scholarly journals 'Flying Checkerboard' a delight to watch

Blue Jay ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Donna Gamache
Keyword(s):  
Black And White ◽  
Snow White ◽  
Melanerpes Erythrocephalus

Have you seen a 'flying checkerboard' recently? That is one of the names for the Redheaded Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus). With its crimson head, snow-white body, and black and white wings, I can see why it is called this, especially when it is flying.

Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress Amongst the Ndembu*

1987 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Woodbridge
Keyword(s):  
Terminally Ill ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
White Skin ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Feminine Beauty ◽  
Snow White ◽  
White Campion ◽  
White Face ◽  
Short Hand

Among terminally ill figures of speech, the cliché of rosy cheeks, ruby lips, and snow-white skin may be counted downright deceased. Even in medieval and Renaissance love poetry, roses in the cheeks, lips like cherries or rubies, skin like ivory, lilies, or snow were stiffly conventional: freshness of complexion prompted no freshness of metaphor. The mistress's red-and-white face was relentlessly emblazoned, “red and white” becoming a short-hand notation for feminine beauty: “With lilies white / And roses bright / Doth strive thy colour fair” (Wyatt 65); “Fair is my love … / A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her” (Passionate Pilgrim no. 7); “Thou art not fair for all thy red and white” (Campion 264). The mistress in Spenser's Amoretti has “ruddy cheekes” and “snowy browes” (no. 64); the bride in his Epithalamion is a vision in red and white—cheeks like sun-reddened apples, lips like cherries, forehead like ivory, “breast like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, / Her paps lyke lyllies budded, / Her snowie necke”; when she blushes, “the red roses flush up in her cheekes, / and the pure snow with goodly vermill [vermillion] stayne, / Like crimsin dyde” (Il. 172-7, 226-8).

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