Poetry and Animals: Blurring the Boundaries with the Human 9780231547420

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1. THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY: FROM CHAUCER TO GRAY
2. POEMS OF THE ANIMAL
3. POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE: THE SPECIES POEM
4. THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY
5. OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID
CODA
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

POETRY AND ANIMALS

POETRY AND ANIMALS

BLURRING THE B OUNDARIES with THE HUMAN

ONNO OERLEMANS

Columbia University New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Oerlemans, Onno, 1961– author. Title: Poetry and animals: blurring the boundaries with the human / Onno Oerlemans. Description: New York: Columbia University, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049986 | ISBN 9780231159548 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231547420 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Animals in literature. | Exempla in literature. | Anthropomorphism in literature. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Animal welfare in literature. | Animals—Symbolic aspects. | Poetry, Modern—History and criticism. | Poetry, Medieval—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1083.A5 O37 2018 | DDC 809.1/9362—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049986

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover image: courtesy of the author

F O R S A L LY

•

Nature poetry should not be taken to be avoiding anthropomorphism, but to be enacting it, thoughtfully. — D O N M C K AY , V I S À V I S

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi

INTRODUCTION 1 1 THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY: FROM CHAUCER TO GRAY 27 2 POEMS OF THE ANIMAL 52 3 POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE: THE SPECIES POEM 83 4 THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY 119 5 OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID 154

X CO NTENTS

CODA 192

Notes

197

Bibliography Index

227

217

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

began this book with the realization that while poetry has helped me to see, explore, and understand the complexity of the nonhuman animals in the world around me, there has been relatively little written about the relationship between animals and poetry. I have been inspired too by the rise of animal studies in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies, finding myself in the usual situation of having personal passion and interest align to some degree with what is (or was) new in the world of criticism and theory. Many people have helped me along the way. Andrew Peart, while a dazzling undergraduate at Hamilton College, worked with me early on to find and collect poems about animals. His deep knowledge of twentieth-century American poetry, and his insight into individual poems, helped me get the book under way and informs my discussions of several specific poems. Tobias Menely, now at UC Davis, has also contributed enormously to the book; discussions with him have deepened my understanding of what matters in thinking about the representation of animals in literature, and his published work has been influential in my own thinking. My colleagues at Hamilton College have given me enormous support, as has the college itself, in terms of sabbaticals and publishing subventions. Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, and Michael Simon at Columbia University Press have also provided much assistance.

X IIAC K NOW LE D GM E N TS

The anonymous readers to whom they submitted my manuscript gave much valuable guidance as I revised the text. I especially want to acknowledge and thank the many students at Hamilton who have taken classes with me in which I have discussed animals and their representation in various works of literature. I have tested out many ideas with them, and the ensuing discussions have helped me move forward in my work. The excitement they have had about the general topic and the specific works has sustained my confidence in my own project, and many of the insights I have gleaned from those discussions have made their way into this book. I also want to thank my wife, Sally Cockburn, on whom I have tested my deepest convictions, including some of my most outlandish ideas. If they survived her rational examination, those ideas are still here. Living with her, and our many companion dogs, these past several decades has essentially formed who I am, complete with my interest in and respect for nonhuman life on the planet.

POETRY AND ANIMALS

INTRODUCTION

I

n 1936 the scholar Elizabeth Atkins published an article in PMLA called “Man and Animals in Recent Poetry.” In her essay Atkins presents evidence that “in American poetry written since the World War, one of the most significant new developments is now seen to be the fascination which animal life holds for the poet.” She notes that in the literary journals she surveyed over a period of fifteen years, 236 poets had published “earnest and philosophical poems about animals,” and that these poems present “intimate portraiture . . . with fidelity of detail worthy of the old Dutch portrait painters.” In contrast to the depictions of animals in poetry of the Victorian and romantic periods, she argues, this new animal poetry is “carefully literal.” With copious references to poets and poems, Atkins argues that poetry about “literal” (as opposed to allegorical) animals is a genuinely new phenomenon. She offers several reasons for the rise of this new kind of animal poetry: the Darwinian revolution and the awareness it brings of the evolutionary kinship between humans and animals; the influence of Emily Dickinson; that most readers of poetry live in cities and so feel the absence of actual animals in their lives; that World War I and the new science of psychoanalysis have offered plentiful evidence of a “sick civilization,” which spurs a turn to the “soundness in the primitive life of the beasts”; and that human interest in animals is in any case “immemorial.” Echoing a

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Shelleyan notion of the relationship between poetry and intellectual progress in society, Atkins insists that this new animal poetry simultaneously reflects and anticipates a more general cultural awareness of the significance of animals. So too Atkins’s article impressively anticipates the recent rise of animal-oriented criticism, which is also a response to the Darwinian revelation of our evolutionary kinship with animals.1 There is a paradox revealed in the essay—that although animals have been curious to us beyond the myriad ways in which we have used them, their own interests and actual nature have always been marginal and unrecognized. Our awareness of animals is simultaneously bound by human history and culture and outside of that history and culture, which is true too of animals themselves. Yet there may now be something new under the sun. That animal studies is now truly interdisciplinary—and includes history, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, rather than being only a relatively lowly branch within biology and psychology—means that there is a growing cultural awareness of what animals mean, of what the animal as a concept means, and that animals have some form of inalienable value to and for themselves. Recent developments in evolutionary psychology have contributed to this growing awareness as well, helping to narrow the seemingly unbridgeable gap between human and nonhuman versions of sentience. As Susan McHugh argues in a much more recent PLMA article, “Animal studies researchers are united by a commitment not so much to common methods or politics as to the broader goal of bringing the intellectual histories and values of species under scrutiny.”2 As Atkins helps us to see, this new academic culture is late on the scene, though it is no doubt driven by many of the reasons she identifies as giving rise to a new kind of poetry about animals. In addition to the belated recognition by literary scholars of Charles Darwin’s key insights, we might also see a more general crisis as motivating this renewed critical interest in the animal: that the news from the animal world is alarmingly bad. Animal populations are under extraordinary threat all over our planet. Habitat destruction, climate change, poaching, and hunting have dramatically accelerated the rate at which many animal populations are shrinking, and at which species

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of all kinds of life other than human are becoming extinct (between one thousand and twenty thousand times the rate of “natural” extinctions). The biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that half of the animal species currently in existence will be extinct by 2100, and predictions for ocean life are even more dire.3 About sixty billion land animals are killed every year for food, in addition to equally vast numbers of marine animals (most of which are merely “bycatch”). Multiple studies have documented the collapse of fish stocks the world over.4 In virtually all respects, then, the lives of animals on the planet are getting worse. Pets are the only animal category that continues to expand (in every sense), though as John Berger noted in his famous essay “Why Look at Animals,” this is hardly reassuring.5 It is an open question whether keeping pets expands, contracts, or does nothing to our collective concern for the larger animal world. The growing awareness of these crises is no doubt spurring the development of a truly engaged discipline of animal studies, which will make this, as ethologist Marc Bekoff has argued, the “century of the animal,” or at least the century of nostalgia for the animal.6 Scholars are now exploring the animal and actual animals in nature and culture, history, philosophy, art, and literature. Yet poetry about animals has received scant attention, both since Atkins identified the burgeoning field and since the rise of animal studies. For instance, at the 2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society: Minding Animals, in Newcastle, Australia, only one session out of about a hundred was on poetry, whereas there were at least a dozen sessions on the representation of animals in novels and film. Equally telling, an essay by Teresa Mangum surveying “animal genres in literature and the arts” argues that the representation of animals in literature “cannot escape the binary opposition that separates humans from non-human animals” because writers and animals are “penned in by the conventions of character and plot that organize genres,” as though all literary genres are reducible to, or entirely structured by, narrative and the creation of characters.7 The excellent book Creaturely Poetics, by Anat Pick, briefly refers to a single poem, its real focus being film and prose.8 A May 2009 special PMLA issue on animal studies included only one article on

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poetry.9 As Marjorie Garber wonders, even in J. M. Coetzee’s powerful The Lives of Animals, a text that continues to reverberate in the realm of literary animal studies, and in which “the debate about the ‘lives of animals’ [is] clearly staged as a debate between poetry and philosophy . . . , why does philosophy seem so clearly to dominate, if not to win?”10 Although Elizabeth Costello argues in her fictional lectures for the superiority of poetry over philosophy as a mode of representing and approaching animals, Costello herself actually engages in philosophical discourse, just as Coetzee engages in prose fiction. The relative scarcity of critical engagement with poetry in animal studies is striking because the trend that Atkins identified between the World Wars has continued; the twentieth century features an extraordinary number of poems about animals. Animal poems are not a minor or perhaps somewhat embarrassing occasion for verse but a significant and consistent topic in poetry. Virtually all of the poets included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (to pick one not entirely arbitrary form of sampling) have written poems about animals. In fact, as David Perkins has shown, the rate at which such poems were written began to increase dramatically during the romantic period, corresponding to the rise of the interest in animal welfare during the same period.11 My own efforts at surveying and collecting what I simply refer to as “animal poems” have left me feeling like a biologist in a rainforest, where every inquiry reveals unexpected and overwhelming riches, new creatures and species at every turn. It is hard to find a poet who has not written some poems on animals, and many poets, including many great ones, have written substantial numbers of such poems. Many commonly anthologized poems are centrally about animals, such as “As I Ebbed on the Ocean of Life,” “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Fish,” “Hurt Hawks,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Skunk Hour,” “The Snake,” “Song of Myself,” and “Two Look at Two.” And there are a surprising number of poets for whom animal poems are a central part of their oeuvre, such as Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and James Wright; and more recently, Margaret Atwood, Russell Edson, Maxine

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Kumin, Sarah Lindsay, Don McKay, Pattiann Rogers, Charles Simic, and Robert Wrigley. The absence of sustained critical attention on poetry about animals is worth pondering. One of the contributions of animal studies generally has been to reveal how human culture has imagined and constructed boundaries between the human and the animal, even as we have shared the planet with animals and built industries, nations, and empires by defining, killing, and exploiting them. As Cary Wolfe has shown, redefining these boundaries has played a significant role in enabling various kinds of racism and imperialism.12 In other words, a conception of the human as opposed to the nonhuman, and thus the very definition of the animal, is at or near the center of conceptions of power. As Nicole Shukin argues: “Discourses and technologies of biopower hinge on the species divide. That is, they hinge on the zoo-ontological production of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals.”13 In the modes of representation she examines (advertisements, images, and movies) we see animals as victims of the human will to power. Both Wolfe and Shukin note how frequently animals are represented and that this representation is largely a way of rendering animals as consumable or otherwise marginal. Because nonhuman animals are virtually without power within human culture, they are destroyed in such vast numbers, and their future is so grim, it stands to reason that culture represents them as objects and as radically other. Cause and effect are ineluctable here. The literary critic Marian Scholtmeijer made a similar point in the early 1990s, noting that in modern fiction animals are consistently represented as victims, as essentially lacking any power of their own: “Almost nothing remains to animals that has not been constrained, pruned, injured, or eradicated by humankind.”14 In this broad cultural context, poetry barely registers and has thus been largely ignored within animal studies. As W. H. Auden wrote, overstating the case somewhat, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”15 Though it is absurd to say so, poetry appears to make even less happen today.

