The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt
"The Kingfisher" by Amy Clampitt is a free verse poem that explores an episodic love affair set in both rural England and New York City. The poem is structured into seven stanzas, each with six lines, and unfolds in a chronological sequence, offering distinct episodes of the relationship. The narrative is presented through the perspective of the female lover, providing insights into her thoughts and feelings while the male lover's emotions are interpreted through her assumptions. The poem begins with the couple enjoying a summer evening in England, filled with the sounds of nightingales and the sights of peacocks, and transitions to their interactions in Manhattan after attending a symphony concert.
Throughout the poem, Clampitt employs rich nature imagery and auditory details, particularly invoking various birds, which symbolize the complexities and tensions within the relationship. As the love affair progresses, moments of intimacy are juxtaposed with increasing discord, leading to a difficult breakup marked by "muted recrimination." The final stanzas reflect the woman's retrospective longing and inability to recapture the initial passion, culminating in a poignant sense of loss. Overall, "The Kingfisher" intricately weaves themes of love, memory, and the interplay of beauty and pain, making it a deeply resonant piece for readers interested in emotional depth and lyrical expression.
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The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt
First published: 1982; collected in The Kingfisher, 1983
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
“The Kingfisher” is divided into seven stanzas, each made up of six lines of approximately the same length. Although it is written in free verse, not in a metrical form, the poem looks more conventional than many other free-verse works, including some in the same collection by Amy Clampitt. It appears even more traditional because each of the first three stanzas is a definite unit, ending with a period; the remainder of the poem consists of double-stanza units, but again, the first stanza in each pair ends with a punctuated pause and the second with a period. Thus the poem is made up of five segments, each distinct in setting, which are arranged chronologically.
Clampitt emphasizes her narrative intent in her notes to “The Kingfisher” when she describes the poem as a “novel trying to work itself into a piece of cloisonné.” The subject of this poem, she says, is “an episodic love affair that begins in England and is taken up again in New York City.” Although the story is related in the third person, the point of view is that of limited omniscience, for while the author reports the thoughts and feelings of the woman, the reactions of the man are presented as his lover’s guesses or assumptions.
The setting of the first stanza and thus of the first episode in this love affair is rural England. In the late spring or the summer of a year marked by especially vociferous nightingales, the two lovers spend an evening going from pub to pub. At some point, too, they walk by the ruins of a convent and see peacocks displaying their feathers. “Months later,” the lovers are in a Manhattan pub. They have been attending a symphony concert, and during intermission they have rushed out for refreshments and a discussion of what they have heard. They do not agree, but it does not seem to matter.
The next scene takes place in the Bronx Zoo. Through the headphones provided for visitors, the lovers hear the “bellbird.” The man makes a comment that seems to his lover to imply much more than the mere words would indicate. There seems to be increasing tension in the relationship, and the answer on this day is to drink “yet another fifth” of liquor.
In the fourth and fifth stanzas, the lovers are still in New York. On a Sunday morning in November, they stroll through a churchyard in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street, listening to the choirs from nearby churches and looking at a thrush, which has paused there on its way south. Some time later that month the love affair ends. No details are given, only that the breakup was a “cataclysm.”
Unfortunately, the relationship did not end neatly. During the years that followed, readers are told in the sixth stanza, there was a great deal of “muted recrimination,” until at last the lovers ceased communicating altogether. Long afterward, again in England, the woman is looking back over the affair, trying to identify the signs of disharmony in every ecstatic encounter. In the last stanza, as urgent as a kingfisher diving upon its prey, the persona summons up her memories. However, she cannot capture her old passion. Her plunge into the past ends in an almost unbearable unhappiness.
Forms and Devices
Like most of Clampitt’s work, “The Kingfisher” is crowded with nature imagery, especially references to birds. The poet mentions nightingales and peacocks twice, once in the initial stanza and again when she is summing up the failure of the affair. She also writes about tropical birds in the zoo, including the bellbird, describes a thrush in detail, and concludes by comparing her emotional experiences to the dive of a kingfisher.
Moreover, the symphonic selection about which the lovers disagree is Igor Stravinsky’s composition entitled The Firebird. In an obvious play on words, the performance is compared to a bird of prey, a “kite.” However, since the persona almost immediately refers to her partner’s “hauling down” the musical work by his ridicule, it is evident that the poet has switched to another kind of kite, that which is made by human hands and flown for as long as the wind is favorable. Both meanings are applicable to the poem. The bird is linked to the subject of the musical composition and, more subtly, as a bird of prey suggests the developing destructiveness in the relationship; the frailty of the paper creation, its dependence on external forces, including the skill and the will of the person flying it, reminds the reader of the conditional nature of human love.
It has been pointed out that although there are fine examples of visual imagery in her poems, Clampitt draws upon the other senses with equal skill. In “The Kingfisher,” she comments on the pheasants’ display of feathers and describes both the thrush and the kingfisher in detail. However, there are also many references to sound in the poem, and they are particularly significant in relation to theme. For example, though ordinarily one thinks of nightingales as producing songs of great beauty, Clampitt uses the adjective “loud” in her first mention of them and later seems to blame their noisiness for keeping the lovers awake and for the “frantic” episode which in retrospect has produced more pain than pleasure. Similarly, the sounds made by both the peacocks and the bellbird are characterized as screams, and, again in retrospect, the poet wonders how many sexual encounters have “gone down screaming.” Although the birds who seemed to her to be screaming were not indeed suffering, that unusual wording is now more than appropriate as a symbol of human pain.
Bibliography
Clampitt, Amy. “An Interview with Amy Clampitt.” Interview by Jan Huesgen and Robert W. Lewis. North Dakota Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1990): 119-128. A valuable addition to scholarship on Clampitt, this interview summarizes her life-long attachments: regional traditions, ancient Greece, ocean vistas, Italian Renaissance paintings, and travel.
Commonweal. CXI, March 9, 1983, p. 155.
The Georgia Review. XXXVII, Summer, 1983, p. 428.
Howard, Richard. “The Hazardous Definition of Structures.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 11, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1983): 271-275. This study connects Clampitt to The New Yorker poetry establishment and illuminates the craft that transforms “grammar into glamour.” The title of Howard’s essay refers to Clampitt’s description of the poetic process in “Beach Glass.”
Hudson Review. XXXVI, Autumn, 1983, p. 582.
Library Journal. CVIII, January 15, 1983, p. 134.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. March 6, 1983, p. 6.
McClatchy, J. D. Review of The Kingfisher. Poetry 143 (December, 1983): 165-167. An insightful analysis of Clampitt’s verbal invention, moods, and preoccupations by a critic who has assiduously followed her career and enthusiastically praised her poetry.
New England Review. VI, Winter, 1983, p. 336.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, August 7, 1983, p. 12.
Olson, Paul A. “The Marryings of All Likeness.” Prairie Schooner 57 (Spring, 1983): 99-102. The title of this essay refers to Clampitt’s description of the search for meaning and coherence in patterns of disorder. Olson views Clampitt’s work as a fusion of medieval religion and Great Plains poetry, a passage from guilt to purification.
Vendler, Helen. “On the Thread of Language.” The New York Review of Books 30 (March 3, 1983): 19-22. In this deeply reflective essay, Vendler examines Clampitt’s meditative scope. Working from the idea of a “thread” of language implanted in “The Reservoirs of Mount Helicon,” Vendler underlines the aesthetic quest in which Clampitt spans “the gulfs of the mind and world.”
Virginia Quarterly Review. LIX, Autumn, 1983, p. 132.
Yale Review. LXXV, Autumn, 1983, p. R14.