Swallows

We took another rock-collecting trip Sunday morning to Lake Livingston, 70 miles north of Houston. Among the beer cans and dead fish we found much petrified wood and rose quartz but no arrowheads. We stopped for gasoline a few miles from the lake, and in the men’s room my sons and I saw this magic-markered on the wall: “Jews must DIE!”

A family was camping on the beach. An adolescent boy sat in a lawn chair, shooting an air rifle at the swallows swarming beneath the bridge that crosses the lake. A man in a Rodinesque pose was sitting nearby on a box, fishing. On his hip was a holstered pistol. On the way home, in front of a modular home business, we saw a sign saying “FEMA Checks Accepted.” Another lot was called Repo Depo, and we saw a roadside stand selling swords and knives, and many more selling fireworks.

I could see all of these things, no doubt, in Ohio or Vermont (except maybe the swords), but probably not within a 10-mile radius. This is Texas, a place of concentrated baroque weirdness. We ate lunch at Whataburger.

What I’ll remember best from Sunday’s visit to Lake Livingston are the swallows, hundreds of them diving in long arcs under the bridge and over the beach. My wife and I had a plot in a community garden near our house in upstate New York, and when I would go out in the evening to weed, water or harvest, I watched the swallows swooping, gathering their own harvest of insects. They are not like pigeons, which fly in dense, synchronized flotillas. Swallows appear to be less social than pigeons. They swarm like oversized mosquitoes, clusters of individual birds rather than choreographed groups, and seem to have no leaders. Is this why Yeats chose them from among all the birds in Ireland to use in his poem “Coole Park, 1929?”

“I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

“There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well set and excellent company.

“They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman's powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.

“Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate - eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade -
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.”

William Maxwell took the opening phrase of the third stanza for the title of his second novel, They Came Like Swallows, published in 1937. Implicit in the poem and the novel is the notion of swallows as somewhat solitary nomads – perhaps here today, but certainly gone tomorrow. Rock doves (pigeons) or crows would not have worked Yeats was not a naturalist – after all, the physical world is merely maya -- but he knew enough about swallows to use them accurately as symbols. Swallows find “certainty upon the dreaming air” – at least until an owl or hawk nails them.

In 1939, the year Yeats died, Eugenio Montale wrote a poem in which swallows figure. This is “Lindau,” as translated by Jeremy Reid:

“Unfailingly the swallows maintains life,
returning here beak needling with a straw.
At night by the piers, slack water
Sluggishly wears through the eroding shale.
Torches smoke, their gusty shadows
Played out fluently on the lifeless shore.
In the plaza a saraband strikes up.
Listen, the wheels of the paddleboats wail.”

James Marcus at House of Mirth has done much translation from the Italian, including a poem by Aldo Buzzi. Last week, we exchanged notes about the poetry of Montale and Cesare Pavese. James’ characterization of Montale’s poems as “oblique, glimmering, cryptic” precisely describes “Lindau.” Human and animal life hardly touch, and a swallow can build a nest without worrying about air rifles