A huge gray bird waits on the roof while daisies sleep and nobody sees. At first this feels like a child’s remembered fragment, but Murray’s “A Tale” quietly arranges its images into something more troubling: a small fable about hunger, escape, and being unobserved.
The poem has two nearly identical stanzas, and the repetition matters because the second telling changes small details. In the first, the bird is “out on the roof” and wants “to eat my heart out”; in the second it is “on the roof outside” and wants “to eat out my heart.” That slight inversion sounds older, more folkloric, as if the language of the tale is settling into a formula. More importantly, the first ending asks uncertainly whether the lamb “got away and galloped up the road and was gone ?” The second version replaces this with the specific fact that it “escaped the butcher’s van and galloped up the road.” The vague flight becomes an escape from death. The poem does not say the lamb was caught or saved; it simply stops with the road, leaving the animal still running.
The central images keep returning. The huge gray bird is not black or dramatic; its grayness makes it ordinary, patient, and all the more menacing. It “wants” to eat the speaker’s heart out, but the poem never says it moves. The phrase “eat my heart out” is an idiom for suffering or pining, yet the bird’s hunger makes it feel physical as well as emotional: the heart, the seat of feeling, is what is threatened. Against that waiting hunger stands the remembered lamb, galloping—an odd verb for a lamb, since we expect horses to gallop. The word gives the small animal an almost heroic urgency. “Galloping” repeats like a heartbeat through the poem, while “the daisies are asleep” repeats with softer sibilance. The flowers are the only possible witnesses, and they are closed, absent. The phrase “no-one knows” makes that isolation explicit: this drama of hunger and flight happens without an audience.
The speaker asks someone, “remember the day,” but the line has no comma around that phrase, so the memory rushes into the present scene. Two time frames sit side by side: the bird on the roof now, the lamb on the road then. The speaker may be remembering a childhood chase, or may be addressing a companion; the poem does not clarify, and that openness lets the memory hover. The title calls it “A Tale,” and the repeated structure does feel like an oral retelling, where each version slightly reshapes the facts. Yet there is no comfortable moral. The bird remains outside, wanting; the lamb remains in motion.
The poem’s significance lies in this refusal to resolve. It takes small, almost childlike materials—a bird, a lamb, daisies, a road—and turns them into a meditation on how danger waits while innocent things run. The sleeping daisies and the repeated “no-one knows” suggest that the crucial moments of threat or escape are often unseen. By retelling the same few lines with small changes, Murray makes the form itself work like memory: circling back, sharpening one detail, leaving another uncertain. What remains is the gray bird’s hunger and the lamb’s galloping flight, held together in tension.