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Culturally, poetry occupies a shrinking proportion of the consumption of the written word. With the notable exception of hip-hop, poetry remains relatively invisible. In the realm of cultural theory, which has had a seminal influence upon animal studies, poetry is unimportant both because it now seems so marginal (and thus barely even a part of culture) and because the concept of the literary, of which poetry is probably its most definitive mode, is considered a form that enables distinction and hierarchy: that it is, in a word, elitist. Though most cultural theory is explicitly post-Marxist, it still conceives of literature as part of a largely impersonal system of production, creating and representing modes of power. So too the category of poetry (which is highly malleable) has come under suspicion in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, most influentially in the New Historicist critique of the romantic lyric. This critique argues that romantic desires for self-definition expressed in the lyric mode are naïve and idealistic, actively suppressing the broadly material forces that structure history and culture. Although there is obviously much poetry then and now that is not in the form of the romantic lyric, the influence of the form has been profound enough that it is possible to think of all poetry as at best irrelevant—fiddling while Rome burns or animals are slaughtered—and at worst guilty of being complicit with totalizing forms of power. An important component of the distrust of poetry in the realm of animal studies is a general suspicion of subjectivity, consciousness, and conscience. Materialist critics conceive of subjectivity as the illusion of self-autonomy, rationality, control, and individual choice epitomized, for instance, in the work of Wordsworth. While many contemporary poets (especially those of the Language school) actively resist this conception of what poetry can be, poetry in the minds of many critics and readers is still largely understood to be the most subjective and spontaneous kind of representation. Subjective responses, moreover, seem in the minds of such critics to lead inevitably to anthropomorphism, in which any presence of the animal is elided in favor of an anthropocentric conception of being. In contrast to this flattened and deprecatory view of poetry, I subscribe to Williams Carlos Williams’s idea that while it is difficult to get

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the news from poems, men (and animals) die miserably every day for lack of what is found there: insight, meaning, and an awareness of complexity and of things otherwise inexpressible. Regardless of poetry’s effects on the broader culture, as a discourse poetry is highly flexible, varied, productive, and complex. It can produce unique meanings and insights that question and challenge dominant modes of thinking. In contrast to much criticism, poetry does more to bring a reader back to the physical world and actual animals. Poetry also provides plentiful evidence against the notion that the present moment always possesses both the most self-awareness of the forces that drive history and the least ability to resist them. My survey of poetry about animals over the past couple of centuries has revealed a history in which humans have always had complex ideas about animals and their relations to them, ranging from loathing to love, fear to fascination—the animal as both beast and companion, human and nonhuman. Signal evidence of this is also found in the earliest art of all cultures: the stunning cave paintings of Chauvet; the complex relations between humans and animals represented by Homer, Chaucer, and the author of Beowulf; and aboriginal art the world over. As Jacques Derrida, at least, is unembarrassed to admit, our interest in animals, both abstract (as objects of our various kinds of discourse) and in our daily lives, has its origin in a moment of ethical awareness that is not purely rational, critical, or theoretical but open and reflective. This awareness occurs in moments of recognition, such as when an individual person looks at an individual animal and perhaps has the gaze returned. I think poetry can speak to and amplify this kind of awareness as well or better than any other mode of discourse, because it enables a version of Keats’s negative capability that is fundamental to exploring the similarities and differences between humans and other animals. As Derrida says, somewhat cryptically, “Thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. It is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking.”16 He means many things here: in part that philosophy, like cultural studies, must attempt a definition of the animal, engage the animal

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as a concept, and remain relatively abstract. Poetry has the potential of engaging the physical being, the individual creature. It can originate in direct experience and emotion, retain mystery, and blur boundaries. Interestingly, many recent critics have argued for the special ability of poetry to generate ecological awareness more generally. For instance, Jonathan Bate suggests that inherent in poetry is a desire or force that turns our gaze outward, to the earth: “Poesis in the sense of versemaking is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself—a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat—is an answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself.”17 Bate makes the extraordinary claim that the poet could be “a keystone subspecies of Homo Sapiens . . . , potentially the saviour of ecosystems,”18 because poetry is uniquely capable of revealing and producing how we dwell in the land. So too Angus Fletcher finds in a distinctive mode of American poetry the ability both to dissolve seemingly entrenched binaries and to create a new awareness of environment as a place actively inhabited by the self of the poet and his or her readers. The “environment-poem,” as he calls it, “does not merely suggest or indicate an environment as part of its thematic meaning, but actually gets the reader to enter into the poem as if it were the reader’s environment of living.”19 Poetry does not escape the world or reify individual being so much as depend upon a poet’s desire to become aware of her many entanglements with others and, through careful description, with the world at large. However, Fletcher makes no allowance for poetry to bridge the gap between human and animal. Indeed, when he reads a poem about an animal (John Clare’s “Mouse’s Nest”), he sees it as descriptive of the poet’s connection to landscape rather than to another sentient being. So too Bate allows that ecopoesis might “engage imaginatively with the non-human” but does little to develop the idea.20 Leonard Scigaj’s account of the work of “sustainable poetry” similarly focuses on poetry that “treats nature as a separate and equal other and includes respect for nature conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and potentially self-regulating cycling feedback systems,” but this focus on vaguely defined systems apparently leaves little room for the sentient beings who live in them.21

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Poetry is a means of encountering, investigating, and representing animals that is especially capable of mediating and altering the way we think about them. Poems about animals do many things: they bring animals to our attention; they give various kinds of meaning to animals; they bring animals into the realm of human culture, even high culture; they transform nonhuman animals into human symbols; and they allow us to imagine modes of animal being, to attempt to cross, blur, and reimagine the problematic human-animal divide. Indeed, given that philosophy has traditionally understood an essential part of its own purpose as defining the human against notions of the animal and thereby solidifying hierarchies, poetry can help us with new ways of imagining human and animal relatedness. Poetry allows for experimentation and diversity, play and openness to the new. Because language and symbol making are at the center of historic definitions of human being, poetry’s experimentation with language and symbols allows for a broad range of ways of representing, thinking about, imagining, and encountering animals. This power of poetry is theorized in Susan Stewart’s fine book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Though Stewart is not specifically concerned with poetry about animals, she argues that poetry is centrally “an anthropomorphic project” in the sense that it is a way of overcoming the profoundly solipsistic nature of individual existence. Though we often regard poetry as effete and ethereal, Stewart argues that it is in fact an expression of fundamental physical desires: for survival, communication, and beauty. “As metered language, language that retains and projects the force of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward intersubjective meaning, poetry sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence.” Herself an accomplished poet, Stewart understands poetry to involve a sensual use of language, connecting us to our own physical existence, as well as allowing us to reach out, to imagine and communicate with others. Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of animals, she argues that “the sense perception of animals is the basis of the link between their own particularity as organisms and the life of the species through reproduction, and it is as well the ground for their desire for an objective being, an other, by means of which such

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reproduction will take place.” The urge to know the world, to know the other through our senses, and to leave a record of it (to reproduce) is central to our animal being. Producing poems is an expression of this reproductive desire, much as song is for many birds. It is anthropomorphic in that it is necessarily bound by our human senses and language and the desire and experience of the individual poet. It is always personal, of the poet. Yet Stewart sees that poems are also a record of a desire to reach beyond self: “The semantic dimension of poetry is an open unfolding one, stemming from both composition and reception. No poetic utterance is absorbed by its context or completed in its use. . . . The poet speaks to another in such a way as to make the communication intelligible to more than one person. The communication is not simply intimate: it is constitutive of the social, mutual, intersubjective ground of intimacy itself. It is the kind of thing one knows that others say when they are face-to-face.” Stewart’s account of the full meaning of a poem includes the community of readers, of which nonhuman animals can never be a part. But animals can be included in the community that poets themselves recognize and help to forge. Stewart notes that poems have mimicked animal calls and so become signs of the desires for spontaneity, authenticity, and beauty that animals often embody for us. Animal play and animal faces (often reproduced in the form of masks) have suggested modes for poetry, ways of becoming other and connecting to the world.22 Although Stewart points to an inherently anthropomorphic quality of poetry (and language), poetry as a whole produces no particular ideology or approach to animals. In the helpful terms suggested by Matthew Calarco in representing and understanding animals, poets may be focused on identity, difference, or indistinction. That is, they may highlight ways in which we are like animals, and they like us; they may foreground and celebrate animal (and species) difference; and they may dwell on “a space in which supposedly insuperable distinctions between human beings and animals fall into a radical indistinction and where the human-animal distinction (in both its classical and more complicated deconstructive form) no longer serves as a guardrail for thought and practice.”23 Poetry in general can do all these things; individual

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poems, as I will show, may align with any of these strategies and sometimes all of them at once. My general argument is that poetry’s inherent playfulness, its resistance to rules and codes, its openness, allows it to break out of ideologies and categories, to be at once anthropomorphic and antianthropocentric.

R My ambition is to produce here a field guide of poetry about animals, which is both an overview and a sampling, one that begins to account for the variety of work poetry can do for and about animals and our interests in them. The only other full-length study that attempts to do this is Randy Malamud’s Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. Noting the absence of serious analysis of poetry about animals, Malamud usefully surveys the work of several well-known twentieth-century American poets. The book is somewhat limited, however, in its scope and in its evaluative schema. Malamud’s activist mode of criticism foregrounds the ability of art to represent animals respectfully, allowing animals in one way or another to be “present.” For Malamud, bad poems about animals (which he sees as legion) are actually about humans, accepting Calarco’s claim that any degree of anthropomorphism is a kind of failure.24 He thus dismisses all first-person lyric poems as guilty of foregrounding the human over the animal. Good poems are those few that make explicit their inevitable failure to represent the animal. Moreover, Malamud ignores matters of form. Indeed, Malamud is not really interested in poetry as a specific mode of writing, but simply as one more mode of mimesis, as though the purpose of all art about animals should always be to make the animal present. This is a simplistic ethics posing as a kind of aesthetic. Thus, although he admires Marianne Moore’s poetry because it presents “a panorama of animals and animal experience,” he also complains that her poems are “choppy and difficult; it’s not the form I would have chosen for such outstanding poetic animals. . . . The important thing about style for my purposes here is that it not overwhelm the spirit of these works. . . . Ideally, the imaginative texts that springboard readers to a range of metaphorical relationships with

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animals would be unencumbered by any stylistic mediation at all, eliminating the need to ‘psych out’ and come to terms with the language, the imagery, the voice.” A work of literary criticism that depicts the act of reading and interpretation as a “psych out” cannot take us far.25 Much more interesting is the kind of animal-oriented criticism exemplified by Dan Wylie. In his essay on southern African elephant poems, he remains deeply attentive to matters of poetic form, giving precise readings of how these poems question “the conventional linguistic boundaries of division . . . [while] at the same time, such poems do not deny human culture.”26 He argues that the power of this poetry lies in its ambiguity and openness, rather than in the impossible ideal of mimetic clarity, in taking “full advantage of the possibilities of language to bridge and embody both anthropocentric and biocentric meanings.”27 He forcefully notes that while it is obviously impossible for any kind of writing to escape the bounds of human perception and culture, it is still possible for poetry to “negotiate the borderlands between interspecies subjectivity and exteriorized observation.”28 The broadest way of stating the work that poetry can do is suggested by the philosopher Dale Jamieson, who has written extensively on our ability to understand and represent animal cognition. Knowing, encountering, and assessing all modes of mental being, Jamieson argues, including those of nonhuman animals, other people, and even our own consciousness, is always a matter of interpretation, of making sense of multiple sources of information, gaps, and ambiguities. Because the process of understanding the mental life of other creatures is broadly similar, there can be a “deep connection between what an organism thinks and what thoughts an interpreter would attribute to the organism.”29 The case I am making abstractly here, and through the poems I examine throughout the book, is that poetry explicitly and forcefully allows us to engage in this kind of interpretation about animals. Especially since the romantic period, one of the functions of poetry has been to engage in precisely this kind of interpretation—formulating the meaning of one’s own experience, and understanding that of others,

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particularly in poems of encounter. Broadening the scope of the other to include nonhuman animals has been a part of the evolution of poetry, as we shall see in chapter 1. The poems Wylie analyzes are those he has collected about elephants in southern Africa, part of a larger project on how elephants are understood and reflected in different aspects of southern African culture and in different modes of discourse. Malamud, on the other hand, examines the work of poets whom he feels offer a sufficient degree of respect to animals. The divergent strategies of Wylie and Malamud raise the interesting question of how, if one wants to consider the specific abilities of poetry to mediate animal being to human culture, to define the field and select examples? In addition to Wylie and Malamud, there is also a long, though somewhat thin, history of critical analysis of specific poets who have written poetry about animals (such as Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, and Marianne Moore), but such criticism tends to interpret these poems in narrow and conventional (which is to say biographical and anthropocentric) ways. What I aim for is a broad analysis, a sizing up of what the constraints and processes of poetry can bring to the fraught relationship between human and animal. That is, we need an analysis of poetry about animals from the general perspective of animal studies, which can scrutinize and document our construction of ideas of the nonhuman animal, how these constructions have served conceptions of the human, and how something of the actual creaturely reality of the sentient beings that inhabit the planet might be found in or rescued from these cultural constructions.

