The Bat-Poet

“Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?” a bat is asked in Randall Jarrell’s 1963 children’s book The Bat Poet, after he, the first bat to write a poem, has read one about a fierce owl aloud. Accompanied by striking black and white ink illustrations by Maurice Sendak, the very same year Where the Wild Things Are was published, Jarrell spins the aching tale of a young bat who becomes a poet in a world that’s hostile to it. In the animal world, bats, having slumbered through the daylight, are mainly ignorant to the day’s gifts– such as colors, like green, gold and blue. As bat learns to become a poet, so, too, does the reader. “He felt the way you would feel,” Jarrell writes of the first time the bat observes the world around him as deserving of poetic inquiry, “if you woke up and went to the window and stayed there for hours, looking out into the moonlight.” How to write the feeling of night holding its breath? Perhaps with the breath of iambic pentameter, but stopping short two metrical feet. How to show how, all day long, chipmunks scurry up trees and then into the ground, burying acorns? Perhaps with short and then long lines, so “it all goes in and out.” How to make a poem one likes though they shiver to hear it? How to make a poem that tells how a baby bird getting fed by its mother “cheeps as if its heart were breaking”? How to write a poem so good that, like the mockingbird’s song, one forgets it’s a poem? “A mockingbird can sound like anything,” the bat writes of his hero. “He imitates the world he drove away/ So well that for a minute, in the moonlight/ Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?” Bat soon understands that life is a poem, just as poems come from life– the way birds sing, the way one shivers at the thought of a menacing predator, and holds their breath, the sound of squirrels chattering their teeth, though all these we humans might call, rhyme, meter, line, image.

Jarrell is most widely known for his poetry collections for adult readers, including the National Book Award-winning The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), in addition to his literary criticism. A contemporary of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick, W.H. Auden, and even close friends with Hannah Arendt, he is perhaps lesser known than his peers because of his tragic early death. In a 1964 review of The Bat Poet in the New York Times, Hardwick wrote, “The child who understands its lessons will be wise and they are easy to understand because they are found in life.” I urge you to read this forgotten treasure and ask yourself, and your young reader: Which lessons are about poems? Which about the world?