’s “granite wonders”. “Time’s unerring hand” prevails, in this sonnet, over the communist vision of the revolutionary dismantling of capitalism.
“Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do,” Nelson Mandela wrote. “But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.” America said … marks the despair of the weaponless, splicing octave from sestet, and separating theoretical New World idealism from brutal reality. The country, now, is ungendered, barely personified: although America “speaks” it is with a voice whose time is past, whose prayed-for vision of equality stays unrealised. Europeans become one exploitative “ruling class” in the sestet, inculpated by the shock of its opening line: “And Africans were here as chattel slaves …” It’s the Black presence that impels the “flood” of white power-seekers forward. The “greater freedom for their kind” is white freedom from the Black population, a freedom never to be shared.\\
Although the metre is loose at times, a five-stress (pentameter) line is sustained by the sonnet’s inherent vocalisation. For example, the third line, theoretically tricky to scan, is perfectly sayable with a rocking, oratorical movement around the five emphases. More variation is possible in scanning the last line. If “half” is stressed (“leaving the blacks still half-slaves, dumb and blind”) it’s as though the devalued humanity of a “slave” had been halved again. If slaves is also stressed, the line delivers a heavily drawn-out and almost weapon-raising conclusion.
America said … gains from being read alongside its neighbours. The whole 54-poem sequence isn’t readily accessible online; however, an 18-poem extract that includes the introductory “proem” is illuminating. McKay insists boldly on his new genre: a sonnet-guided personal-political autobiography. Form heightens the political passion of The Cycle sonnets, but the feeling “I” resonates above the literary voice and the meta-poetic, potentially revolutionary genre, the public speech, is ever-present.
Rhetorical pacing and cadence inform America, too, despite the more literary lexicon. Alongside the deeply absorbed influences of Petrarch, Shakespeare and Shelley, great orators such as Marcus Garvey make echoes in the deceptively small-looking, but rich and expansive sound-chamber of the McKay sonnet.
