Junco, Jay, Yeats' Ireland, Ways of Being in the World

Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.






I’ve been trying and failing to persuade readers to consider the meaning—and value—of the phrase “way of being in the world.” For everything that might be unclear or menacing about the subject, surely it’s clear that the shrieking, bright, blue and white, crested, nest-poaching Lord of the forest, the Blue Jay, twice the size and flap of the cardinal, has a way of being in the world that’s nothing like the humble Dark-Eyed Junco’s way.

Junco is an almost nondescript little bird, who eats generic food from the feeder and is amicable with sparrows, cardinals, chickadees, and all manner of birds. He doesn’t look for fights, and they don’t find him. What a coincidence.

Junco also eats from the ground, or pecks at thistle that’s fallen from the webbed sock and tube feeders dedicated to the finicky finches (who become flashy yellow darting fops in the summer).

Junco would eat with Jay if Jay allowed it, but Jay croaks about “Our Kind of People”; he squawks that he is somebody, full of pioneer bluster, descended from Jesse James. After all, he’s related somehow to his fellow-Corvid, Crow, and only eagles might mess with Crow. I’ve watched a crow chase off a turkey buzzard—noise, persistence, bravado. Maybe Jay has done that too.

Junco’s slate-grey back and creamy white belly seem a perfect winter camouflage for a hard life in snow, among leafless trees. Unless we’re willing to cross over to the land of paradox—that way of being in the world—and call him spectacularly unspectacular, he has not one flashy bone in his body, nor one garish feather.

I’m not aware of ever hearing his song or call. I could look it up, but why would I? Junco does not complain. Even his love life is more discreet than that of Jay and other melodramatic, hormonal suitors and floozies, who confuse sex with Carnival and War, diving into copulation as if it were a seizure. That way of being in the world.

Jay has never taken a back seat to anyone in any venue, has never lost an argument, or pondered the opposing view. Sound like anyone you know?

Probably the best political poem ever written is William Butler Yeats’ “Easter 1916,” in which he is troubled by an Irish citizenry—his countrymen—who had been a Junco nation. On Easter 1916, they achieved their most important victory to date, and Yeats sees them as, yes, heroes of freedom, but also as Everymen hardened into stone: “The stone’s in the midst of all.”

It’s true that in water the stone, like the jay, is beautiful; it sparkles and gleams in a shape that began as motley. But how can a thinking man like Yeats—yes, that way of being in the world—ignore the fact that “all is changed, changed utterly”? How can he not be troubled when he sees that it’s “a terrible beauty” that’s been born? Surely it’s necessary, urgent, for the Irish to forfeit their “polite meaningless nods” and seize the moment, to be the rock and hero they haven’t been since Cuchulain’s time. But it’s also terrible, an entirely other way, and the change is frightening.

Shakespeare’s people would have heard the rumble of The Great Chain of Being as it rattled with the thunder and lightning.

Paradox. Crow. Jay. Junco. Ireland’s “motley” rising against England in 1916. These are ways of being in the world. Spoon, fork. Sheep, wolf. Stucco, brick. Passive, Aggressive. Once we are one, can we become the other? If so, what’s the price of admission, and why am I the only one interested in the question?

Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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