1

Vasko Popa and National Mythology: Notes on Wolf Salt1

Zdravka Gugleta Monash University Zgug1@student.monash.edu.au

In this paper I look at the process of transformation of Serbian national mythology and literary tradition in Vasko Popas book of poetry Wolf Salt (Vuja so). Unlike the principal Slavic scholar Reinhard Lauer, I argue that the book has nothing to do with the affirmation of a nationalistic ideology; on the contrary, the immanent analysis of this poetic text, for example of the development of the wolf motif, manifests a dynamic and complex poetic picture which situates the text within the European Postmodernist aesthetics. On 6th of March in 1993 in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a distinguished Slavic scholar, Professor Reinhard Lauer, published an article entitled: Aus Mrdern werden Helden: ber die heroische Dichtung der Serben (Murderers become Heroes: About Heroic Poetry of Serbs).2 In it Lauer discusses four main Serbian myths (Hauptmyhten)3: the wolf myth,

This paper was presented at the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for Communist and PostCommunist Studies (AACaPCS) in Canberra, 3-4 February 2011. It has been peer reviewed via a double referee process and appears on the Conference Proceedings Website by the permission of the author who retains copyright.

Reinhard Lauer, Aus Mrdern werden Helden: ber die heroische Dichtung der Serben, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 6, 1993; accessed 13 November, 2010, http://fazarchiv.faz.net/.

Hajduci-myth, the myth about Prince Marko and the Kosovo myth. It is primarily Lauers view of the wolf-myth that concerns us here. Explaining the pagan origins of the wolf-myth in Slavic culture and its especial importance to the Serbs, borne out by the fact that in Serbian culture the wolf figure undertook a Christian transformation in the personage of St Sava4: namely, in the popular imagination St Sava was identified as a wolf-shepherd Lauer goes on to argue that the wolf figure was actualized once again in the Serbian national propaganda during the 1990s war. To illustrate this he cites several lines from a poem by Vasko Popa (1922-1991) from his collection Wolf Salt (1975) the very first poem of that collection and of the cycle The Offering to the Lame Wolf. Here is the poem in full:

Return to your den Disgraced lame wolf

And sleep there Till the barking freezes And swear-words rust And torches of the universal hunt die

Lauer, Aus Mrdern werden Helden, 1. St Sava (his secular name was Rastko) was the youngest son of the medieval Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja. He was the founding father of Serbian Orthodox Church, becoming its first archbishop in 1219. He immensely contributed to the Serbian nation, church and culture. Cf. Petar Z. Petrovi, "Sveti Sava." Srpski mitoloki renik. 1998), 401. It was thanks to Cajkanovic that we know about the relation of old Serbian mythology to their Christian religion. Regarding St. Sava Cajkanovic writes: () from legends and from cult customs it is clear that St. Sava is () protective deity of wolfs, or wolf shepherd , and that means () that in Serbian paganism there was wolf deity, whose functions were later transferred to St. Sava. Veselin ajkanovi, Mit i religija u Srba. Izabrane studije (Beograd, 1973), 259.

And till everybody falls Empty-handed into themselves And bite their own tongue out of anguish

And dog-headed rulers with a knife behind the ear And the huntsmen with the sex organ over the shoulder And the hunting dragons the wolf-eaters

I crawl on all fours before you And howl to your glory As in your great Green times

And I pray to you my old lame god Return to your den5

The disgraced wolf figure described in the poem Lauer interprets as essentially representing the repressed Serbian nationalism during Titos Yugoslavia. While recognizing the ambiguity of the use of the wolf-motif, Lauer maintains that precisely because of this dangerous ambiguity (eine gefhrliche Zweideutigkeit)6 Popas poetry is prone to speak on behalf of Serbian nationalistic propaganda that allegedly led to genocide perpetuated during the 1990s war. For in Popas poetry, according to Lauer, the relation between the perpetrator and the victim is reversed; the wolf, a dangerous bloodthirsty wild animal, is portrayed as a victim, which then
5

The translation of Vasko Popas poems is mine, or based on Penningtons translation: Vasko Popa, Collected Poems. Trans. Anne Pennington and Francis R. Jones. Ed. Francis R. Jones. (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1997), 127-261. The original is found in Vasko Popa, Pesme. Dela Vaska Pope u dve knjige (Beograd: Dragani, 2008), 259-319.

