Sorrow Is Not My Name

The vulture in “Sorrow Is Not My Name” represents death and mortality, and the ways in which they offer the viewer a window into joy and beauty. Gay carefully crafts the image:

Look,

 just this morning a vulture

nodded his red, grizzled head at me,

and I looked at him, admiring

the sickle of his beak (Lines 3-7).

The primary image of the poem, the vulture encapsulates the speaker’s complicated view of mortality as inevitable, but capable of drawing attention to moments of aesthetic pleasure. The vulture, a creature that feeds on dead animals, is red and grizzled, and the speaker sees a sickle in the shape of his beak, alluding to another image of death and violence: the Grim Reaper, the symbolic personification of death. Despite this, the speaker is full of admiration for the natural beauty of the vulture, and when the bird flies away, Gay anthropomorphizes it by describing its plumage as a “good suit of feathers” (Line 9)—the vulture is dressed in formalwear to mark the occasion of being the speaker’s moment of joy. The speaker reasserts his feelings of admiration for the vulture when he describes the “naturally occurring sweet things” (Line 13) in the following lines, connecting the vulture to his a wide understanding of beauty within the natural world.