The Bird With The Coppery, Keen Claws is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

. It was originally published in 1921, so it is in the public domain. Librivox has made the poem available in voice recording in its The Complete Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077

The Bird With The Coppery, Keen Claws  Above the forest of the parakeets,  A parakeet of parakeets prevails,  A pip of life amid a mort of tails.  (The rudiments of tropics are around,  Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)  His lids are white because his eyes are blind.  He is not paradise of parakeets,  Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,  Except because he broods there and is still.  Panache upon panache, his tails deploy  Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,  His tip a drop of water full of storms.  But though the turbulent tinges undulate  As his pure intellect applies its laws,  He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.  He munches a dry shell while he exerts  His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,  To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

Vivid Imagism blends with light-hearted rhyming in this poem that evokes a tropical clime. Leiter deems it one of Stevens's "most impenetrable" poems, containing "oxymoronic images" whose conflicting meanings must be held in abeyance. (This may not be far from the `Wilson effect' mentioned in the main Harmonium essay.) Bates compares the poem to Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina

Infanta Marina is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium about a seaside princess. Helen Vendler presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on 'her' in the possessive sense and on 'of' in its partitive and possessive sense....

as a model of Stevens's use of a symbol to invest a landscape with his feeling for it. The aura of mystery that is characteristic of Stevens's naturalistic studies is evident here in the parakeet's brooding, his pure intellect applying its laws, and his exertion of his will. Compare The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician

"The Curtain in the House of the Metaphysician" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was originally published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.An image like the one in "Curtains" is the "crisp lettuce" that...

for another expression of Stevens's enigmatic naturalism.