Ogden Nash

The bat's a radar guided gent

For night time's flying he is meant

The art is not to snag your hair

(Unless you're hiding insects there

Cau Zhi

"The bat is born of an evil spirit

shunned by the beasts

and rejected by the birds" 220-280 AD)

Posted January 2008

Aristotle

"And Bats flew round in fragrant sky's
and wheel’d or lit the flimsy shapes
that haunt the dusk; with ermine capes

and wooly breasts, and beaded eyes."

Lewis Carroll (1832 -1898)

Twinkle twinkle little bat,

how I wonder what you're at,

Up above the world you fly

like tea tray in the sky"

This is recited by The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland and is a parody of the nursery rhyme "Twinkle twinkle little star"

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeples of my dreams

In a letter to Chausson in 1894

Posted October 2007

A new book of bat related poems has been published, with all the profits from it going to the Bat Conservation Trust.

Its called " On a Bats Wing "Edited by Michael Baron ISBN: 978-1-905512-27-0 £7.99. You can order it from this website

Myself, I rather like the bat.

It’s not a mouse, it’s not a rat.

It has no feathers, yet has wings

It’s quite inaudible when it sings,

It zig zags through the evening air

And never lands on ladies’ hair,

A fact of which men spend their lives

Attempting to convince their wives

Francis Bacon

(1561-1626)

TS Eliot (1888-1965) " The Wasteland"

WB Yeats 1865-1939

To Some-one I Have Talked with by the Fire"

DH Lawrence really doesn't like bats much.

...Pipistrello,

Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe

Little lumps that fly in the air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive

Wings like bits of umbrella

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like and old rag to sleep

And disgustingly upside down

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting rags

and grinning in their sleep.

click here for whole poem

Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), went to Oxford to read history, and, at the age of twenty and after only two years study, she left with a first-class degree and traveled widely

“Sir Percy Cox is a great naturalist. He is making a collection of all Mesopotamian birds - sometimes they arrive dead and sometimes alive. The last one was alive. It's a huge eagle, not yet in its grown up plumage but for all that the largest fowl you've set eyes on. It lives on a perch on the shady side of the house and it eats bats, mainly. These bats are netted for it in the dusk when they obligingly fly across the river and over Sir Percy's garden wall. But the eagle likes to eat them in the morning, so the long-suffering Lady Cox keeps them in a tin in the ice chest, and if ever you've heard before of an eagle that lives on iced bat you'll please inform me.”

Extract from Gertrude Bell’s Diary 21st August 1921

Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, ….., `Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, `Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

Chiroptera - Richard George (1965- )

A poet who sees bats in a positive light

The summer evening ages

To silhouettes, and pin-head stars

And vespertine, the first

To serotine, the last,

Bats unfold strange names,

Flitting twilight, out of reach:

Bechstein.

Natterer.

Daubenton.

The men who loved them.

Their lives were a prayer

To God the naturalist:

Natterer elbowed his desk,

Bony fingers stretching wings apart

While Daubenton fished as the dusk fell,

In his beard a glint of teeth

As his bat hawked, low over water.

And the rarest? Bechstein?

Could this be him, I wonder,

Wrapped in his leather, upside down

Twittering hello?

Here is my net. I cast it out

To christen him.

“And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard

Should be so simple - a bat rose from the hazels

And circled round him with its squeaky cry,”

Ted Hughes "9 Willow Street"

What looked like a slug, black, soft, wrinkled,

Was wrestling, somehow, with the fallen

Brown, crumpled lobe of a chestnut leaf

Suddenly, plainly, it was a bat

A bat fallen out of its tree

Mid-afternoon. A sick bat? I stooped

Thinking I'd lift it again to tree-bark safety

It reared up on its elbows and snarled at me

A raving hyena, the size of a sparrow,

Its whole face peeled in a snarl, fangs tiny

I tried to snatch it up by the shoulders

But it spun, like a fighter, behind its snarl

A crowd collected, entertained to watch me

Fight a bat on Boston Common. Finally

I had to give it my finger

Let the bite lock. Then, cradling it,

Gently lifted it and offered it up

To the wall of chestnut bark. It released me

And scuttled upwards backwards, face downwards,

A rearguard snarl, triumphant, contorted

Vanishing upwards into where it had come from

At home I looked at the blood, and remembered:

American bats have rabies. How could Fate

Stage a scenario so symbolic

Without having secreted the tragedy ending

And the ironic death? It confirmed

The myth we had sleepwalked into: death This was the bat-light we were living in: death

Click here for more on this poem

Randall Jarrell The Bat Poet,

This is the quote that got us started on bat lit

It is from the book of the same name illustrated by Maurice Sendak which we featured in Vol 73

" A 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 thumb and bones and teeth

And then when mother dances through the night

Doubling and looping

Soaring, somersaulting

Her baby hangs on underneath

All night in happiness "

Click here for the rest of the poem

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village

(line 364-8)

"Far different there from all that charm'd before,

The various terrors of that horrid shore;

Those matted woods where birds forget to sing

But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling"

for the rest of the poem click here

The welsh poet RS Thomas wrote at least two poems which featured bats. He if often called "the poet of the hidden god' and poem after poem finds him kneeling in a church waiting for god who, unlike the bats, refuses to appear.

" To one kneeling no word came

Only the wind’s song

Or the dry whispers

of unseen wings

Bats not angels in the high roof"

Often I try

To analyse the quality

Of its silences

Is this where God hides

From my searching? I have stopped to listen,

After the few people have gone,

To the air recomposing itself

For vigil. It has waited like this

Since the stones grouped themselves about it.

These are the hard ribs

Of a body that our prayers have failed to animate. Shadows advance

From their corners to take possession

Of places the light held

For an hour. The bats resume

Their business. The uneasiness of the pews

Ceases. There is no other sound

In the darkness but the sound of a man

Breathing, testing his faith

On emptiness, nailing his questions

One by one to an untenanted cross.”

For more of RS Thomas' poems click here

Posted July 2005Taniguchi Buson (1717-1784)

A haiku for the summer

Hiroshige "Men chasing bats" (detail)

"Darting here and there
the bat is exploring
the moonlit plum"

click here For more of Buson's work

click here for another site which quotes Buson

A bat is beautifully soft and silky; I do not know any creature that is pleasanter to the touch or is more grateful of caressings, if offered in the right spirit."

For more on Mark Twain and bats click here.