A Gull Goes Up

Gulls when they fly move in a liquid arc,
Still head, and wings that bend above the breast, 
Covering its glitter with a cloak of dark,
Gulls fly. So as at last toward balm and rest, 
Remembering wings, the desperate leave their earth, 
Bear from their earth what there was ruinous-crossed,
Peace from distress, and love from nothing-worth, 
Fast at the heart, its jewels of dear cost.

Gulls go up hushed to that entrancing flight,
With never a feather of all the body stirred.
So in an air less rare than longing might 
The dream of flying lift a marble bird.
Desire it is that flies; then wings are freight 
That only bear the feathered heart no weight.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“A Gull Goes Up” was published in Léonie Adams’s collection Those Not Elect (Robert M. McBride and Company, 1925). In “The American Sonnet Community in the Early 1920s: The Alternative Evolution,” published in the CEA Critic vol. 74, no. 1 (Fall 2011), Paul Munn, former professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, writes that Adams’s sonnet “is affiliated with those of [Robert] Frost and [E. E.] Cummings in representing a speaker’s response to an element of nature and more specifically resembles Romantic poems in which the speaker responds to the sound or flight of birds—[John] Keats’s nightingale, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley’s skylark, [W. B.] Yeats’s swans at Coole park in 1919 and his falcon turning in a gyre in 1921. It also recalls any number of Christian poems in its seeing an object of nature, a bird’s flight in particular, as emblems of the human spiritual condition from George Herbert’s 1633 ‘Easter Wings’ to [Gerard Manley] Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover. [. . .] The image of a ‘marble bird’ that might be lifted by ‘the dream of flying’ ‘in an air less rare than longing’ strains logic in the manner of the paradoxical language of Herbert and [John] Donne. The poem is metaphysical both in the broad sense that it contemplates mystical connections between the spiritual world and its earthly emblems and in the sense that it includes a difficult and strikingly unexpected, even incongruous poetic imagery.”