The Bat
Ruth Pitter (1897-1992)
Overview
Batman has got a lot to answer for really. Fancy getting the whole world to think of bats as some sort of scary monsters! What an outrage. We should probably put some blame on Bram Stoker as well.
This poem is about the poetic voice’s preconceptions about bats as disgusting creatures being overturned when fortune (or more precisely, a cat) brings her into close contact with one. From fear and disgust, we recognise the fineness of the creature and its vulnerability and our opinion is completely upended.
Context
Ruth Pitter is a British poet who had a career spanning 60 years. Her creatively entitled first collection, ‘First Poems’, was published in 1920 and her final collection, ‘Selected Poems’, in 1979.
This poem comes from somewhere in the middle. It was published in the collection ‘A Trophy of Arms’ that won the Hawthornden Poetry Prize in 1937. The collection explores themes of love and loss, but there is also a strong focus and appreciation of the natural world throughout her work.
Glossary:
eldritch – weird and sinister or ghostly
Muse – a source of creative inspiration
crapy – delicately wrinkled
Lightless, unholy, eldritch thing,
Whose murky and erratic wing
Swoops so sickeningly, and whose
Aspect to the female Muse
Is a demon’s, made of stuff
Like tattered, sooty waterproof,
Looking dirty, clammy, cold.
Wicked, poisonous, and old;
I have maligned thee!… for the Cat
Lately caught a little bat,
Seized it softly, bore it in.
On the carpet, dark as sin
In the lamplight, painfully
It limped about, and could not fly.
Even fear must yield to love,
And pity makes the depths to move.
Though sick with horror, I must stoop,
Grasp it gently, take it up,
And carry it, and place it where
It could resume the twilight air.
Strange revelation! warm as milk,
Clean as a flower, smooth as silk!
O what a piteous face appears,
What great,fine thin translucent ears
What chestnut down and crapy wings,
Finer than any lady’s things –
And O a little one that clings!
Warm, clean and, lovely, though not fair,
And burdened with a mother’s care;
Go hunt the hurtful fly, and bear
My Blessing to your kind in air.
Themes
Apart from the obvious focus on Nature and the appreciation of the subtle wonders of the natural world, this poem could be taken as a broader reflection on diversity and difference – see culture and class. It moves from the extreme of hate and fear towards the unknown to love and appreciation as the mysteries of an unseen world are unravelled for the poetic voice.
Content
The opening of the poem establishes the status quo and the initial fear and loathing towards the bat. Its appearance and movements are depicted as demonic and its actions given evil motivation.
However, the about face starts on line two of the second stanza thanks to an unlikely hero. Although bats might not be very keen on being hunted down by sadistic cats, in this case the cat was clearly just trying to help the poetic voice recognise the error of her ways. The poor bat is left in a bit of a sorry state by the very forward thinking cat who must have gone in a bit heavy pawed.
This piteous state is what stirs the poetic voice into action as swooped to lift it away from the further attentions of the cat. She tries to remove it from danger and put it somewhere it can recover and get back about its business.
However, in the fourth stanza, while carrying the bat, the poetic voice recognises the beauty of something previously reviled. Its soft fur, warmth and delicate wings transform the former impression of bats as hideous.
The poetic voice impression spins on its head from the first stanza in the final stanza. As well as its fine beauty, the bat’s actions are painted in more human terms with the evil swooping and flapping about in the dark, now seen as a mother’s providing for her children, hunting flies to feed them.
The final line gives the fly the Ruth Pitter stamp of approval and a blessing to go about with its business.
Interestingly, you might note that Pitter doesn’t fully learn her lesson as she has a little jab at the ‘hurtful fly’ and makes that the new object of her animal bigotry. What an outrage!
I mentioned in the themes section that this could be seen in terms of culture or class and this is clear from the dichotomous thinking, which sees the unfamiliar as evil/disgusting/other, but once something becomes familiar we recognise the richness and beauty of it and can immediately find connections and relatability.
Language and Techniques
One of the most striking things about this poem is the juxtaposition between the imagery used to describe the preconceptions of the bat and then the altered view.
Pitter uses a semantic field of religious terms to cast the bat as the antithesis of our concept of angels. Bats are ‘lightless’, ‘unholy’, have a ‘demon’s’ appearance and they are ‘dark as sin’. Each of these religious terms contributes to a sense of an innate evilness in bats and all the bats actions and elements of their appearance are seen in this light. So, while we might talk about the grace of a bird’s flight, Pitter sees the opposite in the bat’s ‘murky and erratic wing’. So the swiftness and nimbleness of a bird’s flight seen in the bat’s night time context is suddenly unpredictable and she goes further to consider the ‘swoops so sickening’ as if this movement at night is somehow sinister and intended to cause harm.
