Uccellaci e Uccellini

Ambuscade

Othellos’ ambuscadoes and our ambuscades have been mechanized by modern warfare into minefields and booby-traps, but they can still be true to their origin and be found in woodland. For the embuscado, whose syllables seem to set cannon roaring in a Tudor tragedy, is the English form of the Italina imboscata. The ambush –poor-sounding child of ambuscado– is something wich occurs in the boskage. But boskage could shelter as well as trap: hence the French embusqué. Ambuscades can still help the poet to give power to his line, where ambush would be of no aavail. Dorothy Wallesley in her praise of ‘Horses’ imagines these old lures and traps that work in equine memory:

    Patient, adventuring still,
    A horse’s ears on the distant hill,
    And he will start to hear
    A pleasant chuck or whirr, having the fear
    In him of ages filled with war and raid,
    Night-gallop, ambuscade.

‘Evening’s ambuscade’ is a phrase of menace later made darker and more dangerous still by the gloom of war-time black-out.