Elegy of a Meadowlark
He was a flash of white I flushed from
November’s uncut hayfield, I’d
mistaken for a quail.
The shotgun against my shoulder kicked
as I watched him drop twenty yards beyond
the meadow he’d risen from.
His flute-like whistle silenced.
His yellow breast with a blackened V,
hardly as large as my hand. His body
still warm
eyes glistening like a promise
I now held lifeless, limp.
So, to keep his memory alive, I plucked
his feathers to keep in a jar for luck
as if luck was something I could hold.
___________________
Chapman Hood Frazier
Review by Estill Pollock
The use of the term ‘elegy’ might suggest a moment of mindful repose, but in “Elegy for a Meadowlark,” with its theme of firearms and misidentification, one might think it more like “Ode to a Nightingale’s” twisted sister. A meadowlark is killed, accidentally ‘mistaken for a quail,’ and the narrator’s acknowledgement of the bird’s physical beauty, and indeed its watery trill, invites a moment of quiet introspection. While one might expect that a shotgun discharge would turn a songbird into soup, the creature remains enough intact to provide trophy feathers ‘for luck.’ That is the poem’s arc; the end.
At a closer reading, it remains unclear how a jar of feathers promotes luck in its most abstract sense, but the narrator appears contrite, having observed the dead bird’s eyes ‘glistening like a promise’—a promise neatly curtailed by shotgun pellets traveling at 1200 feet-per-second.
For the moment, set aside any notion of someone wandering into a remote area with a shotgun—potential suicide trope—or that of yet another disaffected young man with a firearm. Life, like poetry, heaves with symbol and metaphor. In this case, the final line of this fifteen-line piece serves as the poem’s exemplar. Feathers held ‘for luck/as if luck was something I could hold’ establishes a state of mind. In the beauty and loss of the meadowlark the narrator observes himself, his own life, and a need to ‘gather’ luck and hold its intangible force as one might gather the stray feathers in a jar.
Deceptively simple, effectively six sentences set out as short verse lines, and without particular regard to technical aspects of poetry apart from spare imagery, simile and a neat slant rhyme of plucked/luck and then a further repetition of the latter word to emphasize its importance, the poem brought to mind James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” another brief poem, wherein the narrator observes the physical world around him, at last overwhelmed by its existential weight and beauty, ending, ‘I have wasted my life.’ A poem of primitive undertones, as here, as the narrator observes, life and luck ‘hardly as large as my hand.’
Review by Paul Jones
This elegy is a song of regret. The hunter confronts his mistake holding it still warm but lifeless in his hand. As atonement and to preserve his memory of the poor bird, he plucked its feathers and converts them into tokens of luck. Not good luck for the bird. But neither for the hunter “as if luck was something [he] could hold.” A very nice turn and close.