“The Woodpecker” in “Life From Within”
The Woodpecker
The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole,
And made him a home in the telephone pole.
One day when I watched he poked out his head
And he had on a hood and a collar of red.
When the streams of rain pour out of the sky,
And the sparkles of lightning go flashing by.
And the big, big wheels of the thunder roll,
He can snuggle back in the telephone pole.
John James Audubon, “Pileated Woodpecker,” date unknown, Postcard Collection, 1907-1987, image no. 0020-020-381, Eastern Kentucky University Libraries, Special Collections & Archives. Used with permission from EKU Archives.
About this poem
By Ella Johnson
This poem demonstrates key aspects of Roberts’ style; her languid syntax that forces the reader to slow down and her ability to take seemingly quaint, ordinary observations on nature and turn them into acute prose. The subject and the detail of “The Woodpecker” invite the reader to make their own conclusions about how profound the poem really is. It could simply be about a woodpecker living alone in a telephone pole. The speaker may identify with the bird and feel a sense of shared loneliness with him. The speaker could be relating to the bird’s sense of ‘home’ as an escape from the chaos of the outside. Alternatively, Roberts could be making a larger commentary on notions of man vs. nature. The woodpecker living in a telephone pole, a decidedly man-made object that connects rural areas to the urban, creates a feeling of turning to more modern comforts as an escape from nature.
Roberts is not particularly concise with her language, creating a feeling that the lines of the poem are all running into one another. For example, “And made him a home” could instead have been “And made a home.” The additional “him” serves to reinforce the idea of the woodpecker’s solitary ownership, but could also be a byproduct of Roberts’ regional dialect. The unfinished thought of stanza three invokes immediacy and incompleteness, like the thunderstorm is currently happening. Like the speaker, the reader must slow their pace in order to appreciate the woodpecker and the poem as a whole.
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