R Coetzee, in The Lives of Animals, makes the strongest case yet for the ability of poems to mediate our understanding of the animal. Although, as I suggest earlier, the debate that Coetzee stages between philosophy and poetry is destabilized by the complexity of its own form, 30 its central character, Elizabeth Costello, in her second lecture offers a fragmentary argument for how poetry provides a profound means of engaging

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and representing animals, a claim consistent with what Coetzee has written in other places. Costello’s argument is presented explicitly as a fragment, its introduction cut short by the fact that the novella’s actual protagonist (Costello’s son), who relates events from his perspective, arrives at his mother’s lecture at least half an hour late. Elizabeth Costello has begun her lecture by identifying “that kind of poetry [in which] animals stand for human qualities,” which is to say, poetry that is not about animals but uses them allegorically to represent entirely human concerns.31 The difficulty of actually identifying or defining poems only seemingly about animals is suggested by the fact that Costello never attempts to do so. Nonetheless, Costello opposes allegorical poetry to two poems by Ted Hughes, which she suggests represent what poetry at its best can do for animals. The first poem she discusses, which the narrator explains is in a handout passed around in the lecture, but which Coetzee himself does not reproduce in his text, is Hughes’s poem “The Jaguar,” which I quote here in full: The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun. The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut. Fatigue with indolence, tiger and lion Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw. It might be painted on a nursery wall. But who runs like the rest past these arrives At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom— The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

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By the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear— He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.32

This is a fascinating poem, considerably more complex than Costello’s brief account of its effect suggests. Costello argues that the poem, “by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and that no one ever will . . . , shows us how to bring the living body into being within ourselves. When we read the jaguar poem, when we recollect it afterwards in tranquility, we are for a brief while the jaguar. He ripples within us, he takes over our body, he is us.”33 Costello, a novelist who is engaging in philosophy, is certainly too quick to dismiss the long history of explanations of “poetic invention” and its effects. The response to the poem that Costello suggests refers only to its final ten lines, in which the pacing jaguar is described as somehow indifferent to being caged because of the sheer force of its desire to hunt. “There’s no cage to him” because his instincts, “the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear,” appear to blind him to his confinement. That a reader can imagine the physical being of the jaguar (as Costello says, “bring the living body into being within ourselves”) results from the poem’s reduction of the animal’s ability to perceive and understand its actual situation, and from the wonderful lines at the end of the poem that create a forceful sense of the cat’s pacing, heightened by the contrast to the other inert animals of the zoo. The poem describes a relatively complex approach to the jaguar, an encounter made to seem objective by the absence of an explicit narrator of the description. Like the crowd in the poem, the reader is inexorably led past the other caged animals to the pacing jaguar. The sudden insight the poem gives of the individual jaguar’s sheer independence is also an assertion of an idea of animal being: that its predatory instinct overpowers its awareness of its immediate environment. It is also possible,

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however, to read the poem and its description of the jaguar as a revealing misreading of the animal. That the omniscient speaker interprets the jaguar’s pacing as reflecting indifference or virtual escape rather than stress and unhappiness (which is more plausible) suggests his belief in the relative unconsciousness of the animal, the primacy of its instinct over its immediate awareness of its surroundings. Regardless of how one interprets the behavior of the jaguar, Costello is right that the poem presents an encounter with an actual animal rather than something obviously symbolic, conceptual, or otherwise artificial, even if the poem is also attempting to capture something seemingly essential about the species. Hughes’s poem makes us feel the jaguar’s presence and its otherness, the reality of its energy, the power of its pacing. We recognize that the jaguar is contained and partially diminished by the artifice of the zoo, and also by that of the poem, a meaning subtly echoed by and felt through the poem’s loose iambic pentameter (a rhythm of natural energy and containment). The poem approaches the animal and leaves a remainder, a mystery about the animal rather than about the perceiver. The poem explicitly reveals that part of our interest in large, sentient animals is a desire to engage them, to have them present behavior that demands interpretation. Again like the crowd in the poem, the reader is forced to recognize that she wants to know what the jaguar is sensing. The poem offers itself as a dramatization of such an interpretation. The poise and economy of the poem, moreover, is at once a statement about the confidence and fullness of the interpretation and that it is an act of the imagination, a surmise, a creation. Costello’s arguments about animal being and against philosophy are consistent with Coetzee’s other writing, in which the distinctions between human and nonhuman animals are frequently blurred. He achieves this not by humanizing animals through careful depictions of their behavior, or attempts to imagine their subjective existence, but rather by de-idealizing human conceptions of our own nonanimality. People, in Coetzee’s novels, are revealed to be a lot less conscious and rational, and more driven by physical desires and needs, than they imagine themselves to be.34 So too Elizabeth Costello argues that reason is

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“neither the being of the universe nor the being of God . . . [but rather] the being of one tendency in human thought.” And in what many readers take to be the central point of her argument about our ability to know the lives of animals, she says: “To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive in the world.”35 For Coetzee and Costello, this is the large common ground between humans and other sentient creatures—not the elimination of mental existence but a conception of awareness as largely occupied by the physical sensation of existence, rather than the more abstract and disembodied notions of reason and, perhaps, self-consciousness (though one could argue that self-consciousness also involves a keen awareness of one’s body). Because we are ourselves embodied animals, imagining this form of sentience is within the reach of our sympathetic imagination. It is the ability of Hughes’s poetry to reflect and produce an awareness of creaturely sensation that Costello celebrates in her account of his poetry. For Costello, poetry about animals can speak beyond the constraints of reason, of what we can absolutely know. It is a spur to the imagination, and implicitly also to sympathy. But of course not all poems that represent animals do this. As Costello notes, there are kinds of animal poetry. Indeed, in one of the most idealistic moments of her argument she states that a poem that is serious about approaching and imagining the actual animal will inevitably resist notions of kind or species: “It has to be that way. Jaguars in general, the subspecies jaguar, the idea of a jaguar, will fail to move [the poet] because we cannot experience abstractions.”36 The jaguar experiences only its own existence; it can’t know its own jaguarness, just as the poet can only see actual individual jaguars, or other animals, not the abstraction that aims to define or describe the essence of the species, genus, family, and so on. We too know our own humanness through self-knowledge and knowledge of other individuals, though we frequently also try to define something essential about our species or its seeming subsets, such as those of gender,

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nationality, and race. The speaker of Hughes’s poem also clearly relies on preconceived notions of kind in watching the jaguar, as indeed we all do when regarding animals. We come to the poem, as we come to any individual animal, filled with ideas of kinds or types—of genre and species. Costello believes that we respond to poetry very differently than to philosophical prose, and she refers to kinds of animal poems, suggesting an unspecified system of grouping poems according to how they reflect the animal. So too in regarding animals, we may think of them as examples of a type within a taxonomic system, as biologists do, or as individual beings, as many people do with their pets. The humananimal distinction that Derrida and Coetzee wish to deconstruct, that many proanimal thinkers and writers decry, is also fundamentally a matter of taxonomy and category. The problem of taxonomy, the relationship between the individual and the category or categories it belongs to, is central to the study of animals, and to animal studies, as it has been for cultural and discourse studies, modernism, and philosophy in general. It is a form of the ancient problem of the one and the many. What is the one? What is truly indivisible? Presented with examples of the one, of any entity conceived as unique and indivisible, human inquiry has tended to dissolve these examples of seeming distinctness into the multiple and contingent. Every thing is in fact many things. Deconstruction is a late twentiethcentury form of this impulse to break apart categories that are taken to be essences. On the other hand, philosophy, particularly natural philosophy, also likes to categorize and discover examples of unity in apparent disunity. Recognizing patterns, seeing individual examples as part of some larger group, is a particularly powerful kind of knowledge. A rock, or tree, or bird can appear meaningless until we give it a name that identifies its kind (not just a bird but a gull, not just a gull but a herring gull, and not just a herring gull but the one banded two years ago in Provincetown). These categories can also appear to be a part of the physical world, both in the sense that we have evolved to create taxonomies of the natural world and that life itself depends on the ability of any living individual to recognize members of categories: of the opposite sex, of the same species, of dangerous species, of food, and so on.37

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Yet taxonomists have long recognized the arbitrariness of the patterns they have identified and the names they have given. Darwin’s Origin of Species was an attack on the idea of the fixity of the category of species, since he showed that they are in a constant state of flux, created by shifting populations of generations of individual organisms. Donna Haraway argues that in this tension between the one and the many, the individual and the species, the only reality is one of indeterminacy and change, what she calls “webbed existences.”38 The one doesn’t exist, because the individual is always a community of cells and microorganisms making and taking part in the body on the one hand, and in larger systems and communities on which they depend for sustenance on the other. Though this is true, it is also the case that criticism of any kind must engage in the abstraction of categorization, and this is especially true if we are trying to survey and make sense of a broad collection of individual entities, as I am doing here with a kind of poetry—namely, animal poetry. Haraway herself is fond of the category of dog breeds, a particularly problematic convolution of artifice and nature, human and nonhuman. My topic is poetry about animals, itself a subset of poetry defined by subject rather than by form. Poetry is of course itself a category, one we find easy to identify but nearly impossible to define. Animals present the problem of categorization in an especially compelling way, in part because animal types, like the category of the animal itself, seem natural, of the physical world rather than our own constructions of it. As children, our ability to distinguish humans from other animals is presumably one of our first acts of knowledge, though so too is the ability to recognize individual parents from among the gaggle of humans who present themselves. The ability to recognize categories of species (such as dog, cat, pig, and horse), the very idea of species, is among the first skills we acquire, or as Carol Kaesuk Yoon argues, one of the first kinds of hardwired knowledge we express. Yet regarding any creature purely or simply as a representative of type creates ethical problems. We demean the individual in understanding a single person or creature primarily as an example of an abstraction. As many animal studies theoreticians have noticed, our schooling about animal types informs and provides language for unethical behavior toward humans.

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We create abstractions about animals, allowing us to ignore their individuality and treat them as “resources” or “pests” or as irrelevant. The subjection of various groups of humans by others is almost always enabled by the ability to categorize those other humans as less than human, as a kind of animal. Racism and sexism are our clearest and most destructive examples of how we subordinate awareness of individual worth to generalized and seemingly biological notions of type. Coetzee argues that in terms of engaging with animals, thinking about them through poetry is better than philosophy precisely because the former tends to engage the individual animal and thus brings us to a moral awareness of the individual rather than the category. “Every living creature fights for its own, individual life, refuses, by fighting, to accede to the idea that the salmon or the gnat is of a lower order of importance than the idea of the salmon or the idea of the gnat. . . . Animals are not believers in ecology.”39 And yet category seems impossible to eliminate, as even Coetzee refers to kinds of animal poetry. And in my attempt to survey animal poetry, I am inevitably confronted not only by the problem of organization but also by the development of an idea of the ideal animal poem, which is itself a category. Approaching poems about animals is like approaching animals themselves in that we can only come to some idea of kinds or categories through individual examples, but we inevitably assess and understand the individual by contrasting it to gradually evolving notions of type. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals suggests the existence of poles along which we might classify and evaluate poetry about animals. Costello valorizes poetry that represents encounters with individual animals, as opposed to abstracting them into kinds. She also valorizes poems that dwell on the physical being of animals, rather than imagining and portraying their mental life or consciousness. Both of these parameters of categorization arise from her ethical stance toward the lives of animals and her critique of the human valorization of reason and consciousness. However, there are many other possible categories, which I would like to survey briefly. For my purposes, the least useful but most common criteria for categorizing poetry are the traditional notions of national and authorial

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identity. There are no doubt interesting things to say about these categories as they apply to the field of poems about animals. American, Australian, Canadian, English, and Japanese poems about animals, examined as distinct groups, would presumably reflect some cultural differences in attitudes toward animals and something of the differences of native species themselves. Grouping poems by author reveals the particular experiences, practices, and ethics of the author in relation to animals but inevitably turns the focus on authorial intentions or habits and does not allow us to see the full range of work that poetry about animals can do, or more interestingly, the variety of ways that animals present themselves to human imagination and perception. These two categories (in addition to time period) are so dominant in how literary scholarship organizes and understands poetry that we can barely imagine other categories. I want to explore categories that arise out of the field of writing about animals, and that address how animals present themselves to poetry and what kind of good, or meaning, poetry makes of animals: how, as Henry David Thoreau put it in Walden, animals are “made to carry some portion of our thoughts” and how they “make a world.” 40 Here, then, are some other modes of categorizing animal poems. An appealing mode of categorization, one invoked by both Coetzee and Malamud and central to animal studies in general, is the degree to which a literary animal is allowed to remain itself, an animal, as opposed to becoming a symbol or allegory for something else. At one extreme, you have the animal as allegory or pure symbol—think of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” In the former poem, the actual cat (and its actual death) are ironically and explicitly made to stand for the vanity of women and its dangers. In Shelley’s poem, the bird is disembodied, and the idea of its music becomes an emblem for the poet’s own Platonic aspirations. The individual animals (the favorite cat, a skylark) are of little apparent concern to the poet, the poem, or the implied reader (though the actual reader may be shocked by the cruelty of Gray’s poem). At the other end of this spectrum we find something like Coetzee’s ideal poem—a poem that somehow registers the reality of the individual animal in and of

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itself, that allows the animal to signify itself or bridges a gap between observer and animal. This is a Platonic ideal—in a sense, it is a lyric with an actual animal speaker, an actual birdsong for instance. But we can allow that some poems express the desire to reach this impossible ideal, while others clearly do not. Poems we might include in this more ideal category, in addition to Hughes’s “The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a Jaguar,” are Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” James Dickey’s “Dog Sleeping at My Feet,” Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” Maxine Kumin’s “Sundays in March,” Christopher Smart’s “For I Consider My Cat Jeoffry,” Robert Penn Warren’s “Caribou,” and James Wright’s “A Blessing.” These are poems of encounter, of a deeply sympathetic attempt by the author or speaker to register the specialness of the individual animal, which I explore in chapter 4. A means of filling in the gaps between these extremes of animal allegory (which I explore in chapter 1) and the “pure” animal poem is suggested by the taxonomic system itself, with its somewhat mysterious and arbitrary modes of abstraction, beginning (or ending) with the category of the animal and ending (or beginning) with individual specimens who are members of a species, genus, or family. There are a surprisingly large number of poems simply on the animal as a category, including “The Animals,” by Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann. These poems tend to puzzle over the question of human-animal difference and similarity, reminding us that we are animals and what has been gained or lost by our collective failure to remember this fact. Such poems often do the work that Coetzee’s own writing tends to do—to deconstruct difference and blur the boundary between human and animal—though they can also do the opposite, reifying human-animal difference. I explore this kind of poem in chapter 2. Then there are poems about kinds of animals—birds, dogs, horses, snakes, farm animals, and predators—a sort of folk taxonomy, which focus attention on larger orders in nature; I explore these poems in chapter 3. There are poems, like many of those by Ted Hughes and Pattiann Rogers, that attempt to define the species itself (e.g., “The Tern,” “The Pike,” and “Justification of the Horned Lizard”). Species poems in a sense mimic the interest of science in finding fundamental patterns of life in the natural world, but they rely on a

