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A Gull Goes Up

1899 –

1988

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.

Born in 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, Léonie Adams graduated from Barnard College in 1922.

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About this Poem

“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.”

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More by this poet

Midsummer

This starbreak is celestial air,
Just silver; earthlight, dying amber.
Underneath an arch of pallor
Summer keeps her brightened chamber.

Bright beauty of the risen dust
And deep flood-mark of beauty pressed
Up from earth in lovely flower,
High against my lonely breast;

Léonie Adams

1925

Never Enough of Living

Never, my heart, is there enough of living,
Since only in thee is loveliness so sweet pain;
Only for thee the willows will be giving
Their quiet fringes to the dreaming river;
Only for thee so the light grasses ever
Are hollowed by the print of windy feet,
And breathe hill weather on the misty plain;

Léonie Adams

1925

Home-Coming

When I stepped homeward to my hill,
Dusk went before with quiet tread;
The bare laced branches of the trees
Were as a mist about its head.

Upon its leaf-brown breast the rocks
Like great grey sheep lay silentwise,
Between the birch trees’ gleaming arms,
The faint stars trembled in the skies.

The white brook met me half-way up,
And laughed as one that knew me well,
To whose more clear than crystal voice
The frost had joined a crystal spell.

Léonie Adams

2017

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A Gull Goes Up

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