Lauer, Aus Mrdern werden Helden, 2.

justifies the crimes it commits: the she-wolf, for instance, is tortured by canine enemies but in the end renews itself recovering her former glory.7 Lauer admits that Popa could not have anticipated such an interpretation of his poetry. Nevertheless, by looking closely at the logic of his lyric, one cannot say, Lauer concludes, that Popas poetry is an innocent one (unschuldige Poesie).8 Lauer effectively contends that Popas use of national mythology is an expression of Serbian nationalist ideology. For him, Popas Wolf Salt illustrates his thesis about the violent and arrogant Serbian mentality, which he analyses elsewhere,9 namely the indefatigable striving of the Serbs towards an establishment of Great Serbia.10 I shall not polemicize about the accurateness of Lauers assertion about the unequivocal guilt the Serbs carry for the civil war of 1990s. I shall only comment that the logic Lauer finds so unacceptable in Popas poetry seems to be forced upon it by the preconceived thesis about the warlike mentality and guilt of the Serbian people. Were we to interpret the 1990s war and the Serbian participation in it differently, the logic of Popas poetry Lauer happily detects, crumbles. An opposite view seems to be equally sustainable by Popas poetry: the demonized Serbs could be compared to the demonized figure of the wolf, best manifested, for instance, in the last poem of Wolf Salt.11 Such a politicization of a literary text is always possible. Lauers
7

See the cycle The Fiery She-Wolf in Popa, Pesme, 271-277. Here cited in Appendix on page 15. Lauer, Aus Mrdern werden Helden. 2. Reinhard Lauer, Serben und Kroaten in Gegenwart unde Geschichte (Hannover: Hahn, 1994), 11-37. Anzulovics book Heavenly Serbia is an example of a similar, Laueran approach towards literature. Cf. Anzulovic, Branimir, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (Annandale: Pluto, 2000), 45-67.The text that is especially targeted here (the chapter Dinaric Highlanders and Their Songs) is Njegoss Mountain Wreath which he describes as a hymn to genocide (p. 54) and supporting Serbian endemic violence (passim), the violence which together with the Kosovo myth, according to Anzulovic, influenced Serbian nationalistic ideology that led to the its expansionist campaign during the 1990s war. While Popas and Njegoss texts are fundamentally different The Mountain Wreath being admittedly a romantic epic celebrating nationhood, while Popa deeply examines the consciousness of a nationhood by looking at its mythic strata I mention Anzulovics book to point out the negative trend of the politicisation of literature.

10

11

This is the poem number 7 of the last cycle The Wolf Bastard in Popa, Pesme , 319. See Appendix on page 16.

reading of Popas poetry ultimately tells us more about his method of interpreting a poetic text through the prism of sociology and politics, than about the poetic text itself. His reading fails to pay attention to the immanent characteristics of the poetic work. And when I say immanent I do not mean that the critic should exclude the historical context from her analysis, but suggest that the historical context, if we want to prioritize the literary text, should not be viewed as an outside transcendent reality, but in an intimate relation to the text, which transforms the historical context for its own purposes, changing it and elevating it into an inexhaustible ahistorical or timeless, that is, universal meaning. I shall offer no true interpretation of Wolf Salt with an aim to oppose and dismiss that of Lauers, but shall indicate some of the facets of the work that each interpretation should be based on if it takes the literary text itself as a starting point. It cannot be fathomed how a scholar of his stature could overlook, as Lauer did, the connection of the wolf myth as Popa utilizes it to the more older, pagan, tradition, of the Slavic and Serbian culture, the nature of the development of the wolf-myth in Popas poetry in general, and a meditation on the motif in different cycles within the book Wolf Salt in particular an examination of which attests less to a simple linear linking of the wolf figure, the Serbian mythological god, to the referent of the Serbian intrinsic nationalistic identity, than to providing a dynamic, multi-layered poetic picture. It is important here to step back a little and briefly consider the importance of Vasko Popas first book Kora (Bark) published in 1953. This book, together with Miodrag Pavlovics 87 Poems pulverized the stale literary scene of the late 1940s and early 1950s and marked the beginning of the so-called post-WWII modernism, what would be later defined as Postmodernism.12 It introduced a radically new poetic idiom which drew on Surrealist heritage as well as Serbian folklore tradition. Its elliptical nature incited the Marxist pragmatic view about
12

