♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (wings flapping) (birds chirping) (wind rustling leaves) There's a lot of shore birds out right now on these mud flats in the marsh.

ELISA NEW: What do you see?

- I'm seeing great blue herons.

NEW: Oh, there he is.

And he's blue-gray, turning his head.

♪ ♪ E.O.

WILSON: It held its head still while the body and green legs wobbled in wide arcs from side to side.

LAURA MCPHEE: When it stalked out of sight, I went after it, but all I could find where I was expecting to see the bird... ROBERT HASS: Was a three-foot-long lizard in ill-fitting skin and with linear mouth expressive of the even temper of the mineral kingdom.

WILSON: It stopped and tilted its head, which was much like a fieldstone with an eye in it, which was watching me... MCPHEE: To see if I would go or change into something else.

NEW: The mysteries accumulating through Galway Kinnell's "The Gray Heron" are the kind that stir the curiosity and creativity of scientists, visual artists, and poets.

The poem seems simple enough.

A gray heron is there, and then it's gone.

In place of the bird the pursuer expected, a lizard.

But what has happened here?

What does this poem see?

Not only looking at a heron or a lizard, Galway Kinnell's poem seems also to be looking at looking.

Exploring the power and testing the limits of the scientist's method, of the photographer's lens, of the poet's metaphors.

To better understand "The Gray Heron," I gathered some observers of the natural world: celebrated evolutionary biologist E.O.

Wilson; poet Robert Hass; photographer Laura McPhee; and a naturalist and some junior naturalists at a wildlife sanctuary on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

(birds chirping) When I first read this poem, I had just been reading Ed Wilson.

I think it's in Biophilia that he says, thinking about what we can know about other creatures, "Every creature lives in its own sensory world."

I felt like when I read that, that it opened avenues into the way we look at the natural world.

The best scientists are always on the hunt.

NEW: Mm-hmm.

- They're looking for something new.

I would like to simply sit back and watch my grey heron and just enjoy it in the embrace of its context, a lovely marsh.

But no, I'm on the hunt.

I want to see what I can see about this bird that is different from what other scientists have seen.

I want to make a discovery.

♪ ♪ NEW: Just what discovery the poem may be making is more ambiguous, as we see in its title, "The Gray Heron," spelled with an "A" in the American way.

HASS: Grey herons, as a species, are distributed across Europe and Asia and not... ...in the United States.

NEW: In the United States.

I've come upon a grey heron.

Let's say it's in Massachusetts.

Good Lord, there are no grey herons in Massachusetts.

This must be an inventive heron.

MCPHEE: I don't know if Kinnell was mistaking a grey heron for a great blue heron, or he's thinking about just the color of the heron, which is gray.

WAGNER: Just by describing it as the "gray heron," it's making it less of a report of what you've been seeing and sticking to the strict scientific species name, saying, "Yes, I observed a great blue heron," but it's kind of going past it and describing things he noticed about the bird.

TIKI: It held its head still while its body and green legs wobbled in wide arcs from side to side.

MCPHEE: I think this poem is about observation, that it starts out in this very precise, kind of, concise way of saying, "Here's this animal, here's its movements."

♪ ♪ MARGARET: It's not a very graceful bird, it's just kind of, like, walking out of the water, kind of, like, I don't know, like you'd imagine a bird.

See, like, it doesn't hop, but it just sort of walks kind of awkwardly, like a turkey or something.

Like, one going this way and the other going this way, wobbling.

HASS: "While its body and green legs wobbled in wide arcs "from side to side, when it stalked out of sight."

He's trying to get something of that.

I don't know what you call the camera technique where... (clicks tongue three times).

There's something about the way herons move that is jerky motion sped up.

The language, the way that it's laid out and where the line breaks occur, and the unwinding of the rhythm of that sentence, it's trying to be the physical rhythm of the thing, you know?

It's that essential thing that poetry does, is to try to be the motion.

NEW: I was thinking that what the line breaks did was try to be the motion of the observer's eyes.

And there's something that isn't all together that we get from the way this one glance, actually, is broken up.

HASS: Yeah.

NEW: And the separation of the adjective from the noun there is a reminder of some slowness of perception.

It's doing two kind of contrary things with the physical motion.

On the one hand, trying to do what poems do, and what Kinnell does so beautifully in so many of his poems, is really capture that movement.

And on the other hand, almost analytically break it up.

And to remind us that our eyes are always composing and bringing together disparate things.

You say that what you love is "a jumble of glittering data."

- That's right.

Scientists think in a jumbled manner.

Even the best ones proceed into unknown territory in a very erratic and random manner, processing large amounts of data that may or may not be relevant and come together according to the vicissitudes of a very imperfect rational process in the brain.

MCPHEE: Poetry is very interesting as an analogue for photography, because it's distilling and condensing things, and it has syntax and grammar, and we have a visual world with four sides around it, in which something will happen.

That's an eight-by-ten view camera.

It was actually made in the 1980s, but it's 19th-century technology.

There's a quality that you get from that film that is still unequaled, especially in landscape, where you're working hard with what you can see.

The eight-by-ten film is so large that it contains much more information than my eye can see.

