Crow and the Birds
When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald When the curlew trawled in seadusk through a chime of wineglasses When the swallow swooped through a woman‘s song in a cavern And the swift flicked through the breath of a violet When the owl sailed clear of tomorrow‘s conscience And the sparrow preened himself of yesterday‘s promise And the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer upglare And the bluetit zipped clear of lace panties And the woodpecker drummed clear of the rotovator and the rose-farm And the peewit tumbled clear of the laundromat While the bullfinch plumped in the apple bud And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun And the wryneck crooked in the moon And the dipper peered from the dewball Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.
Crow and the Birds - meaning Summary
Transcendence Meets Scavenging
The poem contrasts a series of birds imagined in vivid, elevated, or strangely modern settings with Crow’s final posture in beach rubbish. The other birds seem briefly released into beauty, myth, memory, and machinery, while Crow is absorbed in scavenging a dropped ice cream. The abrupt ending makes him comic but also distinct: Hughes’s Crow belongs to appetite, waste, and the unidealized physical world rather than lyrical transcendence.
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