That one bird, one star,
The one flash of the tiger’s eye
Not every poem delivers what it promises in the title. (In fact, some poems feature titles that seem to belong to another work entirely.) This one, however, seal the deal. It tells the reader they are going to read a praising of the act of creation and right from the start it delivers. The opening lines set the tone: creation is this sense is not about the big stuff, but all the little stuff that comprises the awesomeness. From the spark in a big cat’s eye to the twinkling the faraway gases produced by an incinerator in the sky, all is one. All is great. All is creation. And it all deserves praise. After all, can you any of those little things?
Testify to order, to rule –
How the birds mate at one time only
Not that the poem is perfect. Creation is fantastical enough; why do those who seek to praise it insist on asserting that order exists throughout? Sure, there is order in the universe and lots of it. But insisting upon testifying to the existence of a perfect order in the universe is a bridge too far. Chaos and disorder is in at least an equally abundant supply. Even so, those who do testify to that perfect order—like the poet—will continue to overlook the fact that while most birds do mate at one time only, there must surely be at least one species that enjoys doing it more than once in that time span. The succeeding lines will build upon this idea of order with a rather strange and unexpected example: how the sky is full of birds at certain times and empty of them at other times. Anyone who has watched the truly spectacular sight of hundreds or even thousands of starlings swooping in formation through the sky can attest to the fact that an illusion of order can very easily be created out of what the possible illusion of something that also seems to be total chaos.
The world goes turning, turning, the season
Sieves earth to its one sure element
And the blood beats beyond reason.
One of the most interesting aspects of this poem is that though it seems like it might have been written during the Victorian Era or earlier, it was actually published in 1987. The cloning of Dolly the sheep was less than a decade away and “test tube babies” had been a viable possibility for decades. But the only process of creation available to the creatures of the earth that is praised in the poem remains procreation and the delivery of a new life. Here it is referred to obliquely as the “one sure element” available to that which is not God, but what is also fascinating is that this very act is the poem’s only introduction of chaos. The love and lust of human beings and the primal instinct of animals is described as something “beyond reason.” That is to say, something that happens naturally enough, but defies any attempt at explication for why it happens.
