The Flock

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Metaphor

This poem depends heavily on metaphors to convey ideas. The main metaphor features birds, which become the speaker’s imagination and his words on the page. Facing the endless winter, the speaker laments that his bird-ideas have migrated out of his mind. Faced with this dearth of creativity, the speaker describes his writing as “pages of torn birds” (Line 37) that might as well be “engulfing snow” (Line 38). When the bird-words return at the end of the poem, the speaker feels the triumphant return of spring.

Another pervasive metaphor in the poem is winter. Snow, the “white funeral of the year” (Line 12), describes the isolation, figurative death, and loneliness of the blank page. Crossing it feels to the poet like the doomed task of a knight crossing a snow-capped mountain again the wind.

The metaphors give the poem a sense of unity and show that ideas and associations are flexible. The birds can be ideas. The snow can become discarded birds left to “engulf” (Line 38) the mountain, which is also the unwritten page. The poet uses these evolving metaphors to suggest an evolving consciousness. Notably, in the last stanza the “wintry flare of dawn” (Line 46) transforms the winter metaphor to associate it not with cold or loneliness or death, but rather with a flare of warmth. The speaker has successfully crossed the mountain of their thought to reach the other side.

Slant Rhyme

The poet employs a plethora of sound devices in this poem to create musicality. Most notably “The Flock” employs alliteration and consonance, or slant rhyme. The first stanza contains several end-rhymes: “fly” and “sky” (Lines 2, 4), and “sense” and “violence” (Lines 5, 7). Though the rhyme scheme is irregular, it continues throughout the poem, suggesting that though the speaker is grappling with discordant thoughts and undertaking a difficult journey of self-discovery, the ability to create one’s own thoughts and put them on paper is itself a kind of pleasure. The repeating sounds also create a sense of harmony and unity within the poem, suggesting that there is a harmony to the world of the poem and the internal logic of the speaker himself.

Setting

Although the poem is about the speaker’s mind wrestling with the temporary absence of creativity, the poem enacts the drama of this event through several imagined locations. This creates a vivid sense of place, or setting, in the poem, despite the fact that all of the settings the poem describes are within metaphors. One such example of setting is the cold, windy, snow-capped mountain that a knight is trying to cross. The knight’s task is a metaphor for the difficulty of writing, but readers feel his journey viscerally because the poem makes the setting sense-rich: “riding in silence at a black tarn's edge / hooves cannonading snow /

[…] crouched / against those gusts” (Lines 10-15). These lines include many of the sense: the sound of silence, the feeling of gusting wind, the visual of snowballs like cannon fire, the taste of icy lake water. The knight is fighting the wind, and the winter itself is actively preventing the knight from reaching his destination. This fictional setting helps the reader imagine the speaker’s intellectual journey vividly.

Form and Meter

“The Flock” has 48 lines and four stanzas. While the poem’s protracted sentences and pervasive enjambment give a meandering impression, other elements reflect an artful restraint. The poem presents discrete and fairly predictable units of thought; the first four lines comprise a single sentence, as do the next four. From there, the sentence-to-line ratio varies, the sentences taking on an increasingly expansive, roving quality, but the punctuation is usually end-stopping a line.

Some linguistic ceremony is evident, too, in meter and rhyme. The poem is predominantly written in iambic pentameter, where a line of verse has five metrical feet, each foot including an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This metrical line is among the most common features of traditional English poetry, exemplified by Shakespearean sonnets. Additionally, the poem’s opening announces its situation in the English poetic tradition; the first four lines have the rhyme scheme ABAB. These lines, taken together, form a heroic stanza (also called an elegiac stanza). The next four lines have the scheme CBCB—another heroic stanza, though these rhymes are more imperfect (for example, “I” [Line 6] and “mind” [Line 8]). The rhyme scheme becomes more irregular from there but does not dissolve completely.