The Seventh Raven

by David Elliott

  I’ve come so far and yet I’ve learned so little.

  In many ways, I see I’m still a child.

  My life remains a mystery, a riddle,

  a ledger that must be ever reconciled.

  The journey that brought me to this place

  was nothing next to what I now must face.

  The so-called key, that brittle chicken bone,

  was nothing but a stand-in for my own.

  From the handle of this heavy barricade,

  someone, a loving friend or bitter foe—

  the king? the queen? the crone? I’ll never know—

  has hung a keen and shining crystal blade.

  I understand: My finger is the key.

  My brothers? Or my hand? It’s up to me.

  AND she picks up the harp

  Its frame and its strings

  And her fingers are rain doves

  And she sings and she sings

  She sings of her journey

  And all it has cost

  And she sings of her hands

  And what will be lost

  And the trees drop their leaves

  And the stones shed hard tears

  And the wood turtle grieves

  And the termite appears

  * * *

  She puts down the harp

  She’ll play it no more

  And the knife it is sharp

  And she opens the door

  AND wings become arms

  And talons are feet

  And beaks drop to the floor

  And the meeting is sweet

  * * *

  Our sister has saved us

  From what we have been

  The spell has been broken

  We are whole

  We are men

  * * *

  And there’s blood where she stands

  But what does it matter

  The spell has been broken

  * * *

  The glass mountain shatters

  BUT Robyn is silent

  He too has transformed

  His torso his legs

  His head and his face

  He has retained

  All his lightness and grace

  As if a great artist

  Sculpted and molded

  But in place of his arms

  Black wings are now folded

  APRIL

  What is this terrible mistake?

  He trembles there in limbo like a ghost.

  I must be dreaming. I cannot be awake:

  Robyn, who I was sure to love most,

  is caught between one world and another.

  Robyn, my seventh brother,

  was everything I sacrificed in vain?

  Must I lose another finger? Maim myself again?

  But he will not speak, will not say a word.

  Our brothers’ celebrations are raucous, loud, and shrill,

  while he stands there so silently, unknowable, and still,

  trapped in some uncharted place between humanity and bird.

  What have I done? How can this be?

  He turns his head away and will not look at me.

  ROBYN

  How can I look into my sister’s eyes?

  How can I show her what I feel? Should I

  scream how her unasked-for good intentions

  have taken me from everything I loved?

  Shout that her misplaced intervention has

  shoved me back into a world that I have

  willingly forsaken? Should I tell her

  she’s to blame? There is no point. What I am

  now? It has no name. I am not raven.

  Nor am I man. Instead I am some other

  thing. Some other thing again.

  AND the strings of the harp

  Tighten and snap

  And the frame splits and cracks

  And the sound box collapses

  And the tuning pins rot

  And nothing remains

  But splinter and knot

  And wings once carved

  Into the harp’s frame

  Lift from the ruin

  And burst into flame

  EPILOGUE

  APRIL

  How quickly circumstances normalize.

  Now home, my brothers take their place beside our father. Each dawn, they arise as if all that has occurred has been erased, while Robyn stays alone in a thatched hut that our loving parents built for him. Just what he feels, we do not know. He is aloof. But there are always ravens on the roof.

  My father said he wants to carve another harp for me, one that can be played with my poor disfigured hand, but I told him he must wait. I am not ready yet. I am beset with a steady melancholy and cannot find the spirit that music demands.

  I think of what has come to pass and try to find some time each day to spend alone. I dream often of the mountain made of glass, the helpful stranger and the crone, and am struck with the comforting idea that they are always with me, always near. The same is true for the king and queen, though that feeling is more unsettling.

  As for my finger, it sometimes gives me pain, the finger that is no longer there. I feel it strongly, throbbing in the air, pulsing like an unforgettable refrain.

  If I knew now . . . would I do it all again? How can I know? I was a different person then.

  ROBYN

  How quickly circumstances normalize.

  My younger days and now are much the same.

  The difference is I am not willing to

  disguise all that I am. And so the guilt,

  the nagging doubt, the shame I felt, are now

  part of the past. No, I am not an outcast,

  as I so wrongly thought before, but a

  preview of the possible, something new

  and something more. I dream I am a house

  with endless rooms and endless doors.

  Are you an angel? the curious

  inquire. I answer, It’s conceivable.

  To angelhood I happily aspire

  for such a life must be rare and beautiful.

  So do not shake your worried heads and sigh.

  Yours is the earth . . .

  But I possess the sky.

