Hartley's Birds
Plover
(by Marsden Hartley, 1945) I held him in my unspeaking hand after the shot struck him and saw his eyes close down upon an emaciated world I could feel his breath leaving his body his breast sinking slowly as the last sigh left him blood of the lamb at Eucharist was on his shop-worn wings. I could hear the stop of the wind in his wings Sunday morning over the waves-- the ding-dong of them made flayed, mortician music none of the mourners were paid or price exacted. (p. 202 in Collected Poems) |
→ Dead Plover was one of two paintings mentioned in Marsden Hartley's entry in George M. Cohen's American Art Essentials (the other painting being Portrait of a German Officer). → George Cohen writes that the Dead Plover "symbolizes [Hartley's] lonely, bitter agonized life" (90). |