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by Roman Sympos

 

 

A Barred Owl

 

Richard Wilbur

 

The warping night air having brought the boom

Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,

We tell the wakened child that all she heard

Was an odd question from a forest bird,

Asking of us, if rightly listened to,

“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

 

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,

Can also thus domesticate a fear,

And send a small child back to sleep at night

Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight

Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw

Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

 

 

The grace and apparent effortlessness of Richard Wilbur’s verse was often interpreted, during his lifetime, as an attempt to plaster over the ugly countenance of modern life, particularly the ugliness of, as Wordsworth put it, “what man has made of man.”  

 

No one could blame him for trying.

 

Wilbur saw that unmasked countenance close up as a signal corpsman in the US 36th Infantry Division during World War II, taking part in the amphibious landings at Salerno and Anzio, and the bloody assault on Monte Cassino in Italy.  His experiences changed his life forever and made him dedicate it to the writing of poetry, not as a denial or a dismissal, but as an acknowledgement: a recognition of life’s precarious and fragile beauty under threat, of our ultimate helplessness to save it, and of the love that makes us try.  As he put it in the title of one of his most famous poems, “Love calls us to the things of this world.” 

 

Such as it is.   

 

“A Barred Owl” is replete with Wilburian wordplay and soundscapes, like the owl’s “boom” that haunts the first stanza in those proliferating “o”s, all of them recruited in the service of just such a covert acknowledgement. The poem is also, not accidentally, about words themselves as defenses, or “bars,” against our darkest fears.

 

The poem consists of two six-line stanzas of rhyming couplets and is written in iambic pentameter, a fancy phrase for ten-syllable lines conforming, with some strategic deviations, to a pattern of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables.

 

This is the rhyme scheme and meter Wilbur used for his impeccably lucid, prize-winning translations of the French classical dramatist, Moliere, and they lend “A Barred Owl” much the same sense of casual inevitability and formal transparency we derive from listening to these translations. However, if we take a moment to read down the ends of the poem’s twelve lines, “across the grain,” as it were, we can get some idea of how carefully Wilbur has assembled his materials to create this deceptively simple and invisible effect, embedding in his rhyming pairs a kind of synopsis of the poem as a whole: “boom/room,” “heard/bird,” “to/you” || “clear/fear,” “night/flight,” “claw/raw.”

 

In the first stanza, the poet describes a night-scene in which a young girl (she’s “a small child” in stanza two) has been awakened by the hooting of a barred owl outside her bedroom window. It frightens her and she has, apparently, called for help. Her parents (both of them—“we tell . . .”) are trying to calm her fears by means of a whimsical transliteration. “Not to worry, love,” we hear them saying. “It’s just a friendly owl. Can’t you hear it asking, ‘Who cooks for you?’”

 

The implicit answer to the owl’s question is, of course, “We do. Your parents do.” And its larger meaning is clear enough: “We nourish you. We take care of you. We will protect you.” 

 

The second stanza is a reflection on the parents’ attempt to calm their little girl by acting as the owl’s interpreter. Their lexical legerdemain would transform the forest bird’s “boom” (a word registering how violent and near at hand it must sound to her) into a human “voice.” In this way her fear of what she can’t shut out of her room—the sound of the owl—can be “domesticated,” a word which, applied to animals, means taming them, but whose etymological root is “domus,” the Latin for “home.” Our fear of the wild, of what lies beyond our control, is itself wild, out of control, and must be tamed by being taken in, not shut out--acknowledged, not denied. What we cannot expel, we must make familiar—another Latin term, meaning "like a member of the family."  And we do that with words: we coax, we name, we call, we command.

 

Home is where the heart is, and the hearth. It’s the center of warmth and life, where the human world invites “nature red in tooth and claw,” in Tennyson’s bitter phrase, to enter and sit by the fire, and even conceives an affection for it. Home is where someone “cooks for you.”

 

“A Barred Owl” uses words both to “make bravely clear” and to “domesticate” the feral object of the little girl’s terror. The “boom” that woke you, she’s told, is “a forest bird,” but one who can speak like you and me and ask “odd question[s],” perhaps even invite itself to breakfast.

 

This is what we might call “The Bambi Effect,” a way of helping a child overcome its fear of the natural world through anthropomorphism. Grown-ups tend to belittle it, but it’s not just children who succumb to its charms. We adults, who presume to know better, have been making wild animals our pets and companions for thousands of years, even talking to them and, like Adam at the dawn of Creation, giving them names. Dogs were wolves until we started cooking for them and offering them a warm place to sleep. Then they became our helpmates.

 

But, of course, the home is more often the place where we cook animals, not cook for them.

 

Which brings us to the last word of the poem: “raw.”

 

“Cooking is a language,” wrote the French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked.  And like a language made of words, this language of dishes and courses and cuisines enables us to domesticate nature and make it easier to take in: into the home, where cooking or drying retards spoilage and makes food easier to preserve, and into the body, because cooking breaks down cell walls and softens ligaments and fibers, making food easier to digest.

 

Words may anthropomorphize animals, but the transformation is only figurative, imaginary. Cooking anthropomorphizes them in actual fact, helping us make them a part of our own human bodies. That is, after all, what “incorporation” means, isn’t it?  To take into, to absorb and make part of, the body, the “corpus”?

 

If we are looking for features that distinguish human from animal life, cooking is right at the top of the list, along with speech. Eating things raw may be something humans can do, but animals can eat in no other way.

 

The last four lines of “A Barred Owl” acknowledge this ineradicable difference between animals and us, a difference the poet-parent, an adult, recognizes, while hoping to spare his “small child” the same realization. Here’s where the poet uses words to make his own “terrors” “bravely clear.” In the world of the barred owl, which is the dark world that lies, ultimately, beyond his or any human being’s control, or even sight, this little girl isn’t human. She’s merely prey, “some small thing.” If she were little enough to fit in a claw, and her bedroom window were open, she wouldn’t last ten seconds.

 

Anthropomorphism can domesticate the terrors of the feral world, but Wilbur’s zoomorphism in the second stanza—imagining his daughter carried, like a mouse or a chipmunk, “up to some dark branch and eaten raw”—reveals the truth vouchsafed to Lear on the stormy heath: what poor, bare forked animals we really are.

 

There is a world out there that will not be taken in and refuses to be tamed.

 

It is every parent’s worst nightmare.

 

 

CODA:

 

Richard Wilbur wrote many poems featuring birds, but I still have no idea how much he knew about them. It must have been more than me. I read and taught “A Barred Owl” many times before discovering that “Who cooks for you?” was not something he made up. It’s a vocalization well-known to birdwatchers, who use it not just to convey some idea of what the barred owl sounds like, but to elicit a response from it, conversing with the “forest bird” in its own language, as it were.

 

I’ve since learned several other things about the barred owl that have enriched my understanding of this poem and deepened my appreciation of Wilbur’s craft, and craftiness. Here they are. Make of them what you will.

 

Barred owls are known for their loud call, which can be heard up to half a mile away.

 

Females locate their young by means of this call when they have food for them.

 

The barred owl is extremely territorial and typically monogamous, mating for life and maintaining the same nesting site year after year.

 

It is capable of many other vocalizations, including cackles, hoots, caws, gurgles, screams, mumbles, twitters, hisses, and clicks.

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