Bats Ultrasound - Analysis

Two ways of knowing: the bat’s world and ours

Les Murray’s poem starts as natural history and ends as something close to a prayer. Its central claim is that sound is a kind of vision—for bats literally, and for humans through language—and that when we try to imagine the bat’s ultrasound we’re pushed toward a strange, almost religious awe. The early lines give us bats as bodily facts: sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing, living in a rock-cleft or building. But the poem’s attention keeps sliding from what bats look like to how they perceive. They are darkness in miniature, not because they are “evil,” but because they inhabit what we can’t see and can barely hear.

That sets up the poem’s major tension: our ordinary senses versus the bat’s expanded hearing. Murray makes the bat almost pure auditory apparatus—its whole face is one tufty crinkled ear—while its eyes are merely weak. This isn’t just description; it’s an argument about priorities. In the bat’s universe, sight is the minor sense, and the poem forces us to feel how upside-down that is.

Clearing the myths, sharpening the creature

Murray briefly swats away the cultural bat—Dracula, superstition—to clear space for the real animal and its real strangeness. Few are vampires comes as a dry correction. Then None flit through the mirror is both funny and pointed: the mirror is a human emblem, a visual tool, and the poem is moving us away from vision as the main way of knowing. The tone here is brisk, slightly teasing, like a speaker who wants us to stop projecting our stories onto a creature whose genuine difference is already astounding.

Even the phrase radar bats is doing double work. It translates echolocation into a human technology, but it also admits a limit: calling it radar is our metaphor, not their experience. The poem keeps that limit in view, and then tries to leap it.

Hearing at the edge: music that’s also hunting

The poem’s middle section pivots into sound and measurement: the bats hunt in a tonal hunting zone above highest C. That musical marker matters because it’s a human way of naming an upper boundary—our notes, our scales—right as the bats move beyond it. Murray makes the hunt feel like a kind of fierce musicianship, but he also reminds us it’s practical: the bats’ fine teeth are bared even as they sing. The song isn’t decoration; it’s a weapon and a map.

The solfège in drone re and detailing tee continues the musical frame while suggesting precision: the insect’s buzz becomes data, and the bat’s call becomes an instrument that picks out detail. There’s an implied contradiction here: we can name the sounds musically, but we cannot truly hear them. The poem makes our language feel both clever and inadequate—capable of pointing, unable to enter.

The poem turns into echolocation: syllables as sonar pings

The third stanza is the poem’s turn, where description gives way to imitation. Suddenly we’re in a whirl of near-homophones and air-heavy vowels: aero hour, ur-area, our era, ere your raw row. Meaning flickers, but sound holds steady, as if the poem is sending out pulses and catching reflections. This isn’t nonsense; it’s Murray trying to make English behave like ultrasound—rapid, repetitive, information-rich in ways that don’t arrive as clear “statements.”

Notice how often the stanza returns to air: we air our array, aura our orrery, our ray, our arrow. The bat’s medium is air; so is speech. Yet the poem insists on another tension: human speech is drenched in selfhood—our repeats obsessively—while bat sonar is impersonal, purely functional. Murray braids them anyway, implying that our most human act (speaking) is also an animal act, a way of striking the world and receiving it back.

Challenging question: is this “our” world, or the world’s sound?

When the poem chants our ur-area and we air our array, it sounds triumphant—like language claiming territory. But echolocation doesn’t own what it maps; it only survives by it. If our words are also a kind of sonar, does the repeated our reveal mastery, or anxiety—the need to keep asserting possession because the world remains mostly ungraspable?

From biology to theology: the “rare ear” and Yahweh

The last line, A rare ear, our aery Yahweh, brings the poem’s strangeness to a peak. Yahweh is not just an exotic flourish; it pulls the poem toward the idea of a god defined by breath and utterance (the name itself is airy in the mouth). By calling Yahweh an aery presence and a rare ear, Murray suggests a divinity that is less an eye in the sky than a listening intelligence—something that receives vibrations, meanings, cries.

This ending also reframes the earlier bat-face-as-ear image. The bat becomes a kind of emblem: a creature built to listen beyond the human range. The poem’s final tension is the most haunting one: to imagine a listening god is comforting, but it is also unsettling, because it implies that everything sounded into the air—every ah, every err, every near-miss syllable—might be “heard” even when it can’t be cleanly understood. Murray ends not with explanation but with an atmosphere: air, ear, and a name that feels like breath, leaving us suspended in the sonic dark the bats inhabit so expertly.