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sense of the meaning of the species, its distinctness, beauty, and place in the world. Such poems attempt to articulate some essence of the species rather than relying on morphology or genealogy, as biology does. They may involve encounters with specific representatives, but these representatives are understood as examples of the type. There are of course other concepts one can bring to the taxonomic project. There are lyric poems about animals, often about single encounters with specific animals, and narrative poems, of which there are a wide variety of kinds (making narrative perhaps less useful as a category). Within lyric poems, there are poems that foreground their human speakers and the effect the animal encounter has on them and those in which the human speaker appears almost not to exist (e.g., certain poems by Gary Snyder and Robert Creeley). There are poems that present the encounter with the animal only in fragments of images or narrative and poems that provide relatively full and complete contexts. There are poems in which animals speak, or rather, in which the author attempts explicitly to ventriloquize or translate animal desire and intention. And there are many poems that are hybrids of categories I have mentioned—the platypus of animal poems—and that defy categorization, even interpretation, a terrific example being James Dickey’s “Sheep Child.” I examine these poems in chapter 5. Given that there is no obvious system for taxonomizing animal poems, one might rightly wonder what the point of this exercise is. There are also plenty of topical categories one could include, such as zoo poems, hunting poems, pet poems, wild poems, and imagistic poems. Categories proliferate. Like individual sentient animals, each poem is unique, implying its own distinct category and so effacing category altogether. The practice of poetry thrives because it creates rules and conventions in order that they might be broken, and so one might argue that a paradoxical essence of poetry is a hostility to categories. The problem of organization is central to the project of surveying poetry about animals, and to answering the fundamental question of what good poetry can do, and has done, for the animal and what good the animal— and individual animals—has done for poetry. The usual solution has been to write on poets who have written animal poems, which necessarily

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foregrounds and privileges the poets themselves. I want to foreground and privilege the field of poems about animals. I practice a mode of criticism that respects the individual poem and animal, that can give careful readings of the poem—an analog for close observation of the individual animal—and that can pay attention to, and find meaning in, notions of genre and kind. This is a flexible and even hybrid mode of criticism that can do justice to the wide-ranging abilities of poetry to create and reveal our engagement with animals and our conceptions of them. Focusing on the categories through which we perceive the animal presents category itself as a part of our interpretive process—that we make sense of animals (read them) by categorizing them, and that these categories have both cultural (human) and natural (biological) realities. It seems natural to allow these categories of taxonomy to infiltrate my schema for surveying and reading poems about animals. Doing so allows me to answer as thoughtfully as possible the fundamental question of what a careful reading of poetry about animals can teach us about the way we have regarded animals. Chapter 1 is about animal allegory. I note that the earliest poetry about animals tends to be allegorical—that is, the animal stands in for self-evidently human concerns. However, interpretation of most animal poems, regardless of when they were written, tends to turn them into allegories. Indeed, any poem about an animal may be read allegorically if a reader is insistent that all poems must be ultimately or wholly about the human. I argue that even early allegories are concerned with, and reflect, something of the actual animal, and that readers of animal poems of all kinds need to resist the easy strategy of reading through the poem to find the allegory, to see language as always solipsistic. This chapter explores and defines the fuzzy boundaries of the animal poem and establishes that there is a tradition (or evolution) of poetry about animals. Chapter 2 moves from poems that allegorize animals (or the animal) to those that are in some way about animality, or animals as opposed to humans. It is a paradox that we can so easily use and accept the animal as a category (as in animal studies and animal rights) given our awareness of the complexity and variety of life, and that the category obscures

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our own status as animals. Beyond the scientific uses of the category of the animal, why do we need or imagine it? While Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida make the case that the category exists to separate humanity and philosophy from the natural world, this is only one reason among many. Poems imagine, imply, and figure the category of the animal in many different ways with different effects and meanings. Writing a poem that figures the category of the animal can have the effect of distancing humanity from the community of nonhuman animals, to see that community as other and strange. Or the poem can identify the community as a group deserving of attention and care. Or it can idealize or de-idealize animals or humans. Animals as a group can be figured concretely or abstractly, through examples of many of them, or by simply speaking directly about “the animals” (the title of a surprising number of poems). Chapter 3 examines poems that attempt to define specific animal species, which I find to be the most numerous class. This is not surprising, since we so commonly identify other animals as types or kinds, rather than as individuals. One definition of the animal may well be those creatures we recognize as belonging to or constituting a type rather than a collection of individuals. Type produces its own hermeneutics; like the notion of genre in literature, kind in the biological realm is always an abstraction from actual (individual) examples. The concept of species does not simply invite definition but requires it. Just so, biologists have long worked at defining the crucial features of biological kinds and have attempted to order all of creation based on resemblance and difference. Poetry’s definitions are frequently informed by science but do vastly different work. I examine this class of poetry critically, making sense of both the pleasures of species identification and its limitations. In chapter 4 I read those poems that attempt to approach, recognize, and speak to and for individual animals. These are in a sense the most romantic of the animal poems and have been idealized by some critics as the most morally serious, while decried by others as suffering from anthropomorphic delusion. I explore what is at stake in approaching the individual animal. What can a poem do to imagine the boundary between a human and a single other creature? Why is this desire—to

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encounter and perhaps understand another nonhuman being—so powerful? Part of my argument is that the self-conscious creation of the lyric moment allows poets to invent forms of contact that can shape and feed our sympathy. Chapter 5 is on hybridity, on poems about mixing animal kinds, imagining human-animal crossings, and mixing forms. While the other types of poems I examine imply an idealization of the very idea of type— of an essence of animal, human, species, or even individual—poems on hybridity complicate and undermine these other categories. I discuss the idea of hybridity, its biological roots, its appeal to poets, and the various kinds of work that recognizing and imagining hybridity can do. On the one hand, I see these poems as a substantial and important body of work, a consistent way of thinking about the meaning of animals. After all, animals reproduce, mutate, and cross both naturally and as a result of human control and experimentation. On the other hand, these poems are by definition resistant to classification and abstraction and thus call into question taxonomies of all kinds, including the one I am suggesting for this book. I think of this chapter as my own explicit acknowledgment of the limitations of categorization, of the remainders left out by the taxonomy of animal poetry I build toward in the other chapters. It helps to prove the case, I hope, that there is an inevitable tension between ideas of category and their tendency to dissolve, the many and the one.

1 THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY From Chaucer to Gray

I

n referring to the special power of poetry to mediate animal presence to human awareness, Elizabeth Costello, in J. M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, dismisses “that kind of poetry [in which] animals stand for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth.”1 While Costello makes this sweeping assertion as a way of setting up a contrast to poetry that is able to represent something of the actual individual animal, the idea that there is a kind of poetry, or more generally, a mode of animal representation, in which the animal is a purely allegorical figure is common. In his book on poetry about animals, Randy Malamud evaluates poems by the degree to which they “substantially approach or interact with animals” and thus avoid allegorically representing exclusively human concerns, which he argues is a virtually impossible ideal.2 More generally, ecocritics like Lawrence Buell and Leonard Scigaj have valorized nature writing that somehow stays true to the actual physical world and resists projecting meaning onto it.3 Similarly, in the representation of animals, animal-oriented criticism decries the various ways in which animals have been used and subjected, including the ways in which we have supplied them with cultural and social meaning. Projecting meaning diminishes our sense of their distinctness, makes them merely subjects of our power, and coopts their presence. Thus extreme versions of anthropomorphism are

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offensive not just to those who wish to preserve some sense of the distinctive power of human being but also to those sympathetic to an idea of animal difference. In this chapter I want to explore poems that use animals allegorically to represent something else. My goal is to examine the category of allegorical animal poems frequently invoked as a way of distinguishing what “real” animal poetry is. Does such a category exist? How can we define the boundaries between poems that use animals to signal purely human concerns and those that represent animals in themselves? My argument is that in the early modern history of English literature, allegorical representations of animals are characterized by doubleness and complexity; rather than transparently referring to a primarily human significance, animal allegories simultaneously hide and reveal the contested nature of the boundary between human and animal. The purely anthropocentric, or allegorical, animal poem has an origin in the animal fable. This ancient form is not, strictly speaking, poetic, since animal fables are narratives, though many of these are in verse. Indeed, animal fables are surprisingly diverse, being expressed orally, in prose and verse, and having survived in various forms for millennia. Animal fables involve talking (or otherwise anthropomorphized) animals who allegorically reveal an explicit vice or virtue or some other form of folk wisdom. Fables fulfill the Longinian dictum to please and to instruct, which is perhaps why they figure so prominently in literature of the Middle Ages. It is nearly standard wisdom that fables are not actually about animals and that the allegorical purposes of these figured beings—their comic and simplistic characters, the fact that they are made to speak—make them imaginary creations solely in service of human culture. Joyce Salisbury says about animal fables that “while these texts seem to be about animals, in fact, the works use animals to discuss human society, to mirror humanity. When we study these texts, we learn very little about animals and a great deal about what medieval thinkers thought about themselves.” 4 Nona Flores argues that although people of the Middle Ages no doubt were more familiar with domestic animals than we are, animals were converted into symbolic meaning through various cultural forms, including animal fables, so

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that there came to be an easy and obvious distinction between the actual animals and their representations. The act of representation in fables and bestiaries (a kind of field guide to animals that included descriptions of the symbolic meaning of textual animals, in addition to knowledge based on observation) explicitly converted the animals into human signifiers.5 Fables in this understanding are perfect allegories—texts in which the signifier loses any vestige of referential meaning and is instead filled with a meaning that comes from other texts or the narrative itself. Thus in fables the lion is a figure of nobility and the dog a figure of denigration, even though in real life most denizens of the Middle Ages would not have encountered an actual lion, and dogs could be favored companions. This process of anthropomorphism, in which animals become masks for human meaning, is confirmed as central to fables by other critics as well. Howard Needler argues that in fables “man is an ass, a snake, a lion, a wolf to other men. But this is only to say that man is conventionally identified with this or that animal because certain animals are identified with particular human characteristics.”6 Similarly, Howard Bloch, anticipating Jacque Derrida’s discussion of the links between beast and the sovereign, argues that “these tales are not about man and beast at all, but about men and their representation as beasts.”7 That is, fables represent some of the ways in which state power makes itself felt, in which hierarchy is made to seem a part of the natural world. Though the animals in fables invoke familiar creatures, they somehow succeed in effacing their apparent origins to point only to a realm of allegorized meaning. So a fox can be crafty and vain, a victor and a victim, and these meanings bear no relation to an actual fox. This is a neat trick, to be sure. Yet as Edward Wheatley in his book on the Aesopic tradition in medieval literature reminds us, “To believe that a fable is best interpreted in one particular way suggests an entrenched dogmatism which the later Middle Ages did not espouse.”8 Criticism in any case is wont to exaggerate the power of literature and culture to shape and mediate our perception of the world. The actual world, including actual animals, does continue to reveal something of itself. Thus, any kind of allegorical use of an animal (in a literary text or

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as an actual image in art or film) still relies to some degree on an awareness of the animal and its kind or species. Unless the allegorical animal is entirely mythical, even in fables some small sense of the actual animal must enter into the allegory. The animal chosen to represent some aspect of human behavior is not an arbitrary choice. We may use the eagle to represent martial ability, the lion to represent courage, the fox to represent cunning, or the pig to represent gluttony, and these meanings may be narrow and distorting of the entire animal, but these meanings are not entirely projected onto these kinds of animals. The lion’s nobility is connected to its actual strength, its ability to kill many other animals, including humans; the dog’s servility and untrustworthiness in fables no doubt comes from the actual servility of many dogs, their seeming ability to display shame and ingratiation (certainly not commonly shown by other domestic animals). These representations still hearken toward an origin in the physical animal, rather than in something entirely imagined, and to some original familiarity with the animal, even if that familiarity involves a misreading. Indeed, Frank Palmeri argues that there are many examples of animal fable that critique the tendency to allegorize animals, in which animals can be imagined “to speak from the subject position of their species”: for instance, a wolf “who sees some shepherds eating mutton [and] remarks, ‘what an uproar you would make if I were doing that.’ ”9 These narratives allow for some resistance to the desire to allegorize and complicate their reader’s awareness of human-animal difference and similarity. The debate about whether animal fables can be about real animals reflects the complexity of allegory as a mode of representation. Allegory and the representation of animals in literature are deeply connected because allegory is the dominant mode through which animals enter literature, and it becomes the mode through which they are read. Moreover, the difficulty of allegory is also the difficulty of teasing the animal out from behind our representations of it. Angus Fletcher suggests that “in the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another,” which connects it to irony and the symbol. Allegory suggests a deliberately artificial representation, a way of simplifying and making clear, using seemingly arbitrary signifiers.10 This mode of allegory suggests the existence

