Meditations Of A Parrot - Analysis

A parrot’s mind: bright objects, missing explanations

The poem reads like a consciousness trying to make sense of itself through whatever it can repeat: objects, slogans, half-stories. A parrot is supposed to mimic, but this parrot’s mimicry turns into meditation—not calm wisdom, but a restless sorting of impressions that never quite add up. The opening inventory—the rocks and the thimble, the oasis and the bed, the jacket and the roses—pairs things that don’t belong together: hard with delicate, desert with domestic, practical with romantic. It’s as if meaning is always arriving in mismatched sets, and the speaker can only hold them side by side, not reconcile them.

The sea as breakfast: sweetness that feels staged

The most vivid image—blue cornflakes in a white bowl—makes the sea cute, edible, and contained. But the line before it is stranger: All sweetly stood up the sea to me. The sea isn’t just seen; it performs, it stands up like a trick or a rehearsal. That feeling of staged sweetness is reinforced when The girl said, Watch this. The poem places a human audience beside the speaker, as if experience is being demonstrated. Yet what follows is not a successful demonstration but a collapse into uncertainty.

Origin story meets a wall: “None of us know.”

When the speaker offers a biography—I come from Spain, I was purchased at a fair—it sounds like the kind of backstory a parrot might be trained to say, a rehearsed charm for strangers. But the girl’s response, None of us know, undercuts both pride and certainty. It doesn’t just doubt Spain; it doubts the whole idea that a clean origin can explain a self. The tension here is sharp: the speaker tries to stabilize identity with a tidy provenance, while the girl insists that everyone is, in some basic way, untraceable. The poem’s emotional weather shifts: the earlier sweetness becomes a little ominous, because the speaker’s only solid facts are the ones most likely to be scripted.

The vanished house: memory as wreckage

After that refusal of knowledge, the poem moves into a fairy-tale past tense: There was a house once. This house is extravagant but also oddly artificial: dazzling canopies, and halls like a keyboard, a simile that turns architecture into an instrument—something meant to be played, not inhabited. Then the poem snaps shut on the image: These the waves tore in pieces. The same sea that looked like cornflakes now becomes a destroyer. That contradiction—nurturing bowl versus shredding surf—feels like the poem’s core: the mind wants to turn the world into manageable, breakfast-sized pictures, but reality keeps returning as violent weather.

Robin Hood as refrain: play-acting over pain

The final parenthesis makes the speaker suddenly gendered and wounded: His old wound. The poem doesn’t explain the wound; it simply presents it as a continuing fact, something that persists all day. And then, almost as a reflex, the voice breaks into a chant: Robin Hood! Robin Hood! That repetition can sound like a child’s game, a comic catchphrase, or a parrot’s trained call. But placed right beside the wound, it reads like a strategy: myth and costume to cover injury. Robin Hood is the cheerful outlaw, the folk hero who turns theft into justice; invoked here, he may be the speaker’s way of narrating damage as adventure, or of distracting the self when it gets too close to what hurts.

The poem’s unsettling question: who benefits from the “watch this”?

If Watch this is a command, the poem quietly asks what the demonstration is for. Are we watching a parrot perform its trained lines, or watching a person perform certainty—country, purchase, story—until the sea tears the set apart? The girl says None of us know, but the poem keeps staging knowledge anyway: bright objects, a house, a hero’s name. The haunting possibility is that performance is all that’s left when the real home has already been taken by the waves.

What the parrot finally “meditates” on

By the end, the poem’s central claim has taken shape: identity is a collage of rehearsed phrases and shattered memories, and the mind survives by turning that rubble into song. The parrot’s voice—part inventory, part story, part chant—doesn’t solve the riddle of where it comes from. Instead it shows how a self gets made: by placing a thimble beside rocks, a bowl beside a sea, a wound beside Robin Hood, and living in the uneasy spark that jumps between them.