Songs from The Bat Poet I. The Bird of Night

The Bat Poet by Randall Jarrell is a book for children about a bat who writes poems. The bat’s poems appear periodically over the course of the book, and three of them are the starting points for these three movements. Although there is not any kind of one to one correspondence, the pieces certainly evoke the atmosphere of the two poems, and the last hints at the time sequence of the poem about the Mockingbird, who is portrayed as a great, more than slightly vain, artist, who is the bat’s hero. 

I. The Bird of Night

II. The Chipmunk's Day

III. The Mockingbird

Each of the movements may be performed separately.

The Bird of Night

A Shadow is floating through the moonlight.

Its wings don't make a sound.

Its claws are long, its beak is bright.

Its eyes try all the corners of the night.

It calls and calls: all the air swells and heaves

And washes up and down like water.

The ear that listens to the owl believes

In death. The bat beneath the eaves,

The mouse beside the stone are still as death.

The owl's air washes them like water.

The owl goes back and forth inside the night,

And the night holds its breath.