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of an uncrossable boundary between signifier and signified (i.e., between the animal and what it means). Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s well-known distinction between symbol and allegory points to this understanding: “The Symbolical cannot perhaps be better defined in distinction from the allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the whole of which it is representative. ‘Here comes a sail,’ (that is a ship) is a symbolical expression. ‘Behold our lion!’ when we speak of some gallant soldier is allegorical.”11 The artifice Coleridge ascribes to allegory is marked by the gap between human and animal, whereas his example of the symbol is a synecdoche. However, as critics of Coleridge’s discussion have pointed out, the line between organic symbol and mechanical allegory is itself indistinct. There are many examples of allegory in which the vehicle is not arbitrary, such as in forms of personification or prosopopoeia. Classical forms of anthropomorphism in which gods, ideas, and aspects of nature are given human form are versions of allegory. Allegory can represent something otherwise unrepresentable, bringing distant resemblances to life. As Fletcher argues, interpretation of allegory is bound up with both doubleness and contestation of power.12 An allegorical representation asserts a hierarchy, since the vehicle of the allegory is inferior to its tenor, and at the same time belies this hierarchy because our attention is drawn to what is immediately presented. Allegory is central to the history of representing animals in literature because of this crucial doubleness. It is the mode that best reflects the deep conflict in how we have thought about the relationship between humans and animals. On the one hand, allegory represents the idea that humans and animals are fundamentally different—that we are always the signified, the heart of the matter, whereas animals are always lesser beings, ciphers that we fill with our meaning. Thus allegory effectively reinforces the anthropocentric hierarchy (which is presumably why Coetzee’s Costello dismisses it). On the other hand, allegory also allows us to express glimmers of likeness, connections that lie below the surface. Allegorists choose kinds of animals because we understand them to be different from each other, to possess distinct qualities that we apprehend. Because animal signifiers are not in fact empty, animal allegories reflect our sense that animals in

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general, and species types in particular, might stand for qualities we share with them. It is worth remembering that the earliest examples of human art (such as prehistoric cave paintings) reflect a literal interest in animals; allegorical representations of animals are an outgrowth of that interest rather than strictly antithetical to it. E.  O. Wilson and other biologists, in addition to anthropologists like Paul Shepard, have argued that human interest in the actual animal is evolutionarily programmed, as it must be in all animals.13 A detailed knowledge of predators and prey undoubtedly confers some survival advantage. Certainly this interest has been shaped by culture and has itself shaped culture, but it seems unlikely that our understanding of animals, and our representation of them, could ever be completely divorced from our encounters with living and breathing creatures, which would also mean a fundamental disavowal of our own animal bodies. Indeed, I think something like a timeless interest in and regard for other animals at least partly explains why fables have been so fantastically successful as a literary form, producing myriad examples over the history of literature. Writers of animal fables, like owners of zoos and kittens, know that animals in themselves draw our attention and fascination. That very young children are mesmerized by animals is also evidence of the virtually instinctive nature of this interest. So too in fables, which frequently figure children as an audience, the appearance of animals in themselves pleases, even as they instruct us in a human voice. This is not to belittle the many other reasons for the popularity of animal fables. Their brevity and adaptability are no doubt key factors, and so too is the basic trope of talking animals, of which the animal fable provides some of the earliest examples. The trope is richly meaningful. On the one hand, we find talking animals amusing because of the incongruity of animals posing as humans. The absurdity of the ventriloquism confirms our own superiority. Equally, animals give human speakers cover, allowing authors to say things that might otherwise be forbidden or unpalatable. On the other hand, animal speakers in fables can also make the meaning of the stories appear part of a natural order, rather than just of human culture. Indeed, one origin of animal fables,

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which Barry Lopez argues we also see in the animal stories of aboriginal cultures, is that the carefully observed behavior of animals contains its own natural wisdom of survival, adaptation, and even community.14 Bruce Thomas Boehrer reminds us that by presenting animals as characters, early modern fables “openly create a space for the interaction of human and nonhuman species,” allowing for animal and human wisdom to overlap.15

R My first example of an animal allegory poem is a work by the Scottish medieval poet Robert Henryson, who based his Morall Fabillis of Esope on the concise Latin versions of the fables that were ubiquitous in medieval schools. His “The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb” is worth examining because it presents a standard Aesopic tale, featuring animals that have complex cultural meaning that the allegory expands upon. In this 161-line poem (twenty-two stanzas, composed of seven pentameter lines each), Henryson elaborates the fable, lengthening it and making it more complex. (William Caxton’s contemporaneous prose version is a paragraph of about 240 words.) The translation of the Aesopic story to poetry allows for the introduction of details that add symbolic resonance and complexity. The narrative of the fable is simple and direct, about an encounter between a wolf and a lamb who have both come to a river for a drink of water. Seeing the lamb, the wolf immediately intends to kill and eat it. Before doing so, he attempts to justify his desire to kill, accusing the lamb of fouling the water. The lamb, replying in oddly legalistic language, disputes the wolf’s claim, since the wolf is upstream of the lamb and so could not be drinking water in any way affected by the lamb. The wolf then says he will kill the lamb because the lamb is like his father, who injured him through his legalisms, and the wolf had earlier vowed revenge on the father. The lamb replies that holy law requires each person should be punished for his own sin, and that in any case justice demands a court should hear the case the wolf has against him. The story ends with the wolf denouncing the lamb’s arguments as treasonous (since the lamb’s contestations are an affront to the wolf’s higher

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status) and then killing and eating him. While the poem’s story makes the wolf an explicit tyrant, the poem’s narrator nonetheless offers a lengthy elaboration of the story’s meaning. He notes that while the lamb “may signifie / As Maill men, Merchandis, and all lauboureris” (“Maill” refers to tenant farmers),16 the wolf in fact represents three kinds of tyrants: those who abuse the law to seek their own ends, those who are so greedy that they seek out the poor as victims, and those landowners who abuse their poor tenants. While the allegory seems straightforward, and the explicit moralizing by the narrator enforces a sense of the cultural and highly anthropomorphic work of the tale (and poet), the poem is more complex than it seems at first glance. There are odd tensions in the allegory: the narrator ends his moralizing by asking God to protect the lamb from wolves, and also to “saif our King, and gif him hart and hand / All sic Wolfis to banes of the land” (to save our king, and give him heart and hand; all such wolves to banish from the land). Thus the tale protests the arbitrary power of rulers, even as it pays deference to the king, the person in whom all power is vested. The lamb’s innocence is at least somewhat compromised (as the wolf also suggests) by the simultaneously comic and impressive sophistication of his legal knowledge and his claim that the Bible (the origin of a notion of original sin) denies that sins of the father can be visited on the son, or “for my trespass quhy suld my sone have plycht?” (2669; for my sin, why should my son be blamed?). In killing the lamb, the wolf “drank his blude and off his flesche can eit” (2702), a striking allusion to the rite of communion. The wolf’s consumption of the lamb can be a perversion of the sacrament or an act through which he is made holy. This allusion also might suggest some discomfort with the cannibalistic undertones of the communion itself, since the wolf allegorizes the human participant of communion who drinks the blood of Christ, revealing it as a strangely animalistic act. The allusion makes relatively explicit too that the lamb must be read as allegorical of Christ, God as human as animal (making the wolf simultaneously Satan and human). The discomfort over the nature of communion is also discomfort or wonder over the strangeness of the idea that the father (God) sacrifices the innocent son (Christ). Finally, the force of the tale’s

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allegory comes in no small part through the association of the wolf with actual wolves, which in medieval Europe were reviled and exterminated as slaughterers of livestock. The tale thus reflects the very real behavior of wolves in capturing and devouring prey, and that lambs have always been easy pickings. This natural act of predation also produces genuine horror on the part of people familiar with the actual animals, which the tale also reflects. Rather than being a straightforward allegory in which the wolf stands in for human tyrants, the poem presents conflicting realms of natural, human, and holy law. The conflict is most clearly suggested when the wolf gives up on his attempt to debate with the lamb and instead insists upon his right to “wrang” and “reif ” (that is, to wrong and plunder), asserting both his natural right and his awareness that it violates the kind of law that the lamb argues for. The wolf’s final reply to the lamb is that “thow wald Intruse ressoun / Quhair wrang and reif suld dwell in propertie” (2693–94; you would be inserting reason where villainy and ill-doing should rightly rule). The wolf accuses the lamb of “fals tressoun” (2695) for appealing to laws that are merely the current custom of the land, as though violating a basic right of wolves to kill lambs. The wolf’s insistence implies that the laws of (human) culture are temporary and superficial in contrast to laws of the natural world. This break in the allegory allows readers to remember that these characters are animals and not the human or holy characters they are also playing, that wolves do actually kill lambs. While the narrator, in offering his extended interpretation of what the lamb and wolf “may signifie,” insists on listing the kinds of abusive masters the wolf represents, he also collapses the hierarchy of the allegory in speaking directly to “thow grit Lord” to “be nocht ane wolf, thus to devoir the pure,” (2763–64) and then immediately to God to “keip the Lamb” (2765). Here the “Lord” may be tyrant, king, God, reader, and wolf. The “Lamb” may refer to Jesus, reader, the poor, and the actual lamb. Thus, while this animal-fable poem at first seems rigidly categorical, a closer examination reveals how closely and complexly these categories are tied together, and that they collapse into each other. Its most obvious meanings have to do with relations between the powerful and the weak in the human world, but it

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also reflects something of the actual animals involved and human responses (such as fear and pity) to these animals. And like many allegorical poems about animals, it invites us to think of humans as being a lot like animals. Probably the most complex animal fable poem in English is Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” which predates Henryson’s fables by nearly a century. It has received far more critical commentary than Henryson’s poem, including on its use of the fable genre. Not much, however, has been written about its representation of actual animals; the critical assumption is that animals in fables and medieval literature will always be entirely figurative in meaning. The poem is perhaps the most self-reflexive of all of Chaucer’s tales, with several levels of narration concerning what it means to use one person or being to represent another. Thus Chaucer reveals the stresses and joys of storytelling through the pressures put upon the nun’s priest by the host and the dullness of the preceding story, which the knight has interrupted because of its monotony. The nun’s priest chooses the familiar Aesopic fable about the cock and the fox, which he elaborates so extensively that the narrative act of elaboration itself becomes one of the tale’s comic themes. The animals of the tale are allegorical in multiple ways. Chauntecleer and Pertelote, whose dialogue occupies most of the poem, represent Adam and Eve, disputing scholars, a married couple, and the nun’s priest and the prioress (his “boss,” whom in the tale he vanquishes sexually and intellectually). These allegories complement each other insofar as they all reflect the difficulty of accepting authority, the deconstruction of accepted hierarchies, and the tension between free will and fate. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is an important animal poem because it does so much to draw attention to the animality of its characters and to connect its allegorical meanings to the unstable divide between human and animal. The narrator begins by describing “this wydwe, of which I telle yow my tale,” but quickly slips into an extensive description of her animals, already suggesting that this is not a standard animal fable.17 The narrator spends twenty lines on an initial description of Chauntecleer, on the accurate timing of his crowing, on his intense coloring (white, black, red, blue, and gold), and on his flock of seven adoring hens. The

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physical details no doubt suggest a comic allegory of royal finery, but they also suggest the attention of a loving bird owner. At the end of the initial description the narrator appears momentarily to forget that he is speaking about animals; instead of crowing as the sun rises (2858), Chauntecleer begins to “synge / Whan that the bighte sonne gan to sprynge, / In sweete accord, ‘my life is faren in londe!’ ” (2877–79). While it is the central convention of animal fables that the animals can speak, the narrator here appears troubled by this crossing of boundaries, one that appears to have happened almost naturally through the sheer “animal joy” of the cock, and of the narrator in his own account of the animal. The nun’s priest offers an explanation of the weirdness of his own anthropomorphism, of his having forgotten whether his main character is animal or human: “For thilke tyme, as I have understonde, / Beestes and brides koude speke and synge” (2880–81). The narrator’s confusion is funny, of course, and it sets up a pattern of error, correction, and redirection that marks his tale as spontaneous, drawing from multiple confused sources (even as the poem’s iambic pentameter marks Chaucer as being in control of all details). One of these sources is the actual animal, whose physical presence is repeatedly brought back into the poem, however mediated through Chaucer or his narrator’s interest and knowledge and through the conventions of the animal fable itself. The narrator’s frequent confusion satirizes, among other things, audience demands on narrators, the desire for certain kinds of meaning that may well conflict with the narrator’s own ambitions and abilities. This confusion extends to the human lessons of the allegory that are an expectation of the animal fable, revealing the animal as ultimately undefinable, a category inexorably linked to the human. This confusion is signaled in many of the tale’s funniest and most interesting moments. Chauntecleer’s description of the animal he has seen in his dream keeps ambiguous what kind of beast it is, and indeed the long debate over the significance of the dream is in a sense a debate about what kind of meaning this representation of the animal should have: does it signify the devil, a fox, or indigestion in the human/ animal body? Similarly, Pertelote’s interpretation of the dream as a product of poor eating rather than as a premonition despiritualizes (or