Vladiv-Glover, for example, situates Popas thing poetry, along with the Russian Hemingwayan prose, and Polish thing poetry, as the harbinger of Postmodernism in Eastern Europe in 1950s. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, PostModernism in Eastern Europe after World War II: Yugoslav, Polish and Russian Literatures." Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 2/5 (1991).

poetry, which eventually led to the well known literary debate: decadent post-WWII modernism vis-a vis (socialist) realism emblematized by the opposition between the two major literary magazines: modernism-sided Delo (Opus) and Savremenik (The Contemporary) which favored realism.13 Popa, it could be said, paved the way for the second generation after WWII (Lalic, Hristic etc.) to create freely, without having to justify their literary method. The line of development of Popas poetry moving from existentialism (Bark, Unrest Field) towards essentialism of historic and mythic time (Secondary Sky, Earth Erect, Wolf Salt) which Lekic identifies,14 on closer inspection is not so clear-cut. For his existential themes rely also much on history and myth, while the national history and mythology of the later work are elevated into a universal meaning. Both of these dominants are grounded in a complex work of metaphorisation whereby the symbolic layer (folkloristic, Christian, national iconography) is utilized for the purposes of creating a new poetic meaning. Wolf Salt is Popas fifth book published in 1975. It comprises seven poetic sequences or cycles characteristic of Popa, each containing from five to seven individually numbered nontitled, poems: The Offering to the Lame Wolf, The Fiery She-Wolf, The Prayer to the Wolf Shepherd, The Wolf Land, Encomium to the Wolf Shepherd, The Lame Wolfs Trail, The Wolf Bastard. In Wolf Salt Popa does not deal with the wolf theme for the first time. He deals with it in the collection which precedes Wolf Salt, Erect Earth (1972),15 particularly in the cycle St Savas Spring, in which this Serbian saint appears as a wolf-shepherd; as well as in his collection that comes after Wolf Salt, namely Raw Flesh (1975),16 which ironically explores the motif in relation to the lyrical personas individual wolf heritage, bringing it to an almost banal level. Moreover, as many critics have observed, the wolf theme is prefigured in the very first
13

See, for example, Sveta Luki, Contemporary Yugoslav Literature: A Sociopolitical Approach (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 70-73.

14

Anita Lekic, The Quest for Roots: the Poetry of Vasko Popa (New York: Lang, 1993), 12. Popa, Pesme, 207-257. Ibid., 207-257.

15

16

poem of Popas opus, Acquaintance from Bark. This development of the theme shows that Popa uses the wolf symbolism not as a set of predetermined meanings, but rather he is interested in how it can be further extended and reinterpreted. Popas use of the mythological was less a simple thematic appropriation cum celebration (not to say mystification), and more of a formal character. That is, he was interested, as Simic says, in how the mythological symbols work,17 in rendering poetry mythological, so to speak, rather than the other way around making mythology poetical.18 Popa was interested not in the myth as a static content, received meaning, but in the form of the myth, the statu nascendi of the myth/of poetic meaning, as it were, the making of the poetic meaning through the technique of metaphorisation, where the play of language comes to the fore. As Lalic says:
Popa does not use symbols as a system of determined, conventional signs which appeal to the suitable recognition by the reader, but on the contrary he builds images which within his communication act independently, primarily as poetry, at the same time however being anchored into the ancient symbol. The function of such image is to cause a chain of associations, the movement which unobtrusively penetrates into the depth of what we call collective memory, until the symbol, the centre out of which the image has emanated.19

Let us turn to Wolf Salt and its organization of the cycles and development of the wolf theme in Wolf Salt. In the first cycle The Offering to the Lame Wolf the speaker is not the poet himself (as Lauer would have it) but the wolf-shepherd evident from the references in the third

17

Charles Simic, preface to The Quest for Roots: The Poetry of Vasko Popa, by Anita Lekic (New York: Lang, 1993), xiv.

18

Zoran Mii, Pesniko iskustvo (Beograd: Nolit, 1963), 180-181. Ivan V. Lali, O poeziji dvanaest pesnika (Beograd: Slovo ljubve, 1980), 115-116.

