Week 3 – “Still Life with Canary”

This poem is particularly tricky, in that it’s meaning isn’t immediate or intuitive to us as readers, and, as we saw in class, it opens itself to a very layered, nuanced reading.  I, however, would like to take a closer look at it’s title, which in itself conveys several ideas. In their description the poet ‘paints’ a still life – the landscape of the mountains and the grove in which the hunter stands. As a separate entity, a canary in the context of a poem about a mine is immediately a cause of trepidation, as the birds were used as an early warning system, perishing at much lower gas levels than people and giving miners the chance to escape before they ran out of air.  The phrase ‘still life with canary’, as those familiar with art know, is a bit counterintuitive, as a still life does not generally depict a live subject – this makes us almost certain of the fate of the bird, and by extension, the miners.