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dehumanizes) Chauntecleer and his worldview, leaving him strangely animal. That a rooster might dream of being hunted is not entirely fanciful; it suggests an instinct for self-preservation. However, Pertelote insists that the power of the body over the mind (in the form of humors) renders dreams meaningless. But Pertelote mixes things up too, returning Chauntecleer to human status: “Have ye no mannes herte, and han a berd?” (2920), she asks, trying to goad him out of his fear. Chauntecleer’s long account of the history of meaningful dreams returns him to the realm of the fully human—to texts, scholarly debate, and human history—allowing us briefly to forget his roosterness. Indeed, as Wheatley notes, that the tale features a beast telling fables about humans and interpreting them stands the animal fable on its head.18 That Chauntecleer is unable to take any lessons from his dream and his own defense of the meaning of dreams returns him to the realm of the animal, however, if we understand the animal as a creature who has no free will and is entirely a victim of circumstance and instinct. This is signaled in one of the most gleeful moments of confusion in the poem, when Chauntecleer ends his lecture and makes peace with Pertelote by making love to her. “For whan I se the beautee of youre face, Ye been so scarlet reed aboute youre eyen, It maketh al my drede for to dyen. For, al so siker as In principio Mulier est hominis confusio,— Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, ‘Womman is mannes joye and al his blis.’ For whan I felle a-nyght your softe syde, Al be it that I may nat on yow ryde, For that oure perche is maad so narwe, allas! I am so ful of joye and of solas, That I diffye bothe swevene and dreem.” And with that word he fly doun fro the beem, For it was day, and eke hise hennes alle; And with a chuk he gan hem for to calle,

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For he hadde founde a corn lay in the yerd. Real he was, he was namoore aferd; He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme, And trad as ofte, er that it was pryme. He looketh as it were a grym leoun, And on his toos he rometh up and doun, Hym deigned nat to sette his foot to grounde. He chukketh whan he hath a corn yfounde, And to hym rennen thanne hise wyves alle. Thus roial as a prince is in an halle, Leve I this Chauntecleer in his pasture, And after wol I telle his aventure. (3160–86)

That Pertelote’s physical beauty should produce for Chauntecleer transcendence of fear, error-filled rhetoric, and sexual desire reflects a thorough mixing of human and animal. Chauntecleer’s sudden capitulation to Pertelote shows that the learning reflected in his lengthy discourse on dreams is virtually meaningless in the face of physical desire. It does not matter whether his hilarious mistranslation of the misogynist Latin phrase is deliberate or not; in either case he is driven by the power of his desire. Sex, a driving force of the human-animal world, triumphs over death (or fear of it). Chauntecleer’s sexual desire is framed by details that force us to regard him again as an animal—the sexiness of Pertelote’s red eyelids, the narrowness of their perch as an impediment to sex, his clucking, and of course his twentyfold “feathering” of Pertelote—even as we accept that his actions seem human enough. The confusion of animal and man reaches a kind of climax in the way his manly pride at his sexual prowess makes him appear both as a “grym leoun” and a “prince.” There is no clear allegorical meaning here, no other being or idea that Chauntecleer represents; he is a kind of virtual being, both entirely animal and entirely human. Indeed, the only allegorical reading that makes any sense here is the one that the host understands—that Chauntecleer’s sexual mastery reflects the narrator’s own desire, probably for the prioress, before whom he presumably must always have to suppress animal

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urges. Though on the one hand this passage is a kind of burlesque, on the other it is high comedy—celebrating with complex irony the tragedy of human self-delusion. Indeed, Chauntecleer is most appealing as a rooster, getting what he wants, looking absurdly like a lion, even as he struts on his claws. There are several more moments in the poem where the normal human and animal hierarchy is inverted or the categories blended so that we see humans as animals too. In the tale’s second beginning (3187), Chauntecleer sings because the sun has risen twenty-one degrees, “and knew by kynde, and by noon oother lore / That it was pryme, and crew with blissful stevene” (3196–97). The narrator explains that the rooster sings because he is driven by instinct. And yet the next words out of the rooster’s mouth refer to the number of degrees the sun has risen (now forty-one, midmorning), signifying conscious knowledge of when to begin and end the singing. Moreover, he is filled with joy not at his own singing but by that of “thise blissful briddes . . . , / And . . . the fresshe floures” (3201–2). He is an animal filled with joy at the singing of other animals, which is presumably a privilege of humans alone (though it has long been thought that birdsong might signify animal emotion or aesthetic appreciation).19 The melancholy he falls into immediately afterward is both a philosophical trope of the human condition (“For evere the latter ende of joye is wo” [3205]) and a change of mood as physical and inexplicable as joy, desire, or instinct. Another interesting moment of animal confusion occurs when the narrator, in a later digression on traitors and predestination, notes that his tale is about a “cock . . . that tok his conseil of his wif, with sorwe” (3253). He then begins to blame women in general as the source of original sin, as though they were a separate species. Recognizing that he may be offending several in his audience, including the prioress, the priest insists that “thise been the cokes wordes, and nat myne” (3265). Though he is backtracking here, making explicit that animal allegory can be a way of saying what otherwise cannot be said, it is nonetheless striking that the narrator of an animal fable should insist on the animal origin of his language. The confusions of the tale reflect the inclusion of nonhuman animals in a concept of community. Animals can signify humans and humans

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can signify animals because they share common ground, which in the tale is literally the farm and figuratively Eden and the world. A kind of community is suggested too by the detailed list of people and animals who join the uproar and pursuit after Chauntecleer is caught by Russell the fox, including “Colle oure [the narrator’s?] dogge” (3383). In the larger frame of the narrator and Chaucer’s multiple allegories, we have a sense of animal and human as categories always under construction and thus tenuous. The most conspicuous blurring of animal and human occurs in the tale’s epilogue. “Sire Nonnes Preest,” oure Hooste seide anoon, “I-blessed be thy breche, and every stoon! This was a murie tale of Chauntecleer. But by my trouthe, if thou were seculer, Thou woldest ben a trede-foul aright. For if thou have corage as thou hast myght, Thee were nede of hennes, as I wene, Ya, moo than seven tymes seventene. See, whiche braunes hath this gentil preest, So gret a nekke, and swich a large breest! He loketh as a sperhauk with his yen Him nedeth nat his colour for to dyen. (3447–58)

In celebrating the priest’s body as manly and sexual (he takes note of his buttocks, testicles, chest, musculature, eyes, and ruddy complexion), the host has clearly understood the tale as allegorical of the priest’s physical desire. The host’s response turns the priest back into Chauntecleer, a “trede-foul” in need of many hens. He has been encouraged to read the tale this way, however, by the multiple confusions between animal and human I have described. As Wheatley puts it, the host “reads the body of the human before him as an animal’s, and he fantasizes that body back into a fabular setting, where it can abandon morality in pursuit of more than one hundred females. This is a completely inverted reading of the fable—and we should allow the inversion its full range of meanings.”20

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Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” has been about animalizing as much as anthropomorphizing from the beginning. Chaucer’s foray into the genre of animal fable is clearly an extraordinary example. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is atypical in its length and complexity, and in the multiplicity of its allegories. Allegory is the mode that brings the animal into the tale and allows for thinking about the animal and about the animal nature of the human. Chaucer’s text is remarkable too in that its animal characters are individuals with names and personalities and not simply representative of their types (though they are that too). Animal fable in general does not reflect interest in the individuality of animals; fables are abstractions about categories of truth, actions, and species—character as the summation of species or type. However, Chaucer is not unique in early English literature in symbolically blurring human-animal boundaries. As we have seen, this occurs to a certain extent in Henryson. Both authors’ allegories reflect the animality of the human and some human traits in kinds of animals. This blurring occurs dramatically too in Beowulf. There is not enough space here for a detailed reading of this epic poem, but it is worth noting the ambiguity of animality in the poem. The poem’s most obvious figuration of the animal is Grendel, who is a monster and an allegory of the feared other. He is a part of nature in that he is a predator with fearsome teeth and claws, living in a lair and brutally killing and devouring his human prey. He must be, and is, subdued by heroic human action. Yet just as plainly, he is human, a descendent of Cain; his brutality is not motivated by simple instinct but serves as revenge for being a descendent of outcasts: “It harrowed him / to hear the din of the loud banquet / every day in the hall.”21 Moreover, his violence is not substantially different from that of the kings and warriors whose battles are described in the beginning of the poem as the result of “the killer instinct / unleashed among in-laws, blood-lust rampant” (84–85). Grendel is thus simultaneously a symbol of violence as something animal, deeply repugnant, and other and a recognition of animality as something human after all. That this profound ambiguity exists in some of our earliest literature underscores Derrida’s point about how central the humananimal divide is to the history of philosophy and self-representation.

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One might speculate that however strongly human culture (particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition) has worked to separate the human and animal and to see allegory as purely a representational device, the natural world and our perception of actual animals have constantly reminded us of the deep connections. We are of the same world, and imagination recognizes this. In turning animals into allegorical figures, poets do not leave these connections behind. The animal fable as a species of poem did not become extinct in the early modern period. Of course, it has always continued to exist in its “pure” Aesopic form in prose as educational texts for children, but it has also continued to serve as a trope for poetry in interesting and complex ways. The animal fable is a way of allowing writers to talk about the animal nature of human being, but it is also an early bridge to the animal world, a way of marking the presence of animals. A version of the animal fable—that is, the animal as allegorical figure—appears in the Renaissance sonnet, which is not surprising, since sonneteers were keen to display both their knowledge of literary convention and their own inventiveness. An interesting example is Edmund Spenser’s sonnet 67, “Lyke as a huntsman,” inspired by a Petrarchan sonnet that Thomas Wyatt also imitated. Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace, Seeing the game from him escapt away: sits down to rest him in some shady place, with panting hounds beguiled of their prey. So after long pursuit and vain assay, when I all weary had the chace forsooke, the gentle deare returned the selfe-same way, thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke. There she beholding me with mylder looke, sought not to fly, but fearlesse still did bide: till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke, and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmly tyde. Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wild, so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.22

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The allegory here is explicit: the hunt represents the courtship that is nearly always the topic of Renaissance sonnets, with the speaker/lover as hunter and the courted woman (Elizabeth Boyle, Spenser’s second wife) as deer. That the pursued woman is represented as a hunted animal is disturbing in multiple ways, though it plays on the conventional pun of deer and dear. It almost goes without saying that the woman is dehumanized and de-individualized, even as the speaker is figured as a forcefully physical lover rather than as a passive one (who merely writes). The allegory suggests that the point of the pursuit is both conquest and consumption of “trembling” flesh. This is a very early example of women figured obliquely as meat, an association the implications of which have been explored by Carol Adams and others (though she does not examine this poem or this metaphor). As such, the trope reflects patriarchal oppression of both women and animals and highlights the connection between them. An implication of the allegory, made explicit in Petrarch’s and Wyatt’s versions, is that the deer, being “game,” is necessarily already the property of the landowner (usually the king), whose interest in the animal is for sport, flesh, and display. In Petrarch and in Wyatt (quoted here) the doe wears a necklace that bears the inscription “ ‘Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am, / And wild for to hold, though I seem tame,’ ” which reflects the idea that the beloved is already spoken for and thus unattainable; she is controlled game.23 It is worth remembering, however, that one of the framing conventions of the Renaissance sonnet is that it is actually addressed to the woman who is its subject; the sonnet is a kind of love letter, understood as intended to be read by the desired woman. This sonnet is also written to woo, flatter, and impress. Indeed, though most sonnets were written primarily to impress male friends with the poet’s wit, one of Spenser’s contributions to the form is to undermine the implicit irony of the sonnet sequence, since he wrote to his actual future wife. In what sense, then, is this sonnet flattering? That is, why might a woman in sixteenthcentury England not object to being represented as a hunted deer? One reason is suggested by the fact that Spenser describes his deer as truly wild, both successfully escaping the exhausted hunter and hounds and

