Question

Is In the death of a bird how bird describe earth is beauty in A.D.Hope's view?

Answer 1

Explanation:

A. D. Hope’s poem “The Death of the Bird” seems to me one of the great lyric poems in

English of the twentieth century. It is a recognized anthology piece in Australia, of course, but

my impression is that outside the continent Hope’s poetry is not very well known and that few

even of the most serious readers of English poetry are acquainted with “The Death of the Bird.”

In contrast to so many lesser poets of the twentieth century, Hope’s artistry is deeply hidden, and

what makes this poem so powerful, moving, and original is not easy to explain. What follows is

an essay in the original sense of the term – an attempt to make clear to myself my own reactions

to a poem that I have grown to cherish.

In “The Death of the Bird,” Hope writes as if he were simply imparting information to

the reader, conveying a thought-process that has taken form in his mind and that has immediately

engendered the language by which it can be made accessible:

For every bird there is this last migration:

Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;

With a warm passage to the summer station

Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

The poet’s thought-process finds its form in elegiac quatrains (i.e., quatrains of iambic

pentameter with alternating rhyme), as Gray’s does in the Elegy Written in a Country

Churchyard, a poem from which the elegiac quatrain takes its name and which must have had an

important influence on Hope. The movement of ideas in “The Death of the Bird” is clearly

demarcated by sentences, and every quatrain, with only one exception, ends in a period, so that

grammar and form are almost completely congruent (here too the resemblance to Gray’s Elegy is