Blackbird and Wolf
by Henri Cole
Thirty-one of the thirty-eight poems in Blackbird and Wolf are sonnet length. Henri Cole utilizes short lines without restricting himself to iambic pentameter or a rhyme scheme. A couple of the sonnet-like poems have stanza breaks like the Petrarchan form and have a turn in the eighth line, e.g. “Hymn.” Some of the split stanza sonnets, like “The Tree Cutters” and “Self-Portrait with Red Eyes,” have stanza breaks between the seventh and eight lines, bisecting the poem and allowing Cole to describe a new image or idea to contrast with or expand on the previous stanza. The rest of the sonnet poems resemble the Shakespearian sonnet, with the turn closer to the end of the poem, as in “Beach Walk” where the turn is in the last two lines: “We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it. / The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on” (41).
The short lines are emphasized by the heavy use of end-stops in many of the sonnet poems. Ending many, or most, of the lines with commas, semicolons, or periods forces the poem to use short independent or dependent clauses. This puts one or multiple complete thoughts in each line: “I found a baby shark on the beach. / Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding” (41). His lines are sparse, with simple words occasionally interrupted by less common (sometimes multisyllabic) words, drawing attention to them: “personification” (8), “amphibious” (10), “ misprision” (19), “etherizing” (30). The result is that the language describing images and ideas is simple, while the ideas and images themselves are complex and multifaceted: “I want nothing / to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom, / or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, / or the sound of water poured in a bowl” (25).
The incorporation of nature into the majority of the poems works as a foil for the human element. Nature—animals, plants, landscapes—is always experienced through the narrator. Occasionally nature is personified, speaks to the narrator: “‘Hey, human, my heart feels bad,’ the crow asserts” (9), “says / the onyx water, ‘come into my deep’” (28), “The wind was stroking it, / saying, ‘My weed, my weed’” (35). Sometimes the narrator verbally responds, as though trying to engage nature in a dialogue: “‘Mr. Weed,’ I said, ‘I’m competitive, / I’m afraid, I’m isolated, I’m bright. / Can you tell me how to survive?’” (35).
The title of the book perplexes me. On a general level, I see the blackbird and the wolf as representatives of nature and therefore fitting. Birds are introduced early in the form of gulls and crows. Blackbirds don’t show up until the last two poems: “Even the blackbirds,/ squealing in long-haired willows” (53), “and a solid blackbird flew into view, / catching a bee in its mouth” (58). Bears, predators like wolves, also make an early appearance, but the wolf itself is noticeably absent. Being particularly interested in wolves and their role in ecology, I began to theorize why the wolf remained absent (or if the narrator or someone in the poem was meant to represent the wolf).