19

cycle Prayer to the Wolf Shepherd in which the wolves speak.20 The wolf shepherd worships the lame wolf and asks to sing in his name. The second cycle The Fiery She-Wolf depicts in a neutral tone the torture of the she-wolf by dogs and her ultimate Phoenix-like transformation. In the central fourth cycle The Wolf Land there is a dialogue between an anonymous son and a father regarding the intentions of the larger than life figure of wolf towards the wolf land. It portrays a dramatic situation in which the land is poised between the final destruction and second birth, depending on the wolfs actions that embodies both evil and good in this cycle. Like the central cycle in Popa's Secondary Sky,21 this cycle seems to offer a culminating asymetrical point of the book in which the final meaning and the message keeps receding from us: it conveys the ultimate inexhaustible relationship between the wolf and the land. The fifth cycle Encomium to the Wolf Shepherd spoken by the wolves parallels the mentioned third cycle (Prayer to the Wolf Shepherd). The sixth cycle The Lame Wolfs Trail corresponds to the second cycle The Fiery Wolf in that the lyrical persona depicts neutrally the torture of the lame wolf and his eventual victory. The last cycle The Wolf Bastard, predictably, mirrors the first cycle. The lyrical persona is the implied poet who identifies with the wolf. This carefully built formal and symmetrical (but open) structure of the book, the intertextual connections between different cycles and its polyphonous nature are two basic immanent characteristics which need to be taken into account when analyzing the complex meaning of the work.22 Apart from the mythological symbol of the wolf deity Popa activates in Wolf Salt, he also introduces his own mythic (read: poetic) symbols such as the fiery she-wolf, the demonic

20

Especially in the last fifth poem of the cycle in which the wolves are asking the wolf shepherd to visit them in a dream like old silver wolf; they also ask the wolf shepherd to give them the salt wisdomsomething that the speaker in the first cycle Offering to the Lame Wolf asks the lame wolf to sing in his name and a physical mark from the lame wolf so that the young wolves will proclaim him their shepherd.

21

Popa, Pesme, 135-205. Cf. Ronelle Alexander, The Structure of Vasko Popa's Poetry (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1985) which is, as the title indicates, a thorough study of the structure of Popas poetry.

22

dogs, the flying gusle,23 etc. He brings in the popular version of St Sava as a protector of wolfs, actualizing a number of images from oral tradition which coexist with invented ones. Furthermore, the language Popa uses draws from the forgotten, archaic and folkloristic expressions, borrows lyricisms, and weaves together slang and contemporary idiomatic expressions. Popa also radicalizes the traditional literary form. In Wolf Salt he renews the possibilities of the Serbian medieval form of encomium (pohvala) and prayer (molitva).24 This fusion of the traditional, folkloristic, and medieval elements with the modern, both thematically and formally, demonstrates the vital existence of the past within the present. The materiality of the text shows what the search for the meaning of the past entails: a direct engagement with it, bringing it on the same level as the present and discovering its legacy. In place of traditionalism (which views past as static) on the one hand, and the single minded make it new principle of the anti-traditionalists, Popas poetry attests to the importance of exploring just what this legacy of tradition implies.25

23 24

Gusle is a traditional one-stringed instrument. Another form which Popa famously used in a completely new way is the riddle form. In many ways Wolf Salt could be compared to Ted Hughes Crow (1972). A number of interpretations followed its publication which tried to pin down as to which mythological figure the crow represented. The crow was seen to refer to a trickster archetype associated with a number mythological figures ranging from those belonging to North American native mythology to the figure of Iblis/Satan from Islamic and Hebraic tradition; the Celtic god Morrigu; Teutonic mythological figure of Wotan; there were even attempts to establish the crows origin in Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. A single linear reference was sought which ultimately was unsustainable by the polymorphous text itself. Matthews Cy, "Crow and Vucja so: Locations of Indeterminacy in Ted Hughes and Vasko Popa," Comparative Literature Studies 47.2 (2010): 170-171. While Hughes Crow is formally a fragmentary text, and Popas Wolf Salt, as we have seen, is architectonically organized structure, they are both open texts full of surrealist imagery. They both depict violence that many a critic thought unliterary based on their preconceptions of what a literary text should be like. But ultimately both texts are in line with the Postmodernist aesthetics of demystification. It is interesting here to note how the two texts are compared by Matthews on the basis of their national/transnational meaning. In regards to Popas Wolf Salt, Matthews emphasizes how the translated text saw a more favorable interpretation since its national mythology was largely unknown to the Western reader. Cf. Matthews, Crow and Vucja so, 180. However, one could argue that the transnational dimension is already available in the original text, just as the national/Serbian

