Magpies - Analysis

From roadside comedians to moral mirror

The poem begins by making the magpies legible in human terms, almost to the point of caricature, so that the speaker can use them as a quiet rebuke to people. Wright’s central move is: she starts with affectionate mockery—magpies as petty, dapper gentlemen—and then turns that mockery back on human self-importance, arguing that what looks like animal appetite is finally outweighed by a larger, steadier gratitude. The birds become a mirror in which human poise and wise nonchalance look thin, because they are not matched by a comparable capacity for praise.

That double intention is set up right away in the opening portrait: the magpies walk with hands in pockets, they stroll and talk, and their plumage reads as well-fitted black and white. The language is playful but precise: the birds aren’t simply walking; they’re performing a kind of social ease, an almost comic civility. By lending them pockets and conversation, the speaker invites us to see how quickly we humanize what we observe—and how easily that humanization turns into judgement.

The table-manners joke, and what it exposes

The second stanza sharpens the satire. The magpies resemble men who look nonchalant and wise until their meal is served. Then the veneer collapses: clashing beaks and greedy eyes. It’s a quick, vivid switch from polish to appetite, and it contains a sting: the birds’ greed is not presented as uniquely animal, but as a familiar human revelation. In other words, the poem is not really accusing magpies of bad manners; it’s noticing how quickly dignity can become pretense—how fragile the pose of wisdom is when hunger arrives.

This is also where a key tension forms: the poem delights in the birds’ comic resemblance to people, yet it refuses to leave them trapped in that small, belittling comparison. The speaker enjoys the joke about greed, but she doesn’t want the joke to be the final truth.

The turn: humans can’t match the magpies’ praise

The hinge comes with a blunt correction: But not one man does what the magpies do next. After the pointed image of feeding frenzy, the speaker shifts from social observation to something closer to spiritual accounting. No human the speaker has heard can throw back his head in such a song of grace and praise. The comparison widens: it’s not only that men may be greedy; it’s that men, in the speaker’s experience, are less reliably glad.

That line no man nor bird is especially revealing: it momentarily levels the categories, as if to say that greed isn’t the defining difference between species. The real difference is what follows greed—what the creature returns to after the meal is over.

Greed that passes, joy that stays

The poem resolves its earlier satire by re-weighting the magpies’ character: Their greed is brief; their joy is long. This isn’t sentimental; it’s an argument about proportion. Wright grants the birds their appetite without excusing it, but she insists it is not their dominant note. What dominates is the song: each bird is born with such a throat that it thanks his God with every note. By making the gratitude bodily—something carried in a throat—the poem suggests praise is not a chosen posture but a native capacity. The magpies don’t perform wisdom; they enact joy.

That creates the poem’s sharpest contradiction: the birds are first made to look like shallow, self-satisfied men, yet they end as beings with a more reliable relationship to grace than the humans they were compared to. The early anthropomorphism becomes a trap the poem springs on the reader: if we were quick to laugh at the magpies’ greedy eyes, we may need to ask what we’ve missed—what we overlook when we reduce an animal to a human flaw.

A pointed question hiding in the praise

If the magpies’ thanks is something they are born with, what does that imply about the speaker’s disappointment in people? The poem doesn’t simply admire the birds; it quietly suspects that human self-control and sophistication—those hands in pockets, that air of being wise—can become a kind of spiritual muting, a way of never throw[ing] back the head in unguarded praise.