Carolina QuotesA bat is born Naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a pocket of her tail And catches him. He clings to her long fur By his thumbs and toes and teeth. And then the mother dances through the night Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting — Her baby hangs on underneath.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"A bat is born," lines 1-31; reprinted as "Bats" in The Lost World (1965)
- work
- The Bat-Poet (1964)
- year
- 1964
Cite this record
“A bat is born Naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a p…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-8118A1BDDD. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/8118a1bddd
More from Randall Jarrell
When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book — why, how could anyone help knowing? But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?
Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?
That most human and American of presidents — of Americans — Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” It’s a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn’t go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven’t seen, feel what we haven’t felt, understand what we haven’t understood — he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world — to make, even, a United States of America.