So how do you make something precise, but also mysterious?

Something that has a clarity of purpose and meaning, but also something that you can think about repeatedly and that offers itself to open interpretation?

♪ ♪ WILSON: When it stalked out of sight, I went after it.

WAGNER: He's going after it, trying to learn more about it, trying to hunt it down, not to catch it, but to understand it.

WILSON: There's nothing more exciting than to see something and to say, "God, that's something that I don't think anyone has seen or thought of before."

And it creates what I like to call "the aesthetic surprise."

There's a lot of elements of surprise in this poem.

He says, the whole expecting thing, he wants to see something else, or he thinks he's going to see something else, and he's surprised by what he sees.

WAGNER: If you go out expecting, then that's what you're looking for, and you're not looking for the unexpected.

And that's something that I always hold true is, if I'm going out in the morning, especially here in Wellfleet, or some place where I bird every single day, I'm not saying to myself, "I'm going to see this, I'm going to see this."

I'm going out and experiencing what that day holds.

Sometimes, the thing that you didn't expect to find is actually better than the thing you wanted to find.

Like, if you are looking for a cool type of rock and you actually find a turtle, a turtle's, like, cooler than a rock.

♪ ♪ DYLAN: He might not have been paying full attention.

And this could've been, like, out of the corner of his eye, and he might not have been really paying attention to what he's looking at and thought it might have been a heron walking and then looked back and it was a lizard.

Some of them are the same size.

They sometimes are in, like, the same habitats.

I assumed that Galway Kinnell was operating inside the universe as we understand it.

Of science.

- And the... And that he went around a bend looking for this bird and the bird was gone.

And there's the lizard.

♪ ♪ MCPHEE: This whole idea that you have an expectation, and that your expectations are generally defied.

NEW: We're getting less about this creature the speaker's presumably in pursuit of, than about him.

DYLAN: "When it stalked out of sight, "I went after it, but all I could find where I was expecting to see the bird..." He uses "I" a lot for an observer.

He's talking about his own experience with it a lot, more than what's going on in front of him.

NEW: "Ill-fitting skin."

Who is this observer to say whether the skin fits well or ill?

WILSON: That's the one piece that really doesn't fit, because most lizards have beautiful skin.

Because they have to have a perfectly designed skin for the environment they live in.

The one thing that Darwin taught us is that if that skin is that way, must've had some evolutionary... NEW: It's supposed to be that way.

HASS: It's supposed to be that way.

However, geckos have taut skin, monitor lizards have loose skin.

The loose skin looks, to us, like someone wearing a rumpled suit, so we say "ill-fitting skin."

♪ ♪ MCPHEE: "When it stalked out of sight, I went after it, "but all I could find where I was expecting to see the bird "was a three-foot-long lizard in ill-fitting skin, "and with linear mouth expressive of the even temper of the mineral kingdom."

HASS: When I've shown this poem to students, who often assume that anything could happen in a poem, some of them, maybe a third, think that the heron's turned into a lizard.

WILSON: A heron is nothing like a lizard, although we know they're descended from reptiles, ultimately.

To add the dimension of time-- that's evolutionary biology.

For a fleeting moment, he was thinking of the ancestry, this ancient history, going all the way back, he says "lizards," metaphor for reptiles, feathered dinosaurs.

So he was thinking like a biologist.

And so it's possible that even though, in this poem, we're seeing the image of a bird, and the image of a lizard, and we assume that they're in one space and one time.

WILSON: Yes.

NEW: It's possible that this poem has now delivered us into deeper time and into evolutionary time.

I often say, when we see a great blue heron flying, I'll say it looks like a pterodactyl when it flies.

There have been times where I'm in my kayak, and I can be four feet away from a great blue heron.

You can hear the heavy wing beats and then just tucking its neck into its body.

(wings flapping) ♪ ♪ HASS: "A three-foot-long lizard in ill-fitting skin, "and with linear mouth expressive of the even temper of the mineral kingdom."

MCPHEE: We're moving backwards, even to the older world, to rocks.

NEW: You thought you were just there looking at a heron, and all of a sudden, you're time-traveling.

MCPHEE: Exactly.

HASS: The humor in the description of the lizard's mouth, raising the idea of the mineral kingdom also puts us in the world of Earth-making and change.

MCPHEE: I guess I think about that as geologic time.

As time that feels literally stopped to us.

So you have the bird that has disappeared, you have the lizard that's just moving at a very slow rate, and then you have geologic time, which just seems still, because we are just a flash in that.

(stream trickling) LUCA: I think this poem's about a bird turning into a lizard, then he's thinking it's going to turn into stone with one eye.

Poetry since Darwin has been partly in revolt against a scientific, mechanistic view of nature.

All of this just so we could eat each other or wither and grow old and die?

And it's been the effort of poetry, since Darwin, to say what imagination is and what it does.

♪ ♪ WILSON: "It stopped and tilted its head, "which was much like a fieldstone, "with an eye in it, which was watching me."

DYLAN: I thought a lot about those few lines.

They were a little confusing at first, and I immediately thought maybe it was about a change of character.

If he would change, just change into something else.

