What the Camel-Sparrow Ate

 The excellent Public Domain Review recently posted a photograph, from around 1930, of the contents of an ostrich's stomach, extracted post mortem. It's a fascinating collection of objects, including two handkerchiefs and a buttoned glove (this was a zoo ostrich), a length of rope, and various metal objects – coins, tacks, staples, hooks and a four-inch nail (which, sadly, was the cause of death). Here's a link –  https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/contents-of-an-ostrich-s-stomach-ca-1930

It would seem, than, that there is some truth in the idea that the ostrich 'digesteth hard yron', as in the poem by Marianne Moore –

He 'Digesteth Hard Yron' 

Although the aepyornis
   or roc that lived in Madagascar, and
the moa are extinct,
the camel-sparrow, linked
   with them in size—the large sparrow
Xenophon saw walking by a stream—was and is
a symbol of justice.

   This bird watches his chicks with
   a maternal concentration—and he’s
been mothering the eggs
at night six weeks—his legs
   their only weapon of defense.
He is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard
as a hoof; the leopard

   is not more suspicious. How
   could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young
used even as a riding-beast, respect men
   hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand
making the neck move as if alive
and from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches

   might be decoyed and killed! Yes, this is he
whose plume was anciently
the plume of justice; he
   whose comic duckling head on its
great neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness
when he stands guard,

   in S-like foragings as he is
   preening the down on his leaden-skinned back.
The egg piously shown
as Leda’s very own
   from which Castor and Pollux hatched,
was an ostrich-egg. And what could have been more fit
for the Chinese lawn it

   grazed on as a gift to an
   emperor who admired strange birds, than this
one, who builds his mud-made
nest in dust yet will wade
   in lake or sea till only the head shows.

	.	.	.	.	.	.	.

   Six hundred ostrich-brains served
   at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent
and desert spear, jewel-
gorgeous ugly egg-shell
   goblets, eight pairs of ostriches
in harness, dramatize a meaning
always missed by the externalist.

   The power of the visible
   is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.
   Heroism is exhausting, yet
it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare
the harmless solitaire

   or great auk in its grandeur;
   unsolicitude having swallowed up
all giant birds but an alert gargantuan
   little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird.
This one remaining rebel
is the sparrow-camel.

This is a poem that vividly evokes the ludicrous but admirable flightless bird (not the last large flightless bird, pace Miss Moore), but is also about much more: the persistence of the past, endurance and survival, heroism and greed. The notes are impressive in themselves, citing Lyly's Euphues – 'the estrich digesteth hard yron to preserve his health' – and a range of other sources, notably George Jennison's Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome.  Maybe the 'poet friend' quoted by Kay Ryan in her essay on Moore* was right: 'They should have taken away her library card.' But she is magnificent, formidable. Ryan goes on: '... how can we not find Marianne Moore formidable since she's so hard to understand? I think we just have to read her until we can contain the complexity that we cannot resolve. That is a bigger kind of understanding. At that point, the poet is no longer "formidable". A word or two becomes sufficient to invoke the complex spirit. We feel, now, an affection, a human affection, and a receptiveness which we could not feel when we were fighting with particulars.' Very true, I think, and of other poets than the magnificent Miss Moore.

*Collected in the wonderful Synthesizing Gravity (2020).