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not already owned. Spenser’s deer is free too in that she returns of her own will, and she is not killed by the hunter but led away as a now domesticated creature. The poem reworks the Petrarchan allegory to undermine the straightforward narrative of the hunt, nicely suggested by the ambiguity of the final line. That she is “goodly won with her own will beguiled” suggests the possibility that her own will plays a role in the mutual beguiling that is the nature of love. In other words, this deer has some agency. That the climax of the hunt is thwarted (a hunter sets out to kill his quarry not capture it)—and that it is a doe, not typical quarry in an actual deer hunt (in Petrarch it is weirdly a doe with antlers)—suggests that the deer is not valued for its flesh but for its beauty and independence. This may be evidence of a similar admiration for the actual animal. Deer can of course be admired for their grace and beauty and thus thought an appropriate emblem for a woman being courted by the male poet. This is not to argue that the poem represents any kind of breakthrough for the representation of women or animals, but that the allegorical status of the animal is more complex than it at first appears. I am not offering a complete historical survey of allegorical animal poems, but rather trying to reveal the complexity of early examples of allegory to show that it is not always a way of repressing or ignoring the reality of the animal. Allegory retains its deep ambiguity in relation to the animal as writers continue to deploy it in English poetry in later centuries. Margaret Cavendish’s poem “The Hunting of the Stag” (1653) nicely shows the multiplicity of animal fable and how it comes to allow for even explicit representation of concern for animals. Tobias Menely has argued that the poem is an example of the georgic, a form he suggests shows more interest in representing the animal literally.24 Anne Elizabeth Carson, on the other hand, reads the poem as an allegory about the fall of Charles I in the larger context of sympathy for animals.25 The poem’s narrative is structured as fable; the stag is punished for committing several sins, including narcissism (the stag stares at himself admiringly in a stream), theft (he takes food from a farmer’s field rather than from the forest), and general hubris (he falls asleep in enemy territory). As in any fable, these sins apply to all humans, though Carson

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notes that the stag’s nobility allows him to be read as an allegorical representation of the ill-fated king. Like Menely, though, Carson suggests that the effectiveness of the allegory—aimed at producing sympathy for the royalist movement—depends upon “the acceptance of animals as sensitive beings” and a broader cultural awareness that nonhuman animals could feel and express pain, have desires, and face death with horror and pity.26 This is an allegory, in other words, that depends upon a deep sense of the similarity between deer and king. The result is a poem whose allegorical impulse seems repeatedly to shift between man and animal. The poem begins by methodically setting up allegorical resonances, including a Spenserian rendering of the forest as a labyrinth and home to anthropomorphized trees. The hunt begins when the stag leaves the forest to feed upon a farmer’s field: “The Owner coming there, he soon espies: / Strait call’d his Dogs to hunt him from that place.”27 The stag goes from narcissist to thief, implying another justification for the hunt, and not simply an allegorical one, since the raiding of crops, or more broadly, competition for resources, has long been a reason for killing animals of all kinds. The stag has left its “natural” domain, and also the safety of the royal forest, and stumbled onto private property. The hunting of the stag is thus overdetermined, which perhaps explains why so much of the poem is given over to a description of the chase: “At last it came to be a forrest chase” (58). The poem’s remaining eighty-two lines narrate the hunt. At this point too the stag becomes the heroic victim who tries to outrun and outsmart his pursuers, to no avail. The length and detail with which the hunt is described forces readers to dwell on the violence of the hunt and the terror experienced by the stag, suggesting the poem really is about a deer hunt. The Stag with feare did run, his life to save, Whilst Men for love of Mischiefe dig his Grave, The angry Dust in every Face up flies, As with Revenge, seeks to put out their Eies. Yet they so fast went on with such loud Cries, The Stag no hope had left, nor help espies.

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His Heart so heavie grew, with Griefe, and Care, That his small Feet his Body could not beare. (115–22)

The stag goes down “shedding some teares at his owne funeral.” The weeping stag is a Renaissance motif, interesting because it suggests the animal both understands and feels his fate, just as a human might. As the stag experiences the chase and its impending death in human terms, so too the hunters are animalized, the dogs and humans becoming a kind of single predator described from the inside out. The Dogs their Tongues out of their Mouths hung long, Their Sides did beat like Feaverish Pulse so strong, Their Short Ribbs heave up high, then fall downe low, As Bellowes draw in wind the same to blow. Men tawny grew, the Sun their Skins did turne, Their Mouths were dry, their Bowels felt to burne. (71–76)

In the end this poem is clearly about animals, protesting the cruelty of the hunt, while only obliquely an allegorical account of the death of Charles I. Only readers familiar with Cavendish’s royalist sympathies will find the allegorical meaning readily available. Curiously, even as the poem’s fluidity helps to create sympathy for both animals and king, it also gives its author protection both from those who see concern for animals as unworthy of rational argument or poetic treatment (because it is merely a feminine concern, for instance) and from the antiroyalists in power in England when the poem was published in 1653. Cavendish’s poem shows how allegory remains a mode for the representation of animals in early modern English poetry. By the time that concern for animals became a topic of political and public discussion, in the form of anticruelty laws in the late eighteenth century, allegory’s resonance as ancient and artificial gave explicit cover for those concerns. Virtually all of the important poems about animals in the romantic period allow themselves to be read as allegories and, indeed, have been

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read as allegories about primarily human affairs, or otherwise ignored, until the rise of animal-oriented criticism in the past decade. The most interesting of these are Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Mouse’s Petition”; William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” “The Lamb,” and “The Tyger”; Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse”; John Clare’s “The Badger” and many others; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “To a Young Ass”; and John Keats’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s great bird poems. Like Cavendish’s poem, these poems depend on reader sympathy for actual animals for their allegorical potential—that is, unlike traditional fables, these poems are literally about concern for or interest in animals, so that their hidden allegorical meanings (about matters of class or spirituality) depend upon the reader seeing through a seemingly trivial interest in an animal. That these poems also reflect real concern for actual animals is so obvious that it ought to be surprising that the “surtext” of animal sympathy has been ignored by criticism for so long.28 Indeed, collectively these poems show the end of a strict formal opposition of human and animal; that concern for the animal isn’t allegorical for some other kind of concern but, in Coleridge’s terms, symbolic of it, an example of a kind of imagination that reaches out for other beings. I will end this chapter with a final example that demonstrates the complexity of allegorical poems about animals. Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” shows that sympathy for animals is not a prerequisite for a poem that appears to be about an actual animal. Indeed, Gray’s poem is one of the cruelest animal fables I have encountered. It tells a story not about a generic cat but of a particular favorite cat, identified explicitly as “Selima” in the poem. It is an ode in the sense of being a memorial, but the title is ironic, since the poem is really a fable that presents the cat as an allegorical example of the follies of young women. That the poem is based on a particular cat (one owned by Gray’s friend Horace Walpole) is revealed by the seemingly lovingly detailed description of the cat in the second stanza.29 Her conscious tail her joy declared; The fair round face, the snowy beard,

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The velvet of her paws, Her coat, that with the tortoise vies, Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, She saw; and purred applause. 30

The description suggests a creature who is admired because of its beauty and character. Even the cat’s tail possesses a kind of consciousness. Every action the cat makes in the poem is the result of apparent deliberation, ultimately making its drowning in the fish bowl appear deserved, as though it should have known better. Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent Again she stretch’d, again she bent Nor knew the gulf between. (Malignant Fate sat by, and smil’d) The slipp’ry verge her feet beguil’d, She tumbled headlong in.

At this point too the poem’s allegorical intentions become explicit; the identification of the cat’s sex allows the narrator to begin his conflation of cats and young women. The purpose of the fable comes in the final stanza, where the narrator gives up the pretense of talking about cats. From hence, ye beauties, undeceived, Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved, And be with caution bold. Not all that tempts your wandering eyes And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters, gold.

The lesson for young women readers, who are presumably fond of cats, is to tame their own apparently instinctive desire for shiny objects, which is likened to a cat’s attraction to fish. Indeed, the whole poem implies a strong correlation between women and cats through the qualities of narcissism, superficial longing, and shallow physicality. What is

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perhaps most striking about the poem, though, is the seemingly sadistic delight the narrator takes in describing the cat’s drowning: Eight times emerging from the flood She mewed to every watery god, Some speedy aid to send. No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred; Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard; A favorite has no friend!

Though the hyperbole and allusion are typical of the mock epic mode, the passage also implies a strange voyeurism, as reader and narrator watch the cat meet its drawn out and apparently deserved fate. The poem mocks the sympathy female readers would be presumed to have for the cat, at the same time threatening a vaguely similar dark fate for heedless women. The real mystery of the poem’s allegory is the drowning of the cat. What kind of punishment for women does this imply? The poem is an arch joke, of course, which perhaps explains its enduring popularity. A serious poet may waste a bit of his time on the low form of animal fable (or animal epitaph) only if it is deeply ironic, works hard at making explicit its lessons to young women, or was written for private rather than public consumption. At the same time, the poem has in fact entered the canon and remained popular and interesting to readers over several centuries, and this needs some explaining. Whatever Gray’s motives, or his understanding of the poem’s readership, the poem reflects, and perhaps contributes to, a hardening of attitudes toward animal allegory—that animals in poetry cannot be taken seriously and must refer to something else. The poem puts animals firmly in their place. Readers in addition to Walpole have presumably found it amusing to see the sad fate of the cat turned into a moral lesson for young women, and to play with the associations of cat and women that the poem finally brings out into the open. It is also clever to create a fable about a real cat rather than an imagined one. The other allegories I have discussed are about generic animals, yet are more deeply ambiguous about the relation between human and animal, and more open to

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presenting some form of sympathy for the animal. Gray’s poem presents an animal face that barely masks a deep misogyny, “the en-gendering of figures of vanity, luxury, and consumerism,” as Suvir Kaul has argued.31 The association of fables with children here enables the infantilizing of women as well as the trivializing of animal life in general. A final lesson we may draw from Gray’s animal fable is that the doubleness of allegory seems to inhere both in the poem itself and in our acts of interpretation. We can, and normally do, interpret literary animals allegorically even if a poem appears literally to be about an animal. By enforcing a leap beyond the “mere” animal, Gray’s poem marks a moment when animal allegory becomes for readers strictly binary, allowing us to pass over the literal, or the represented, to some abstract and always human meaning. Much like anthropomorphism, allegory can be a strategy for bringing the animal and our relations to it to light or a mechanism of distortion, of putting the animal in its place.

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s we saw in the previous chapter, even poems that invoke fable or allegory by depicting explicit anthropocentric meanings, that feature talking and otherwise humanized animals, can meaningfully reflect something about actual animals and our relation to them. That is, a poem can mediate what animals mean to us as humans and speculate on what they are in themselves. Indeed, imagining what the animal means as a category, while necessarily bound up with our ideas about ourselves and our language, is a crucial part of recognizing that animals deserve our attention and moral consideration. Poetry does this in various ways: by imagining how animals perceive the world (what Jacob von Uexküll referred to as their “umwelt”),1 recording observations of them, documenting forms of injustice done to them, registering their existence, and suggesting nuances of difference and similarity between them and between them and us. Individual poems normally reflect one of these goals, but the body of poems about animals has a far more significant impact, which we can recognize and assess when we see that there are broad categories of animal poems. In the previous chapter, I examined a category of poems especially difficult to define—those poems, like those based on fables, that feature highly anthropomorphized or allegorical animals. Examining this class of poems helps to define what actually constitutes an animal poem—that

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is, a poem actually about animals. I showed that even obviously anthropomorphic animal poems can engage the animal by exploring the boundary between human and nonhuman and so should be considered a kind of animal poem. Equally important, examining allegory reveals that it is a strategy not just of representation but also for interpretation, which readers can invoke as a strategy of denial and anthropocentrism. That is, it is possible to read any poem about an animal as ultimately being an allegory for primarily human concerns. Even such poems as Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” John Clare’s “The Badger,” and Ted Hughes’s “Hawk Roosting” are commonly read (in the realm of professional literary criticism)2 as allegories. This is surprising because these poems are explicitly about specific individual animals and are filled with details of those animals. In reading these poems, I find it easy to believe they are rooted in the actual observation of the animal by the poet, rather than in received ideas about the animal—abstractions or myths. That sophisticated readers can still interpret these poems as ultimately about humans, in these cases as representations of class and the poet himself, suggests how easily allegory can be invoked when an animal appears in literature. On the one hand, reading these poems as allegories suggests the deep reluctance of some readers to allow animals into literature, as well as a strong predilection for reading all lyric poetry as autobiographical. Literary criticism, like human culture in general, has found interest in animals to be vaguely embarrassing, equating it with children’s literature and childishness. On the other hand, it is simply factual that all poems are human artifacts and so must always be about us in some way. Yet our desire to imagine animals, to do something with and for them, is also real, just as our own individual experience with and interest in animals is powerful and real. That animals are intrinsically interesting in and of themselves, and as symbols for meanings we project onto them because we need such meanings to exist palpably in the world, is at the root of all representations of animals in poetry. All poems about animals have to negotiate these complexities, as do all readings of them. At the crux of the problem of making sense of animal representation in poetry is a confusion over categories. In reading poems as strictly