There's a theme of change and surprise here.

The great poem that kind of sums up all of classical polytheism, that animist way of imagining the world, was Ovid's "Metamorphoses."

NEW: Right.

Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is a Roman narrative poem that shows men and women transformed into birds and rocks and trees.

MCPHEE: I think it's a call to see nature in another way, to see it as fluid and mutable.

We're now observing the world morphing from one thing into another almost magically, that it becomes an imaginative world rather than a fixed nature.

HASS: Buried in the poem is the magical and metaphorical, the most ancient way of saying things.

You think of 100,000 years of human evolution in which hunters just told stories to each other and to the families around fires, imitating the motions of animals and trying to imagine their way into the lives of animals, so the gods that ruled over the animals would not punish them for taking the lives of the animals.

All of that ended up in this imaginative tradition of everything changes into everything else.

♪ ♪ WILSON: Intelligence evolved around the campsites of pre-humans and ancient human species.

Namely, the development of language to grasp more and more, and then the development of metaphor to capture attention and improve memory and the quality of emotional response.

Scientists are always searching for metaphors, explaining new phenomena by comparisons with objects and processes that all people are familiar with.

What we're doing is trying to make a precise description, but we don't try to open new vistas of thinking about the object, as the poet does.

NEW: The metamorphosis of bird to lizard in Kinnell's poem may itself be a metaphor for those forces of evolution and change that connect all life forms and all forms of knowledge.

♪ ♪ Why would you say that the mineral kingdom had an even-- what was...

It keeps it alive.

So the mineral kingdom we think of, it's dead, it's inanimate, but he's giving it life by giving it an even temper.

I think he meant-- 'cause "even tempter," "temper" is, like, calm, and then "mineral kingdom" is, like, a rock, and rocks don't move, so they're basically calm.

♪ ♪ NEW: That seems to belong to another moment in our understanding of the world.

Not a world of physics, but a world of gods.

A pantheistic world where the rocks themselves have a spirit.

♪ ♪ MCPHEE: "It stopped and tilted its head, "which was much like a fieldstone with an eye in it, "which was watching me to see if I would go or change into something else."

MARGARET: "Which was watching me to see if I would go."

That's looking at not only your perception of other things, but how they perceive you.

DYLAN: "Which was watching me to see if I would go or change into something else."

Going back to the surprise thing, you think the entire time the only, like, constant thing in the poem is the narrator.

He doesn't change into anything else-- everything around him seems to be changing.

And then the poem ends on the note of, maybe he will change, change into something else, and it's a little bit of a surprise ending.

GIULLIA: "Which was watching me to see if I would go or change into something else."

He's thinking into sort of the lizard's mind and thinking, "Oh, I'm guessing since I'm thinking "that he's going to change into something, I'm definitely... "he thinks I'm going to change into something different, also, like everything around me is."

HASS: Human beings have been projecting human attitudes onto animals forever.

NEW: Yes.

HASS: And one of the achievements of modern science was to peel that away.

Instead of saying lions clearly stand for regal pride and rage, and snakes stand for this, and this stands for that, they said, "How does a lion make its living?"

Mostly poetry didn't go there.

It continued to think the birds were singing because the poet was in a good mood.

♪ ♪ I know, from reading a lot of Galway Kinnell's work, that it's occurring to him that he shouldn't be projecting our stuff onto animals.

♪ ♪ When I look out at a bird and it looks back at me, I'm so curious in what it's thinking.

"Why is this person watching me?"

"What is it getting out of this?"

"Am I in trouble?"

Because that contradicts every instinct they have, to go near something that's unknown to them and potentially dangerous.

It's impossible to even start to guess what it actually is thinking, and that's one of the things that's so special about bird watching and birding.

You're very much on their court.

HASS: Human beings have become immensely clever at studying animal behavior, but we're never going to have a dog's sense of smell.

- Right.

- We're never going to inhabit that universe.

And that universe is as real as ours.

(birds chirping) MCPHEE: Kinnell is describing the natural world as it exists.

But also, he finds the opportunity to imagine something in order to make meaning.

This poem takes on, in many ways, the whole universe, the history of the universe, and yet it's so precise and specific.

HASS: The speaker has the sensation of the bird having turned into a lizard.

NEW: Yes.

HASS: In his rational brain, he knows... That doesn't happen.

HASS: Birds don't turn into lizards.

But he doesn't know, when he looks at the lizard, he realizes he doesn't know whether the lizard has that kind of rational brain or not.

♪ ♪ So the poem ends in the mystery of the final unreadableness.

And for me, the joy of the poem is escaping a naturalistic explanation of the world by understanding that we...

Finally, there's so much we don't know.

♪ ♪ WILSON: "It held its head still while the body and green legs wobbled in wide arcs from side to side..." MCPHEE: "When it stalked out of sight, "I went after it, "but all I could find where I was expecting to see the bird..." HASS: "Was a three-foot-long lizard in ill-fitting skin "and with linear mouth expressive of the even temper of the mineral kingdom."

WILSON: "It stopped and tilted its head, "which was much like a fieldstone with an eye in it, which was watching me..." MCPHEE: "To see if I would go or change into something else."

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