  AND the trees they are singing

  And the ravens are winging

  And the world celebrates

  * * *

  And the forest awaits.

  A NOTE ABOUT POETIC FORM

  I love formal poetry, that is, poetry with a prescribed form. And I especially love it in the context of a novel in verse. Some might fear that the rules of each form will restrain the writer. But I have found the opposite to be true. In fact, the rules liberate, helping to shape and inform the book’s various voices. When a character speaks always in haiku, for example, she tells us something about who she is, as distinct from, say, her counterpart who holds forth in long-winded ballads.

  Below, you will find the forms I used in The Seventh Raven. To the purists among you, I apologize for the idiosyncrasies—some might call them blunders—by which I sometimes flout the rules. To the more forgiving, I am grateful for your spirit of generosity.

  ROBYN

  When human, Robyn speaks in the rondeau, a French form of fifteen lines in which the opening phrase of the first line repeats at lines nine and fifteen ("they called me Robyn” in his first poem). This repetition, plus the rhyming of just two words, constricts the form. This tightness seemed to parallel Robyn’s feelings as a young man. But when he is a raven, free of his human constraints, it seemed to me he needed to express himself in a form that was less binding. In early drafts, he spoke in a standard fourteen-line Shakespearean sonnet. While the sonnets worked well enough as sonnets, as Robyn’s voice they were still too limiting. Not only that, but they gave him a kind of superior feeling. Look at me, he seemed to be saying. I can speak in sonnets! What to do? In the spirit of sustainability, I repurposed his poems. That is, I took the sonnets apart, used what I thought was working, discarded what w
asn’t, and added lines when fourteen weren’t sufficient for what he wanted to say. Now he speaks—more or less—in ten-syllable lines, which sometimes are sonnetlike and sometimes aren’t.

  APRIL

  Originally, there was a talking bear in the book. (Don’t ask.) The bear is, of course, a symbol of Russia, so in those early days a Russian form seemed appropriate for April. I settled on the Onegin stanza, sometimes called the Pushkin sonnet because it was invented by the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. (Pushkin used this form in his own verse novel, Eugene Onegin.) The sonnet requires seven sets of rhyming words in each stanza. It also employs both masculine (stressed) and feminine (unstressed) rhymes. I confess that I did not adhere to this latter requirement. April’s last poem consists of two stanzas (and a variation or two) of this form but with different formatting, a visual representation, I hope, of her own transformation and change. Sadly, that talking bear didn’t make it into the final draft. But the sonnet stayed.

  JACK/JANE

  Robyn and April’s parents speak in a Welsh form, Cyhydedd Naw Ban. (Don’t ask.) Each line has nine syllables, plus or minus in my rendering. But the poet has some freedom when it comes to the rhyme pattern. In my version, the pattern is as follows: couplet, triplet, couplet, triplet, couplet, triplet, couplet, couplet. Because we often experience our parents as a single unit, I thought it right that Jack and Jane speak in the same form.

  THE CRONE

  Though it looks different on the page, the crone speaks in the form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his famous and beautiful poem “Pied Beauty.” I was happy to discover that the brief final line of the form works to intensify the crone’s ambiguity.

  KING/QUEEN

  Both the king and queen speak in couplets.

  NARRATIVE POEMS

  These poems were inspired by “The House That Jack Built.” Each line has two beats. To my ear, when read aloud, this lends a hypnotic effect suggesting another time, another place. In other words, once upon a time.

  Once upon a time. Five syllables that have the power, perhaps more than any others, to transport us to our deepest selves, for fairy tales are not merely stories to entertain us. They are also intricate pictures of the human experience, generated in and by our ancestors and passed down to us through the ages. Tales, the real tales, are vessels that help us navigate the existential dilemmas that sooner or later we all must face. Passed on from generation to generation in cultures from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, they teach us how to live.

  I have always loved the Grimms’ lesser-known story “The Seven Ravens” and what it seems to say about masculine energies run amok, about the power of perseverance to transform and unite, about sacrifice. And above all, the powerful message that if we are to inherit the kingdom, we must enter the forest alone.

  JOAN

  I’ve heard it said that when we die

  the soul discards its useless shell,

  and our life will flash before our

  eyes. Is this a gift from Heaven?

  Or a jinx from deepest Hell? Only

  the dying know, but what the dying

  know the dying do not tell. What

  more the dying know it seems I

  am about to learn. For when the

  sun is at its highest, a lusting torch

  will touch the pyre. The flames will rise.

