George SterlingThe Black Vulture

George Sterling

The black vulture written by the great poet George sterling . Born in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York in 1869, George Sterling came from an old and respected family descended from the Puritans. His father wanted him to become a priest, so George at age 17 was sent to a Catholic college in Maryland. Fortunately, his studies included poetry -- and the priesthood's loss was literature's gain.

The father sent the wayward son to Oakland, California San Francisco where the uncle -- Frank C. Havens -- was a leading real estate and insurance agent in the area. Here Sterling obtained an office job -- little more than a sinecure that allowed him to continue reading and writing poetry.

Since he felt of little resurrection from where he brought up, he saw that San Francisco is a place more opened to many things and through the Bohemian club he was able to express himself in very new way he liked. He had a love of liberty and freedom, dislike for a master, and would not be driven .

The Bohemian While he was there in San Francisco , appears the bohemian lifestyle , By 1872, when a group of journalists and artists who gathered regularly for cultural pursuits in San Francisco were casting about for a name, the term Bohemian became the main choice, and the Bohemian Club was born.[9] Club members who were established and successful, pillars of their community, respectable family men, redefined their own form of bohemianism to include people like them who were bons vivants, sportsmen, and appreciators of the fine arts

  George Sterling responded to this redefinition:

Any good mixer of convivial habits considers he has a right to be called a Bohemian. But that is not a valid claim. There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism. The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty. Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical in their outlook on art and life; as unconventional, and, though this is debatable, as dwellers in a city large enough to have the somewhat cruel atmosphere of all great cities.

Bohemian poets

They found inspiration in machines, speed, noise, confusion, film, vaudeville, circus, jazz - everything new and popular. They openly ridiculed the upper class art establishment. They encouraged each other to find new ways to portray the world around them, to challenge all their traditional assumptions about art, life and even perception itself.

In 1892, Sterling met the dominant literary figure on the west coast, Ambrose Bierce which at Lake Temescal and immediately fell under his spell. Bierce -- to whom Sterling referred as "the Master" -- guided the young poet in his writing as well as in his reading, pointing to the classics as model and inspiration. Bierce also published Sterling's first poems in his "Prattle" column in the San Francisco Examiner Sterling's poetry is both visionary and mystical and harked back to what he had been taught by Bierce, and, with its emphasis upon exotic romanticism and rhythmical regularity, and his work covered a broad set of themes and philosophies - from the romantic, in the tradition of Shelley and Keats, to the morbid gloom of Poe passing through the mystical and fantastic on the way

The Black VultureBy George Sterling

As you know Sterling was influenced by the Romantic poets as Shelly and Keats and how they use nature as a tool to express their feelings and ideas , so in this poem,    The Black Vulture is a nature-poem pure and simple , Sterling in this poem symbolizes death as a vulture , he saw this bird in Santa Lucia mountains , he was inspired by nature and birds , he also mention the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Santa Barbara County, California

“Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.”     

Because he was also the king of Bohemian poets, and the concept of their poetry is portray the world around them, he was able to portray of the all-destroying power of Death in this poem 

Nouf al-ogla Nada al-habardi