They have treated birds as messengers from the beyond, the embodiment of a transcendent vocation. They have watched them in their backyards ( John Keats, “ Ode to a Nightingale,” 1819 Anthony Hecht, “House Sparrows,” 1979), followed them into the woods ( Robert Burns, “Address to the Woodlark,” 1795 Amy Clampitt, “A Whippoorwill in the Woods,” 1990), and tracked them to the shore ( May Swenson, “One of the Strangest,” 1978 Galway Kinnell, “The Gray Heron,” 1980). They have also noted their difference from us. In Bright Wings (2012), Billy Collins points out that in early English poetry, “birds can be emblematic (the royal eagle), mythological (the reborn phoenix), or symbolic (the self-wounding pelican as Christ).” Over the centuries, poets have frequently identified with cuckoos (“Sumer is icumen in - / Lhude, sing cuccu!”) and mockingbirds, seagulls, herons, and owls. Greek poet Alcman of Sardis claimed to know the strains of all the birds. “Sir, we are a nest of singing birds,” Samuel Johnson told James Boswell. The vocal music of birds has always had a great hold on poets. In A Kind of Scar (1989), Eavan Boland calls the aisling tradition “that old potent blurring of feminine and national.” Seamus Heaney has several aislings, including “Aisling” (1974), “An Aisling in the Burren” (1984), and “The Disappearing Island” (1987), which he recognizes as “a form of aisling, a vision poem about Ireland, even though it is an aisling inflected with irony: ‘All I believe that happened there was vision.’” In Paul Muldoon’s mock-vision poem, “Aisling” (1983), written in light of the 1981 prison hunger strike in Northern Ireland, the maternal figure of Ireland is recast as Anorexia. The subgenre still reverberates, though reflexively. In The Hidden Ireland (1924), Daniel Corkery calls the aisling an “intimate expression of the hidden life of the people among whom it flourished.” The aisling provides the legacy for such iconic female figures as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the Shan Van Vocht, and Dark Rosaleen. Throughout the eighteenth century, the form took on a strong political ethos, expressing a passion for Irish deliverance. Aodhagán Ó Raithille inaugurated the tradition of the political aisling with his eighteenth-century poem “Mac an Cheannuidhe” (“The Merchant’s Son”), which closes on a note of total despair. The woman is usually referred to as a spéir-bhean (sky-woman). The aislingí present and personify Ireland in the form of a woman, who can be young or old, haggard or beautiful, lamenting her woes. It has its origins in the Old French reverdie, which celebrates the arrival of spring, often in the form of a beautiful woman. Irish for “dream.” The aisling (pronounced “ashling”) is a vision or dream poem, which developed in Gaelic poetry in Munster during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Browse the following poetic terms and forms below:Īll entries are excerpted from A Poet’s Glossaryby Edward Hirsch. We’re proud to feature more than forty individual entries from A Poet’s Glossary. With terms ranging from abededarian to zeugma, Hirsch brings us along on a journey that includes basic poetic terms alongside forms from poetry around the world. Readers called for an expansion of the book’s addendum of poetic terms, and Hirsch responded by creating an international and inclusive collection.
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Ten years in the making, A Poet’s Glossary (Harcourt, 2014) is a followup to former Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’s best-selling book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harcourt, 1999).
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