In many cultures, birds are thought to have a connection to the worlds beyond this one. They have what we earthbound humans see as ultimate freedom – to cruise through the sky on a whim. It’s lent them a supernatural air that has influenced their place in our mythologies from the beginning of storytelling itself. So with fall starting to darken the sky and cool the wind, I put forth my two favorite examples of birds and what they represent to me: XTC’s song “Rook” and Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven”.
The leading myth about birds is their connection to the soul… crows, ravens and rooks (which are different names for the same species of large, black bird) have been specifically named as the carriers of dying souls into the Great Beyond. They have a unique place in our spiritual thoughts… they’re omens of death, but can also be seen as hopeful metaphors for transcending this mortal life.
This is the uneasy perspective from which XTC’s Andy Partridge wrote “Rook” back in 1991. He chose a song arrangement that features a piano backed by an orchestra, which gives the song a haunting, timeless quality. The opening piano chords are methodical, unhurried, like the ticking of a clock. This atmosphere pervades the whole song, only picking up its pace later on by subdividing the beat and increasing the swirling runs of strings during the bridge. He establishes the idea of the song in the first verse:
“Rook, rook, read from your book,
Who murders who and where is the treasure hid?
Crow, crow, spill all you know
Is that my name on the bell?”
He’s a man confronting the inescapability of death, and to deal with this he goes right to the source – literally speaking to the bird who will carry him out of this life. He combines this with another funereal image of a bell tolling someone’s death, and passes through the different stages of mourning (for himself!) in further lines… first, a search for understanding:
“What’s the message that’s written under the veils of clouds?
Plans eternal, I know you know, so don’t blurt out loud”
Then anger:
“Rook, rook, by hook or by crook,
I’ll make you tell me what this whole thing’s about”
Moving on to bargaining:
“If I die and find that I had a soul inside
Promise me that you’ll take it up on its final ride”
And finally to acceptance -- and almost perfectly mirroring the first verse:
“Crow, crow, before I let go,
Is that my name on the bell?”
The song ends with final, not-quite discordant notes on the piano, a great end to what Andy Partridge has called his “most successful” attempt at songwritng – and that’s something coming from a man who has written over 300 unique and witty songs over the last 30 years.
Where “Rook” ends on an ultimately hopeful note of letting go of worldly things, almost the exact opposite happens to the narrator of Poe’s “The Raven”. Here is a man pinned down by his own ponderous thoughts, having a similar confrontation with a bird who holds the answers he’s always longed to know, but the answers are anything but comforting.
His revelation comes on a dark night in December, a “midnight dreary” that he’s spending in his library. To begin with, it’s an oppressive place, full of purple curtains and embers dying in the fireplace. He’s there mourning the loss of a “rare and radiant maiden” named Lenore. It’s clearly her death that’s kept him up so late, poring over “quaint and curious volume[s] of forgotten lore”, presumably looking for some sort of answer to why he‘s been left alone in this world. He hears a knocking at the door, and goes to see who’s there, but finds no one.
He goes back to his reading, and then something taps at the window. He opens the lattice, and a raven flies in, immediately flies to perch on a plaster bust above the door, and then just sits there, looking at him. The man, startled by its appearance and the look in its eye, starts talking to it. He first asks its name, and to his surprise, it actually speaks back, answering “Nevermore”. He’ll soon find out that this is the only word the bird knows how to say.
And so begins a sort of conversation he has with the bird, during which he goes from amused to furious to despairing. He laughs at first, since the bird seems so intent on staying in the room, and tells it that he knows it will leave eventually, since everything -- including Lenore -- does, but the raven again says “Nevermore.” (Meaning: I have no intention of going anywhere.)
I won’t be thorough enough to go through the poem and reiterate every line, but I’ll put my own simple translation of the “conversation” the narrator and the bird have below. Poe says it much more emotionally, but it all boils down to this…
“Well, if you’re not going to give me any straight answers, then help me forget about Lenore!”
“No. You’ll never be able to forget.”
“Is there any cure for my broken heart?”
“No. You‘ll always feel this way.”
“Will I ever see her again?”
“No. There is no hope.”
He finally orders the thing to get out, and its final answer – the only thing it needs to say – is “Nevermore.” And this is where we leave our narrator at the end of the poem, still under the demonic gaze of this bird that is actually himself, the embodiment of his own psyche dragging him down into despair, with no way out.
The ultimate question of this poem, and what makes it so interesting to contemplate, is this: How long does it take before the narrator *knows* that the bird’s answer is always going to be the same? Does he eventually ask his questions knowing what the answer is going to be? If he does, then his agony is of his own devising, his ruin fueled by his own grief and fury. The ability of the human mind to turn on itself is a theme in Poe’s other writings, but is never stated so perfectly and efficiently as he has done here.
So with these two works, we realize we are given a choice. Loss, of both loved ones and one’s own self, is a given. It’s how we deal with this knowledge that determines the state of our souls, soaring high above the world, or pinned in the shadows under its own ponderous weight.
