'The Monarchs’ Late-Emerging Tribes Ascend'

Serendipity never disappoints. I was reading What the Light Was Like (1985) by the front window Saturday afternoon. I haven’t read Amy Clampitt’s work in several years, and remember how refreshing her poems were back in the poetically dreary nineteen-eighties. I’ve always liked “Urn-Burial and the Butterfly Migration,” which mingles Sir Thomas Browne, Paradise Lost and monarch butterflies, among other things. The poem’s dense texture is particularly rich and pleasing on the tongue. Read these lines aloud: “From the fenced beanfield, / crickets’ brisk scrannel / plucks the worn reed of / individual survival.”

 

Scrannel? The word illustrates Emerson’s notion that “language is fossil poetry.” The OED suggests it derives from the Norwegian skran, meaning “lean, shrilled.” The definition is a miniature lesson in English Lit: “Thin, meagre. Now chiefly as a reminiscence of Milton's use, usually with the sense: Harsh, unmelodious.” The Milton allusion is to “Lycidas”: “. . . their lean and flashie songs / Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.” Scrannel shows up later in Browning and Auden. A later phrase in Clampitt’s poem, “a shadeless Vallombrosa,” echoes a well-known phrase in Paradise Lost: “autumnal leaves that strow the brooks, in Vallombrosa.” Back to Clampitt’s butterflies migrating across the Great Plains:

 

“Listen

as the monarchs’ late-emerging

tribes ascend; you will hear

nothing. In wafted twos and threes

you may see them through the window

of a southbound Greyhound

bus, adrift across the

Minnesota border.”

 

As to serendipity: it’s November. I assumed I had seen my last butterfly of the season, and would have to settle for Nabokov and poems like Clampitt’s until spring. Outside the bay window, flitting among the tubular blossoms of the firebush, was a cloudless sulphur, a large yellow butterfly.