Sweet like a Crow

"SWEET LIKE a CROW"

The poem "Sweet Like a Crow" by Michael Ondaatje has a very torturous way of describing someone's voice. I also had to read the title again, because crows are not sweet. Ondaatje uses a lot of redundant similes in this poem. A simile is a metaphor comparing something to something else using the word like, or as. The similes in this poem are very vivid, and Ondaatje uses them in a very unique way. Someone would think that when a person writes a poem dedicated to another person, and the first four words are "Your voice sounds like," one expects to hear a poem attempting to describe the beautiful appeal of the person's voice, not "like a scorpion being pushed/ through a glass tube" (320). The similes Ondaatje uses in this poem are not easily decipherable, they are difficult and contain more fundamentals than the poem requires. Even though the poem attempts to describe a voice, and a sound, Ondaatje could simply compare the voice with other basic sounds such as an, off-key piano, or old scratchy-sounding record player, fingernails on chalkboards, and things of that nature. Yet instead he uses similes that have very powerful visual essentials as well as auditory ones.

Many of his similes depend on sight to make the reader understand the harsh nature of the voice described. An example like, "a typewriter on fire" might not make much of a sound, but instead maybe some hissing and high-pitched whistling as the plastic keys and metal slowly melted could have worked, but yet visualizing a typewriter on fire would be painful. The destruction of possibility for inspiration and potential is immaculate. I cannot recreate some of the sounds Ondaatje describes in his poem in my mind, but I can visualize them, such as "a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience" or "betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air" (320). Ondaatje is probably using these types of comparisons for a reason, to express that the voice cannot be fully described, that it cannot be fully understood by any one human mind. It might also be that I have not lived in all the places he has, and therefore I do not fully appreciate or understand some of the sounds he describes.

I also thought that Ondaatje's choice not to write out the number was an interesting one, as it broke up the consistency of his poem, and it is usually considered to be informal and inappropriate for published work like a poem. This leads me to believe that Ondaatje is using this notation to convey a message. He definitely emphasized the specific amount such as, "Eight sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle" (320), and "three old ladies locked in the lavatory" (320). By doing this, he might have hoped to force people to imagine the scene in that is in his mind, not just a fuzzy replica.

Just about