“Bat” is a free-verse poem in eighteen short stanzas by the English poet D.H. Lawrence. The work was initially published in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, the poet’s 1923 collection focusing on the natural world. Lawrence uses vivid imagery, dramatically contrasting word choice, and a sharp change in mood to ground the reader in the speaker’s perspective.

The poem opens with the speaker sitting on a serene Italian terrace, watching the sun set to the west. As the light sky darkens, the speaker notices delicate swallows flying above. In horror, the speaker soon comes to realize that he has made a mistake—what first seemed like late swallows swooping above are, in fact, the evening’s first bats.

Set against the classical backdrop of Florence, with its Renaissance architecture, the narrative evokes the unique fear that results from a surprise encounter in familiar circumstances. The speaker is in an environment seemingly familiar to him. In this setting, in this state of comfort and leisure, the realization that the birds aren’t birds at all is as dramatic as if the birds themselves had made a magical transformation and simply become bats mid-flight.

Lawrence evokes the speaker’s encroaching terror through dramatic shifts in his word choice and imagery. When the story begins, the speaker uses peaceful, serene metaphors to describe the poem’s setting and the birds overhead. In stanza two, the city of Florence is a tired, wilting flower. In stanza four, the purported “swallows” overhead arc gracefully in circles and swoops, “sewing the shadows together” with a spool of figurative thread.

The delicate flower of the city, as it wilts, evokes a gentle, quiet sense of peace that marks the day’s uneventful end. Lawrence’s choice is an especially evocative one—a flower is an object traditionally considered beautiful, vibrant, and vital. Even a fading flower is beautiful and elegant, wilting slowly as its life cycle comes to a natural completion. Another meaningful dimension of this metaphor is that flowers attract birds and bats.

The metaphor of the swallows “sewing,” too, evokes a particular set of reactions. Sewing is a careful, deliberate action, and to fly as though “sewing” the sky together is to fly with a coordinated, rhythmic grace that evokes the precise, careful, productive motion of a needle moving back and forth. There is irony in the fact that, in the poem’s first third, the speaker attributes these elegant descriptions to the very bats he later loathes.

In the second third of the work, the speaker finally comes to realize that the creatures moving overhead are bats, not birds, and the language changes considerably. The soothing, complimentary word choices used to describe the delicate “swallows” give way to chaotic, erratic descriptions. The bats “twitch” and “shudder,” likened in one stanza to a wayward glove, flung haphazardly into the air. In another, the speaker likens them to “bits of umbrella.”

Crucial to note is that the “birds” themselves have not changed in any way. There were no birds, only unidentified bats. The same creatures that, to the speaker, appeared to be so graceful as to mimic the rhythm of a needle and thread are now seen as unpredictable and “Flying madly.” The change in the speaker’s feeling toward the creatures is enough to change the narrative perception of how the bats are moving through physical space. The movement of a physical body should, by all accounts, constitute an objective fact, but the speaker’s biases are enough to change his interpretation of the world in front of him.

In the final third of the poem, the speaker’s vitriol toward the bats comes to a crescendo....