One recent day on my usual walk, I encountered a raven and his voluminous squawk. Man, he declared, to all within earshot, Here walks a horrible man of the worst sort. Be careful, this biped in black that you’re seeing is a terribly angry and old human being. He’s dark and he’s cynical, you’ve seen it before- an over-educated individual who scoffs, and what’s more, he stands in frank judgement of all the world’s wrongs, as if he was whistling popular songs. Watch out for the chorus of woe and self-pity, just look at him walking, it surely ain’t pretty. To me, it just sounded like a crazed bird in panic on an upper blind branch squawking loud, bird satanic. I stopped and looked up and we had a brief moment, two species in nature, one squealing to foment as if rallying others, ’cause haters gonna hate, Me knowing there’s no escaping one’s fate. He kept squawking loudly, Crazed bird narcissistic, I turned and kept walking away from this critic. The sad truth: there’s always someone who’ll hate ya, you cannot escape it, not even in nature.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
This poem is in eleven quatrains and it refuses to print them.
Forty-four lines, no stanza breaks anywhere — and yet the rhyme falls on the second and fourth line of every group of four, without a single exception, for the whole poem: walk/squawk, earshot/sort, seeing/being, before/more, wrongs/songs, self-pity/pretty, panic/satanic, moment/foment, hate/fate, narcissistic/critic, hate ya/nature. That is ballad measure, ABCB, held eleven times running. The form is completely regular and completely invisible, because you never once stop.
I do not think that is an accident, and if it is, keep it. The poem is about a man who will not break stride for a heckler. Printing it as eleven neat quatrains would give the raven eleven places to interrupt. Running it as one column means the reader has to keep walking too.
The second thing worth naming is the line the poem stumbles on:
an over-educated individual
Twenty-four letters in three words — eight letters a word, against a poem whose words average fewer than four and a half. Over-educated alone is twelve, as long as any word in the piece, and it is the only line here you cannot say quickly. It is also, of course, the raven calling him over-educated. The insult is written in exactly the register it is accusing him of, and the poem makes that joke with nothing but word length.
Where I press: the last quatrain says out loud what the previous forty lines have already shown. The sad truth: there’s / always someone who’ll hate ya, / you cannot escape it, / not even in nature. The poem has just spent twenty lines demonstrating exactly that, in a bird’s voice, with more wit than the summary has. I would look hard at whether it needs to end on the moral, or whether it could end on away from this critic and trust you.
The title is doing three jobs at once and I want to make sure it gets credit for all of them.
A constitutional is a walk taken for the good of the health — the exact thing the poem describes, and a slightly old-fashioned word for it, which is already a small joke about the speaker. It is also what a person is made of: constitution, temperament, the thing the raven claims to diagnose. And it is the word for a founding document, which is what the bird is behaving like — a self-appointed authority reading out an inventory of the speaker’s character to all within earshot, as if standing has been granted to it.
That third sense is why the poem is more than a joke about a noisy bird. The raven does not attack. It publishes. It issues a character assessment — dark, cynical, angry, old, over-educated, self-pitying — to an audience, from an elevated position, in a voice that assumes jurisdiction. What the speaker walks away from is not aggression but a review.
My reservation is that the poem knows the sound of that better than it knows the source. ’cause haters gonna hate imports a ready-made phrase to explain the bird, and a ready-made phrase is the one thing the raven itself never uses; its twenty lines of abuse are all specific. The poem’s own critic is a better writer than the poem’s defence.
There is not one quotation mark in this poem.
The raven talks for twenty lines — from Man, he declared to it surely ain’t pretty — which is very nearly half the poem, and none of it is fenced off. There is no punctuation anywhere telling a reader where the bird stops and the man starts. The accusation and the narration are set in exactly the same voice, in one unbroken column, with nothing between them.
I do not think you can dismiss a thing you have given forty-five per cent of your poem to, verbatim, unquoted. The speaker calls it squawking, calls the bird crazed, satanic, narcissistic, in panic — four dismissals in twenty-four words — and then reports the indictment in full and in order: dark, cynical, angry, old, over-educated, judgemental, self-pitying. That is not what a man remembers from noise. That is a list he already had.
Which is why the poem is better than the anecdote it appears to be telling. Everything the raven says is something a person might say about himself at three in the morning, and the poem’s achievement is putting it outside, in a tree, where it can be walked away from. The last line — not even in nature — is offered as a complaint about the world. It reads to me as a fact about the head: there was no getting away from it, because it came along.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
Nature as a place without judgement
Constitutional enters the Archive as forty-four lines in unbroken ballad measure: a man goes for a walk, is loudly and specifically insulted by a raven, and walks on.
The myth it exposes is the reason people go out at all: that nature is a place without judgement. The whole apparatus of the walk — the health, the trees, the fresh air, the old-fashioned word for it — depends on the outdoors being a room where nobody is assessing you. The poem puts a critic in the branches, gives it twenty lines of character assessment delivered to all within earshot, and closes on the finding: you cannot escape it, / not even in nature. The sanctuary has an audience in it.
Beneath it runs the myth the speaker needs in order to keep walking: that a dismissal is a refutation. The bird is crazed, satanic, narcissistic, in panic — and every one of those words is a category, not an answer. The archive records this as a dependency rather than a finding, because the poem reproduces the indictment in full, in order, and unquoted, which is not what dismissal looks like.
Its symbols are all things you meet on foot. The walk is the title’s triple joke — a constitutional, a constitution, a founding document. The squawk is criticism before it has been translated into sense. The blind branch is the position from which a review is issued: above, unseen, unaccountable. The chorus of woe and self-pity is the accusation the speaker minds most. And the critic is the word the poem finally settles on for the bird, which is the moment it stops being about a bird. Its target is nature as a place without judgement.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. It arrived legible, our readers divided along their usual lines rather than over anything the artifact forced, and nothing about our procedure had to change to receive it. Rung is not rank. What it leaves behind is one piece of form worth studying: a poem that holds eleven perfect quatrains and prints none of them, so that the reader has to keep walking too.
Press any of these to record that your reading disturbed it. Select a word or phrase in the piece above to mark it unresolved. Both acts are kept in your browser and nowhere else, and they are what your reader artifact is made of.