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I Am The SoNg
by Charles Causley
I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.
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I Am the Song is a nine line poem, written in iambic tetrameter, with a rhyme scheme of ABCBDEFBG.
The poem is in first person, and it discusses perception, particularly with respect to the way nature is viewed. The repetitive use of “I Am” provides the Reader with a clue that the Speaker is God.
Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
Line 1:
I am the song that sings the bird.
I really love this line. It inverts our idea of cause and effect. Rather than the bird acting upon the song, the song acts upon the bird. By creating this inversion, we view the bird as the created being, rather than the bird being a creator of its music. “I Am” is thus an indefinable source of life and creation. We can also infer that “I Am” is good, in that we typically link bird song with purity and goodness.
Lines 2 through 7:
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
After establishing the theme in line one, the next six lines continue it. By reframing our expectation for cause and effect, the Reader is left with no option except to credit “I Am” with things most typically credited to nature and science. Life and nature are not caused by things that are in motion, but rather the things that are set in motion were caused by life, or more specifically by “I Am.”
Lines 8 and 9:
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.
In these two lines, the Speaker’s intended meaning is made more clear, by drawing from more familiar religious allusions.
Line 8 is interesting, in that the inversion itself (as regards pottery) is familiar within Judeo-Christian religious texts:
Genesis 2:7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
Isaiah 64:8 But now, O Lord, You are our Father,
We are the clay, and You our potter;
And all of us are the work of Your hand.
Jeremiah 18:6 “Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel.
Lamentations 4:2 The precious sons of Zion,
Weighed against fine gold,
How they are regarded as earthen jars,
The work of a potter’s hands!
2 Corinthians 4:7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
I’ll stop there but there are many more verses in the Bible which deal with this metaphor. As much as the hand of man shapes the clay, the hand of God made man.
Line 9 is excellent also, inasmuch as it both adds to the point made by Line 8 – complete with many religious texts to which it can also refer – and the last line also calls back to and reinforces the point of Line 1. The song animates and creates the bird. The word (or, The Word) animates and creates the man.
Who is Charles Causley?
Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a British poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.
According to the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature, “because his characteristic themes, preoccupations, and freshness of language vary little, it is often difficult to distinguish between his writings for children and those for adults. He himself declared that he did know whether a given poem was for children or adults as he was writing it, and he included his children’s poetry without comment in his collected works.”[11]
Causley stayed true to what he called his ‘guiding principle’, adopted from Auden and others, that: “while there are some good poems which are only for adults, because they pre-suppose adult experience in their readers, there are no good poems which are only for children.”
His close friend Ted Hughes said of Causley:
“Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley’s could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed…. Before I was made Poet Laureate, I was asked to name my choice of the best poet for the job. Without hesitation, I named Charles Causley — this marvellously resourceful, original poet, yet among all known poets the only one who could be called a man of the people, in the old, best sense. A poet for whom the title might have been invented afresh. I was pleased to hear that in an unpublished letter, Philip Larkin thought the same and chose him too.”
Perhaps because of that widespread perception of Causley as a poetic ‘outsider’, academia has so far paid less attention to his work than it might have done. However, the publication over recent years of a book of critical essays edited by Michael Hanke, Through the Granite Kingdom, as well as a number of dissertations about Causley’s work (alone, or alongside poets such as Larkin and R. S. Thomas) suggest that this situation is changing.