  And I will burn. But I have always

  been afire. With youth. With faith. With

  truth. And with desire. My name is

  Joan, but I am called the Maid. My

  hands are bound behind me. The fire

  beneath me laid.

  FIRE

  I yearn I yearn I yearn my darling

  I yearn I yearn I yearn

  JOAN

  Every life is its own story—

  not without a share of glory,

  and not without a share of grief.

  I lived like a hero at seventeen.

  At nineteen, I die like a thief.

  * * *

  I’ll begin with my family:

  a father, a mother, uncles

  and aunts, one sister, two brothers,

  all born in Lorraine in the

  Duchy of Bar. Domrémy is

  our village. It’s north of the Loire,

  the chevron-shaped river that cuts

  across France. My parents were peasants,

  caught up in the dance that all the

  oppressed must step to and master:

  work harder, jump higher, bow lower,

  run faster. The feel of the earth

  beneath my bare feet, the sun on

  my face, the smell of the wheat as

  it breaks through the soil, the curve of

  the sprout as it bends and uncoils,

  the song of the beetle, the hum

  of the bees. I was comforted

  by these, but they would not have

  satisfied me, for something other

  occupied me. To take the path

  that I have taken, I have abandoned

  and forsaken everything I

  once held dear, and that, in part, has

  brought me here, to die alone bound

  to this stake. Each decision that

  we make comes with a hidden price.

  We’re never told what it is we

  may be asked to sacrifice.

  * * *

  A shape begins to form itself

  in the air in front of me. Trunk . . .

  and roots . . . an ancient tree, its limbs

  so low they touch the earth. I know

  it now. Around its girth we village

  children sang and danced. The tree was

  thought to be entranced; our elders

  said beneath its shade a band of

  brownies lived and played. I wonder

  if they live there still, or have, like

  me, they been betrayed?

  NOT far from Domrémy there is a tree that they called “The Ladies Tree”—others call it “The Fairies Tree.” . . . Often I have heard the old folk—they are not of my lineage—say that the fairies haunt this tree. . . . I have seen the young girls putting garlands on the branches of this tree, and I myself have sometimes put them there with my companions.

  * * *

  Joan

  Trial of Condemnation

  THE FAIRY TREE

  I sing the mournful carol of five hundred passing

  years. Nurtured by the howling wind and the

  music of the spheres, I have retained the record

  of every heart that ever broke, every wound that

  ever bled. I remember single drops of rain, every

  day of golden light, the sorrow of the cuckoo’s

  crimes, the lightning strikes, the trill of every

  lark. And I have stored the memory of these

  consecrated things in the scarred and winding

  surface of my incandescent bark. Etched there,

  too? The face of every child who cherished me,

  who sang my name—the Fairy Tree. They came

  to celebrate the sprites who lived beneath my

  canopy, for I was the fairies’ chosen, their syl-

  van hideaway. The brindled cows looked on at

  human folly when the fairies were charged and

  banished by the village priest. The children, too,

  have vanished, undone by years, and worms, and

  melancholy. Yes, all my children I recall, but it

  is Joan who of them all stands apart in the con-

  centric circles of my ringèd memory. She hid it

  well—the burning coal that was her heart. But

  a tree is ever watchful in the presence of a flame,

  and I saw in her a smoldering, a spark, a heat

  well beyond extinguishing. I feel it even now, that

  heat. It blazes just the same. Elements not rec-

  onciled, as disparate as day and night, sparked
r />   an unrelenting friction destined to ignite some-

  thing hybrid, new, and wild. It was a heavy fate

  for such a child, so small and young. And yet

  among the girls she was a favorite, their affec-

  tion for her zealous. But the boys were threat-

  ened. Rough. Rugged. Strong. Athletic. They

  did not know that they were jealous. I see now it

  was prophetic, the rancor hidden in their hearts.

  But rancor is a stubborn guest; once lodged, it

  won’t depart. The village priest abides here still,

  or his likely twin, still finding evil in every joy,

  still scolding the girls, still eyeing the boys, still

  holding up pleasure and calling it sin. As for the

  girl, for Joan, she remains a mystery. Who can

  say why some arrive and then depart forgotten

  while others fashion history?

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Author photo by Lisa Hull

  DAVID ELLIOTT is a New York Times best-selling author whose recent works include Bull and Voices, both critically acclaimed novels in verse, with ten starred reviews between them. Born in Ohio, David has worked as a singer, a cucumber washer, and a Popsicle stick maker. Currently, he lives in New Hampshire with his wife and dog.