Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

Today's post on one of my favorite poems, Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather", is by Tyler Mills, a poet and former UMD classmate of mine who is so cool she has her own website. You can read the poem at the link above or at the end of Tyler's post.

This poem is maybe a little trickier to follow that some of the ones I have recently posted, so I will enter teacher mode for a moment to get you started, and tell you that a rook is a bird (according to my dictionary, it's "a gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face"). If you find yourself getting lost in the poem, try reading straight through the line breaks until the end of each sentence. Thanks, Tyler, for this great post!

This day in the second week of April, a cold rain has been soaking into the concrete of the walkways that lead to the looming buildings of my city university. It is the kind of morning when rusty drips find your scalp through the cracks in the platform overhang, the train is late, and people crush you against a metal bar with their damp coats. Later, the fluorescent lights of your composition classroom show rows of pale, tired students sitting in front of the crinkled pages of their homework.

I pull out a huge pink costume scarf from my backpack like a magician, but instead of it transforming into a long knotted rope to lead us out the window, I fold the fabric in half and wear it. A few students smile.

Whimsy. I’ll take it!

For those of us in a semester cycle (or those who experience spring’s seasonal tax-season stress), National Poetry Month occurs at a time when one’s own creative projects become buried under laundry, library books, and unopened junk mail. “April is the cruelest month,” writes T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” Crocuses spike from the mud along a chain link fence, but we can’t help but smell the dirt and think of its duality—life and death—and the rain that makes this duality even more present to us. The earth is being creative, but even as we comment on its changes, our own struggle for creativity seems wan in comparison.

More bedraggled students wander into my classroom, and I point out that when they go outside, they will be able to see tiny yellow buds appearing on the bushes outside the building. A few more smile. The classroom is thawing slowly, but thawing.

In this second week of National Poetry Month, I keep returning to Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and what we—poets and non-poets alike—can expect from inspiration at a time when inspiration can seem just out of reach or absolutely absent. Plath’s poem begins this way:

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye,

The black rook “[a]rranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain” promises design. The act of arrangement seems like a mind dealing with the problem of mood and deciding what to do with it. I love how the beginning of this poem acknowledges the speaker’s search for inspiration, especially in the way the stanzas break on “accident” after the speaker confesses, “I do not expect a miracle.” But “an accident”—enjambed, hanging out in the white space of the poem’s weather—throws us into even more uncertainty. Chance cannot even “set the sign on fire/ In my eye”.

What then?

If the mood of the weather cannot give us the bird, or even some abstract “accident” inspiration, what hope is there for us in the month of April? The speaker wants “some backtalk/ from the mute sky,” but the sky remains “mute.” Yet what I love about “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” is the poem’s turn that happens next:

I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—

The speaker “can’t honestly complain”? (And, we can read some word play in “honestly.” Is the speaker being conversational, or is she saying that complaining would be dishonest?) One reason that the poem gives us is the presence of “minor light” that she finds in the gloom: playing off of the domestic space of the “kitchen table or chair” and created perhaps by the speaker’s own will (by the word “incandescent,” suggesting a bulb switched on). April might be “mute” to us. But,
With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles.

The speaker’s voice is hesitant, self-correcting, and critical. But, honest. And, poetry at its best.

You can read the entire poem on the Poetry Foundation’s website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178972 .