25

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The last cycle of Wolf Salt, The Wolf Bastard represents, in a sense, a metaphor of this message. The wolf bastard is a renegade figure that stands out of the canine canonical world view, and his song appears as an apocrypha an interpretation of tradition and past inassimilable by the domesticated view which goes blindly forward denying any roots, and as such are as stubborn as the traditionalists who perceive the past as fixed.26 The wolf bastard is able to connect the two opposing lines of force, the past and the present, and synthetically build his own vision, his own wolf song, which the reader perceives as the wolf salt the wisdom and meaning he is able to distill from the myth. To cite from one of the poems from this cycle which encapsulates the metaphor of a perpetual search for meaning, perpetual need to interpret the past:
I go in search for my real father Who cannot be born without me

I search for him

In the lines of his face Dispersed over the den I have fallen into

form of reference is employed in Alexander and Lekic even though they worked with the translated text as well it is a matter, we conclude, of interpretation and indeterminacy, which Matthews favors, of the text as always already translated.
26

Difference between life-giving tradition and the static traditionalism is discussed, for example, by Mii, Pesniko iskustvo, 179-183.

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In the valley of my bitten out foot Inherited from him Poor sun-stealer

In the tall weeds Sprung up between the syllables Of his name

I search for him And in that my whole life Passes here on the fiery field27

Going back to the mythic roots of Serbian people in order to create something new is essentially a demythologization of the myth as one traditionally knows it (i.e. receiving it as a fixed meaning) and at the same time a demythologization of the myth and past/tradition (e.g. the literary tradition). Nevertheless, pure demythologization is not possible, because all you create is a new meaning or text which is a new myth waiting to be read and interpreted. The emphasis of the presence of the past and the need to poetically and meaningfully interpret the past evident in Popas poetry we find also in his manifesto-like prefaces to his Golden Apple, an anthology in which Popa had culled out the most poetic folk stories, short lyrical songs, sayings, incantations, riddles (non-sense folk literature)28 and other anonymous
27

Popa, Pesme, 315. Lalic is reported to have said this in an interview published in A. Alvarez, Under Pressure. The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the U.S.A. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), 92.

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literature from the Serbian golden age.29 In the short preface, Popa stresses the importance for the modern poet to do what the greatest poets of the Serbian poetic canon did: keep coming back to eternally living wellsprings of folk poetry. But to go back is to go forward and transform the old into the new. Popa writes:
The only bright, genuine tradition of our folk poetry is an endless invention and endless discovering. Under the light of that inextinguishable tradition one must go forward, one must cone a new, own path in the stone of ones age. The rugged path equally dangerous for inducing either immortality or death in the one who steps on it.30

Instead of passively imitating the traditional models in language, repeating the language found in folk poetry, thus enclosing it into norms and clichs, the modern poet strives to discover new possibilities of meaning within the old anonymous folk imagination.31 And not only within the oral tradition but within the literary tradition as well, in a word, within the cultural tradition as a whole (history, religion, literature), as Popas poetry shows. The modern poet is born into an old language, old words, old meanings and is forced to invent something new that will persist and become another myth among myths, another poetic meaning. In words of Jovan Hristic, another distinguished Serbian poet, the modern poet needs to form the second tradition.32 In contradistinction to heritage, tradition is a matter of ones spiritual and poetic choice33 which is often dangerous (see Popas quotation above) because it is in a
29

Vasko Popa, Pesniki zbornici. Dela Vaska Pope u dve knjige (Beograd: Dragani, 2008), 11. Ibid., 13. It is important to note what kind of folk poetry Popa chose to present in his anthology. He chose less known short forms of the riddle, incantation, sayings, etc. which exuded the surrealistic quality that characterizes his poetry. Only after Popa could we go back to folk poetry and read it in a Popaesque way: find inexaustable surrealist images in it.

