Pigeons out Walking
By Josephine Preston Peabody
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
They never seem to hurry,—no, Even for the crowd. They dip, and coo, and move as slow,[1] All so soft and proud! You can see the wavy specks Of bubble-color on their necks; —Little, little Cloud. Cloud that goes, the very way All the Bubbles do: Blue and green, and green and gray, Gold and rosy, too. And they talk as Bubbles could If they only ever would Talk and call and coo! —Till you try to catch one so, Just to make it stay While the colors turn. But Oh, Then they fly away!— All at once, two, three, four, five— Like a snowstorm all alive,— Gray and white, and gray!
Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Pigeons out Walking,” in The Book of the Little Past, 10. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.
[1] Male pigeons coo to attract their mates.
Contexts
Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”
Resources for Further Study
- “Pigeon Watch: Get to Know (and Love) Our Amazing City Birds.”
- “Where Did Pigeons Come From?”, by Justine E. Hausheer.
- In “Why Pigeons Feel at Home in the City,” Martha Foley talks to Dr. Curt Stager, Professor of Biology at Paul Smith’s College, about the adaptability of pigeons to urban environments.
- In “The Origins of Our Misguided Hatred for Pigeons,” Matt Soniak engages with sociologist Colin Jerolmack’s research on how these birds came to be considered city pests in the United States. Starting in the late XIX century, the public opinion on pigeons shifted from “innocent bird, to mundane nuisance, to public enemy in just a few decades,” with a marked negative turn in the 1930s and 1940s. The term “rats with wings,” for instance, was coined as recently as 1966 by a New York City Parks Commissioner.
- The American Pigeon Museum and Library in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, features permanent exhibits such as Pigeons in Wartime, The History of Pigeon Racing, A Shadow Over the Earth: The Life and Death of the Passenger Pigeon, and Project Sea Hunt: Pigeons and the Coast Guard.