This framing of bats as symbols of evil leads to the believe that everything about them is unpleasant. Much like kids grow up thinking snakes must be slimy because of their constant association with nefariousness, the poetic voice she’s them as ‘tattered, sooty’, ‘dirty, clammy and cold.’ This combination of tactile imagery reflects this preconceived idea of bats as a fundamentally unpleasant creature, not just with evil intentions, but all aspects of its body being somehow monstrous and disgusting to the touch.
All this imagery is summarised in the first line of the second stanza with the tricolon depiction of bats as ‘wicked, poisonous, and old.’ Note that all these terms are hyperbolic and paint a black and white picture of the world – we see things as either all good or all bad.
However, this hyperbolic negative depiction is juxtaposed with the altered view after a close encounter with a bat. Jumping right to the last line of the poem, the religious depictions of the demonic bat is overturned with the poetic voice granting her ‘Blessing’ to the creatures.
Immediately after the tricolon mentioned a moment ago, Pitter uses a truncated exclamation to recognise just how thoroughly wrong this impression was. ‘I have maligned thee!’ The strength and directness of this exclamation acts as a powerful corrective to the previous ideas.
From this point, the bat goes from demon to cutie-pie. Pitter uses personification and diminutives to humanise the bat caught by her cat. From demon to ‘little bat’, giving a sense of its vulnerability in the world, and later the apostrophe ‘O a little one that clings’ hints at its sweetness and need for the poetic voice’s protection. After the cat’s capture of the bat it is depicted as ‘painfully… limp[ing]’ and thus seen in terms of an elderly or vulnerable human, deserving of our sympathy.
*Just a quick note about this bloody cat and the impact of preconceptions of the way creatures are perceived. This son of a gun has just knocked the crap out of our poor bat, but his actions are depicted as ‘seized it softly’. So, the cat is this gentle hunter, ey? Not only that, but this soft seizing leaves the bat unable to fly. That is bloody assault and you know it. Can we please have a poem abut cats being bastards rather than bat bashing?
Anyway, rant over.
By humanising the bat we now see an empathetic response to its plight. The ‘fear’ of the unknown ‘must yield to love’ and here the dramatic contract of fear and love shows the power of familiarity. As soon as the bat is seen more in human terms, the poetic voice sees it as something to save.
Now let’s dive into the redemption arc for the bat. Another exclamation at the beginning of stanza four shows the dramatic nature of the changed perception. It is a ‘Strange revelation!’ and thus a complete surprise to find that rather than dirty and unpleasant to the touch, the bat is ‘warm as milk’, ‘clean as a flower’ and ‘smooth as silk’. These three similes are juxtaposed with the ‘dirty, clammy, cold’ in the first stanza. Each of the comparisons have strong positive connotations, conveying how soft, clean and gentle the little buggers are.
In a similar vain, the ‘tattered’, ‘murky and erratic wing’ are transformed into ‘crapy’ or delicate and intricate wings and we get further recognition of the fineness of their fur and delicate ears. Pitter then provides a further simile that continues to humanise and consolidate the idea of the bat’s beauty as it is ‘Finer than any lady’s things’. Thus it is associated with the beauty of jewellery, even elevated beyond it.
The final stanza is notable for the change in address. Suddenly the poetic voice is talking directly to the bat as she wishes it well. Again we have personification or humanising going on here as the bat is seen in relatable terms as ‘burdened with a mother’s care’ and those ‘swoops so sickening’ from the first stanza are now seen as hunting to provide for her young. This once again makes use relate to the bat in human terms.
Circling back to the title, ‘The Bat’, we now see the significance of the definite article here. This is not jut a poem about bats being cute, but is specifically about this one bat and it is seen in definitive terms and as an individual rather than just a creature.
Structure
This is a narrative poem that explores this revelation about the true nature of bats. You could term it an antithetical poem because of the dramatic contrast of the initial impression with that left at the end of the poem.
While the whole poem uses rhyming couplets, the opening two stanzas (where our depiction of the bat is more sinister or piteous) these are at times half rhymes at best. However, this gives way to much more fluent and pleasing rhymes as the bat is redeemed.
Tone
In the first stanza, note the use of sibilance and assonance of the long ‘o’s of ‘unholy’, ‘demon’s’ and ‘cold’. These, alongside the harsh consonant sounds of words like ‘erratic’ and ‘tattered, contribute to a very sinister tone when presenting this initial conception of the bat.
There is a notable softening in the following redemptive stanzas that shifts the tone to one of pity, appreciation and in the end even admiration and wonder.
One Response