“Vultures” begins with a portrait of its titular birds perched up a tree on a “despondent dawn”—a grim grey morning before even the slightest “harbinger[] of sunbreak." The atmosphere is bleak. One vulture’s head looks “bashed in,” raw and mangled and flattened, bald as a “pebble” atop a “dump of gross feathers.”
Everything the poem’s imagery reveals makes the heart sink. This is a landscape of death and decay. The carrion birds look like dead meat and perch in a setting that looks like dead meat: even the dead tree they sit in resembles “broken bones,” a metaphor that evokes not just death but violent death. This, readers will soon see, is foreshadowing.
Strangely enough, in their hideous sunless landscape, these two birds are cuddling. The male vulture tilts his bald, mashed head “affectionately” towards its “mate,” and the pair “nestle close” to each other. It would be sweet, the gentle language suggests, if it weren’t all a little queasy-making, too.
These vultures, in their juxtaposition between the hideous and the tender, will become the poem’s guiding symbol. The poem’s speaker will suggest that horrors and love all too often coexist, not just in nature, but inside human hearts.
The poem will unfold in slow, measured free verse, without rhyme or a regular meter. Most lines here are of roughly equal length, only three or four words long, making it sound like the speaker is working their way through an idea carefully—or perhaps squeamishly, as if tiptoeing through pools of things they really don’t want to step in.