30

31

32

Quoted in Lalics preface to Hristics book of poems. Cf. Ivan V. Lali, preface to Sabrane pesme, by Jovan Hristi (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1996), 10.

33

Tradition is that line of spiritual and poetic choice, not always popular and not always saving, often dangerous, non-canonic in any case, sometimes even abyssal, heretical and infernal, but also rapt and radiant with the inner

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certain sense apocryphal. Evoking Eliots concept of the historical sense Hristic defines the modern as a specific sense of the past, a lens through which we look at the past []. If we are able to achieve one such sense of tradition, it means that we have achieved the modern in our time, achieved to be contemporary.34 A number of the twentieth century Serbian poets demonstrate this conception of the modern, the need to go back in order to go forward, the need to deconstruct the past always anew. The avant-garde and Modernist poets and writers between the two world wars, as elsewhere it the world, were attracted to the mythological and folklore heritage. Rastko Petrovic explored in his lyric the Slavic pagan mythology, while Momcilo Nastasijevic adopted the folklorist poetic expression seeking the maternal melody of Serbian language. Milos Crnjanski was averse towards the Serbian mythology and religion but, nevertheless, with his Vidovdanske pesme as Petrov says: despite their being anti-Byzantine, and exactly because of that, Crnjanski belongs to the conceptual sphere of the Byzantine canon of the 20th century Serbian poetry.35 A noticeable trend of the folklorisation of the avant-garde36 (excluding here Crnjanski) which Bojic observes could perhaps better be dubbed as the avant-gardisation of folklore and tradition. After a brief period of literary stagnation of socialist realism, poets of post-WWII Postmodernism of the 1950s continued to explore the wellspring of tradition. The first postWWII generation, Vasko Popa and Miodrag Pavlovic, and the second, Jovan Hristic, Ivan V. Lalic, Branko Miljkovic, were constructing individual mythopoetic worlds relying on the classical Mediterranean and (Orthodox) Byzantine heritage, on the one hand (especially Hristic

peace , which stretches from the primordial memory to the threshold of future which poets anticipate. Zoran Mii, Pesniko iskustvo (Beograd: Nolit, 1963), 180.
34

Cited in Lali, preface to Sabrane pesme, 11. Aleksandar Petrov, Kanon: srpski pesnici XX veka (Beograd: Slubeni glasnik, 2008), 47. Bojan Jovi, Neki aspekti motiva vuka kod Rastka Petrovia i Vaska Pope in Poezija Vaska Pope: zbornik radova, ed. Novica Petkovi (Beograd: Institut za knjievnost i umetnost, 1997), 208.

35

36

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and Lalic) , and Serbian folklore and history (especially Popa, Miljkovic) on the other. Vasko Popas poetry, therefore, was a part of a general literary, post-WWII literary trend, developing a unique second tradition, a unique mythopoetic universe, the universe that reconfigures the past. Looking at the development of the wolf-motif within Wolf Salt and within Popas opus as a whole, shows that Popa eruditely transforms and extends the national (mythological) symbols into poetic symbols and thus opens up a myhtopoetic and metaphoric space where universal meanings take place. Rather than being an expression of an exclusionary nationalist ideology, Popas poetry manifests the erudite Western Postmodernist aesthetics by eschewing any kind of ideological, logocentric meaning and instead celebrating indeterminacy and play of (but not with) poetic meaning.

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Appendix 1

From the cycle The Fiery She-Wolf

2. They imprison her In the underworld fire

They force her to build Towers of smoke And make bread loafs of coal

They stuff her only with embers And water With hot mercury milk

They compel her to couple With shining pokers And rusty gimlets

With teeth the she-wolf catches The fair-haired star And returns to the skys foothills

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Appendix 2

From the cycle The Wolf-Bastard

7. You bark

That my mind has slid into my ass And grown overnight Into an ominous tail

You bark

That my thoughts have transmogrified Into grey bristles And pierced all pores of my skin

You bark and bark

That my words smell Of human flesh burnt on a pyre And of the white sperm of my caudate god

You bark bark bark

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That out from my throat comes A well-known bloodthirsty howl Which I call a song

Just you bark

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