The flying parliament, and other poems — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Title Poem as Dramatic Fragment

The longest piece in the collection, The Flying Parliament, is less a narrative poem than a dramatic tableau. Babcock provides a full stage setting: the piazza of San Marco, November 1917, with the winged lion of St. Mark removed, the flagstaffs flying Italian flags, and the canals deserted except for one gondola. The American war correspondent who rows it is an outsider, a witness. The poem's language is deliberately theatrical—"the guns sound like huge bass chords; the pigeon wings beat a curious suggestion of delicate pastoral themes"—and the effect is one of suspended time, a city holding its breath.

Babcock does not attempt to explain the war or to moralize. Instead, she presents a scene of absence: the statues gone, the horses removed, the familiar landmarks hidden behind sandbags. The poem's power lies in what is not shown—the battle, the enemy, the outcome. The reader is left with the sound of distant guns and the flutter of pigeons, a juxtaposition of violence and fragile life.

Shorter Lyrics: Voice and Displacement

Alongside the title poem, the collection includes a number of shorter lyrics that explore a different kind of unease. In "In the Strange Country," the speaker addresses a listener directly: "I speak your language very glibly now, / Have all the countersigns and know the range / Of all your boundaries; the streets I know.... / And yet, your land is strange." The poem resists easy identification—is the speaker an immigrant, a soldier, a traveler?—and instead dwells on the gap between outward fluency and inner alienation.

Other poems, such as "The Tramp" and "Rain Pictures," turn to nature and the figure of the outsider. "The Tramp" describes a man who "knows not home nor child, nor wife, / Nor friendly grasp of any hand," yet who "lays his scheme for daily food" and "spending imagined affluence." The language is precise, almost reportorial, but the tone is not sentimental. Babcock gives the tramp a kind of dignity, a secret life of the mind.

War Poems: Public Elegy and Private Grief

The final section of the collection is explicitly labeled "War Poems," and here Babcock's voice shifts again. Poems like "The Sacred Ships" and "Home Coming" adopt a more formal, elegiac tone. "The Sacred Ships" describes the departure of troops: "Youth leaves our shores—to face the Minotaur." The classical reference is characteristic of Babcock's tendency to frame modern war in mythic terms.

Yet even in these public poems, the personal intrudes. "Resurgence—To C. L. B." is dedicated to a named individual, and the poem "Garden Adventures" juxtaposes the violence of war with the persistence of domestic life. Babcock does not resolve the tension between these registers; instead, she lets them stand side by side, as if the war itself has made coherence impossible. The collection ends not with a grand statement but with a series of quiet, often ambiguous, lyrics that resist closure.

Readers approaching The Flying Parliament and Other Poems should be prepared for a collection that resists easy categorization. Babcock moves between dramatic scene, lyric meditation, and public elegy, often within the same poem. The war is a constant presence, but it is felt more often as an absence—a removed statue, a distant gun, a stranger's face—than as a direct subject. The poems reward attention to their shifts in tone and their careful, sometimes surprising, juxtapositions of the natural and the man-made, the familiar and the strange.

There’s a kind of loneliness in Babcock’s wartime Venice, a city reduced to its own echoes. It stayed with me long after I closed it. That same fragile quiet surfaced again, unexpectedly, in the older voices of Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards — Context and Discussion, where loss speaks through stone and memory.