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allegorical, as not about animals at all, we insist on a kind of abyss between vehicle and tenor. So too in thinking of the animal as strictly other, we insist on a gulf between animal and human. We have always known, however, that the category of the animal both excludes and includes the human, that “man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human,” as Giorgio Agamben has put it.3 Indeed, Agamben and Jacques Derrida have both argued that the construction of the category of the animal as exclusionary—that is, a definition of the human as distinct from the animal—has been at the center of the (failed) project to create philosophical discourse. We can see this desire to separate humanity from the animal everywhere; it is at once our collective fall, as Paul Shepard and others have suggested, and a central tenet of JudeoChristian theology.4 If humans are made in God’s image (an early and powerful instance of anthropomorphism), the abyss between animals and humans is the absence of divinity or the irretrievable distance from it. Insisting on the category of the animal as other, as that natural phenomenon from which we as a kind of supernatural phenomenon are fundamentally different, reveals the category of the animal as primary. Yet Derrida argues for our concurrent ability to dissolve category, in part by imagining new categories. There are “only two types of discourse, two positions of knowledge . . . regarding the animal. . . . In the first place there are those texts signed by people who have no doubt seen observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen by the animal. Their gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them. . . . They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them.”5 This first category of discourse about the animal necessarily sees the animal as other and will not recognize the face of the animal as a face, as presenting some sense of individual being that we can recognize as meriting moral standing. Allowing oneself to be seen by an animal, as Derrida describes himself doing in his essay, is to regard the act of being regarded and can allow one to recognize something of the subjectivity, distinctness, and essence of the other living being. This “other category of discourse,” Derrida suggests, is largely

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“found among those whose signatories are first and foremost poets and prophets.”6 I take this to mean that writers interested in the sentience, subjectivity, or being of animals recognize that (until recently) this interest necessarily excluded one from the central philosophical project. More to the point, it also suggests the ability of poetry to foster and reflect a kind of negative capability toward animals and to explore this strange state of being both other and same, to be a category with and without meaning.7 While there are many types within the category of the animal (the subject of the next chapter), in this chapter I am interested in the broadest of these abstractions, the category of the animal itself. While for Carl Linnaeus animals formed one of two kingdoms of life (the other being plants), animals are now defined by the biological sciences as a subgroup of the domain of Eukarya, or those living beings with nucleated cells, which includes the kingdoms of plants and fungi but excludes Bacteria and Archaea (single-celled creatures with no nuclei). Of course, as members of the animal kingdom humans are a part of this domain, though as Tim Ingold argues, many of our contradictory attitudes toward nonhuman creatures stem from our “propensity to switch back and forth between two quite different approaches to the definition of animality: as a kingdom, including humans; and as a state or condition, opposed to humanity.”8 As scientists discover more kinds of life on the planet, the animal kingdom has actually become more confined, a smaller part of the living stuff of the world. Nonetheless, the folk notion of what the animal is has actually not changed that much. We still think of animals as living creatures distinguished from other organic entities by their ability to move and thus by their actual or apparent sentience. Aristotle, like Linnaeus, recognized invertebrates like insects and mollusks as a kind of animal and developed a hierarchy of classification based upon the perceived complexity of the creature. Not surprisingly, those animals that most concern us, whom we normally think of as exemplifying the category, are mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and common insects. Those animals that matter most, those we give the most consideration, are those we can easily observe and are thus large enough to see without optical aids. They are animals we admire and fear, live with,

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domesticate, consume, and observe. These are the kinds of animals most commonly found in art and poems. It is something of a paradox that we can so easily use and accept the animal as a broad category (as in animal studies and animal rights) given our awareness of the complexity and variety of life and that the category fudges our own status as animals. Beyond the scientific uses of the category, why do we need or imagine it? While Agamben and Derrida make the case that the category exists to separate humanity from the natural world, this is only one reason among many. As with other forms of discourse, poems imagine, imply, and figure the category of the animal in many different ways, with different effects and meanings. Writing a poem that figures the category of the animal can have the effect of distancing humanity from the community of nonhuman animals, to see it as other and strange. Or it can identify the community as a group deserving of attention and care. Or it can idealize or de-idealize animals or humans. Animals as a group can be figured abstractly or concretely, through multiple examples, or by simply speaking directly about “the animals” (the title of several poems). It almost goes without saying that ideas about the animal or animality are also deeply bound up in culture and history, all the more so because this is the broadest and vaguest category and so bound with defining humanity.9 Inuit culture understands the animal very differently from other cultures in North American, for instance, and Inuit culture, like all cultures, also changes over time. I will largely be side stepping these important contexts in this chapter, but it strikes me that a broad view reveals some continuing truths—that ideas about the animal vacillate between poles of similarity and difference, savagery (bestiality) and docility, mindlessness and mindfulness, and stasis and progress. Reading poems individually allows us to see these vacillations in action. As we saw in chapter 1, explicitly allegorical representations of animals like those of fables offer one way of figuring the animal broadly. That is, the less a poem concerns itself with a specific actual animal, the more it allows itself to be read as about something like animality in general. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is clearly less interested in a specific rooster, or chickens and foxes, than it is in a broad array of

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tensions within and between humans and animals in general. Animal allegories involve abstraction and thus produce representations and implicit comparisons in terms of broad categories. We can see this too in a number of other allegorical poems, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” perhaps the best known animal poem in the English language. The poem has been read allegorically in an astonishing variety of ways; part of what makes it such an open-ended and multivalenced work is that it is conspicuously ambiguous. Though the story the mariner tells is vivid, it is nonetheless difficult to say what the poem is literally about. Its realistic frame is about storytelling, but the mariner’s story becomes increasingly fantastic and repetitive, of cycles of punishment and apparent or momentary reprieves. One of the central effects of the poem on the reader, and its narrator-auditor, is to blur the distinction between natural and supernatural, literal and symbolic, so that our interpretive impulses are given a broad range. Yet the poem is, among other things, an animal poem in that the climax of the mariner’s story is his inexplicable killing of the albatross, so that all that follows can be read as a consequence of this act of malice on a representative of the animal world. Indeed, the mariner himself interprets his story this way (“He prayeth well who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast” [612–13]), which has led several critics to see the work as an early example of a poem that takes seriously our obligations to other kinds of life.10 I don’t want to rehearse those readings here—just to show that the poem’s allegory, its inherent abstraction, allows us to read it as broadly about animals as a collective, “all creatures great and small,” as the mariner says. This reading is supported too by the fact that the mariner’s initial rehabilitation begins at the moment he finds himself able to feel a spontaneous current of love for the “water snakes” that surround his ship. Read as about animals and human obligations toward them, the poem asserts that nonhuman animals are part of a mysterious and sentient order to which humans also belong, thus blurring boundaries between human consciousness and other species of it. Obviously, animals occupy only a small fraction of the poem’s lines and concerns, but the poem figures the animal as pivotal in order to say something about the human condition. Thus the poem is more clearly

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about the mariner himself, the compulsion of his action, his storytelling, his grip on his audience, and that he never realizes or accepts forgiveness for his unexplained crime. That the wedding guest wanders away forlorn, a wiser and sadder man, also makes the poem’s possible animal rights message appear inconsequential. Indeed, an equally plausible reading of the poem is that its collective figuration of animals (the innocent albatross, the beautiful sea snakes, the skylarks’ “sweet jargoning”) suggests that human self-consciousness, our awareness of death and evil, prevents us from experiencing the simpler and holier existence of the other creatures and thus separates us from them. We exist in a world that remains permanently mysterious to us, and the other animals are a part of that mystery. Though presumably like the other animals in lacking free will, the human characters of the poem have enough awareness to know that life is ultimately tragic and meaningless. Defining the animal as a way of defining the human is as old and common as beer.11 And because we may choose to read any poem about animals as allegorical, we may read any poem that figures the animal as a category as ultimately about how humanity does or does not fit this category. As always, though, there are degrees. Some poems invoke the animal explicitly as a way of remarking upon or defining humanity, while others make explicit their actual interest in animals. Most inevitably do both. Wendell Berry’s well-known poem “The Peace of Wild Things” is somewhat cloyingly on the anthropocentric end of this scale: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.12

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Though not without its charms, and while it is certainly about a kind of experience that many readers will believe to be real and universal, the poem reenacts the romantic cliché of escape to the natural world through the simplifying trope of the animal as emblematic of stasis, as though these animals are still tangibly a part of Eden. Despair is presented as an inevitable condition of human existence, while “wild things” exist in their shallow beauty, their seeming placidness and immediacy, and most of all their lack of awareness—in short, in the ways they differ from being human. W.  H. Auden’s amusing poem “Natural Linguistics” begins by asserting that “every created thing has ways of pronouncing its ownhood,” suggesting the idea that every creature participates in a kind of universal linguistics of existence and communication with the world around it. However, the poem also describes the animal as a way of negatively defining the human condition. If they have never laughed, at least they have never talked drivel, never tortured their own kind for a point of belief, never, marching to war, inflamed by fortissimo music, hundreds of miles from home died for a verbal whereas.13

Auden is working against the idea of the animal as beast: degraded, uncultured, and thus perhaps intrinsically evil: the beast as a figure for the absence of the good that makes us human. “He behaved like an animal” normally means something bad. Here again, though, the animal means simplicity, a kind of blank existence without meaning, morality, or foresight. Auden has several wonderful poems about animals and does not use them only to comment on human self-delusion. In “Talking to Mice” he amusingly notes that in thinking about animals we tend to class all “those animates which we call in our arrogance dumb” as “either Goodies or Baddies. So spiders and roaches and flies we / excommunicate as—ugh!—all irredeemably evil.” His sardonic poem “Address to the Beasts” celebrates animal innocence and mocks human pretension in neat triplets, as though acknowledging the Hegelian logic of repeatedly comparing ourselves to the animal world.14

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Your own habitations are cosy and private, not pretentious temples. Of course, you have to take lives to keep your own, but never kill for applause. . . . . . . . . . . . . .  And, though unconscious of God, your Sung Eucharists are more hallowed than ours.

The heavy-handedness of the critique of humanity is tempered by the humor created through the brevity of the lines and stanzas and the respect implied by speaking directly to the animals. Auden is not speaking for animals but imagining that animals might be spoken to, and that this is a morally preferable stance. “Our poets are right in assuming / all would prefer that they were rhetorized at than about,” Auden writes self-referentially in “Natural Linguistics.” Addressing animals is a first step in giving them moral standing; it is both a trope representing moral seriousness and an act that can be understood literally. Walt Whitman begins section 32 of “Song of Myself” with a broad categorization of animals that similarly inverts human self-regard. I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

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Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.15

The animal as abstraction stands in as contrast for what seems diseased or weak about human being and culture, and by implication, for those values the speaker of the poem wishes to assert for himself. However, Whitman is one of the great poets of invoking, creating, and dissolving categories. Thus from this slack generalization about animals, the speaker of “Song of Myself” moves to recognize affinities with individual animals: “Tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.” These deep similarities between him and other specific animals are “relations,” another broad category of encounter, made concrete in the thrilling account of riding a stallion that ends this section. A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears, Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving. His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him, His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.

This encounter stands for these broader relations with animals, that we may find them beautiful and powerful, and in doing so we may merge with them imaginatively. The passage can also be read as an allegory of sexual encounter; the contact with the animal body reminds us that the human body is also animal. More radically, Whitman entertains the idea that there can be joy in our contact with an animal body. Many poems follow the strategy of using a single animal to represent the animal as a category in order to set up a (usually comic) commentary

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on humanity. Robert Frost frequently used animals this way in his poetry. In his poem “The Bear” the narrator describes the bumbling movements of a bear (on “her cross-country in the fall”) to make the larger point that “the world has room to make a bear feel free; / The universe feels cramped to you and me.” The bear represents the idea of the animal as unselfconscious and simply existing, in contrast to which “man acts more like the poor bear in a cage, / That all day fights a nervous inward rage.”16 In “White-Tailed Hornet” the narrator gives a long and detailed account of the speaker’s interactions with and observations of a hornet. In the first paragraph of the poem the narrator comically recounts his being stung by the hornet, even though he meant it no harm, an action he ascribes to the hornet’s instinct. The second verse paragraph describes the hornet apparently hunting for a fly, mistakenly attacking (or so the narrator surmises) nailheads and a huckleberry. While Frost’s narrator makes a number of self-deprecating statements about his attempt to understand the hornet, the final verse paragraph of the poem leads to a broader comparison of human and animal, with the hornet serving as a comically puny proxy for humans. Interestingly, the narrator’s thoughts center on how we make the distinction. “To err is human, not to, animal,” he neatly asserts. That is, in ascribing animal behavior entirely to instinct, and in imagining free will as a defining quality of human intelligence, we define ourselves as creatures uniquely capable of error—which the behavior of the hornet belies. The poem’s explicit message is that when “our comparisons were stoutly upward / With gods and angels, we were men at least. . . . / But once comparisons were yielded downward, . . . / ’Twas disillusion upon disillusion.”17 The double point here is that human self-conception has in fact declined, which the narrator notes with at least some regret in the tragicomic lines “We were lost piecemeal to the animals, / Like people thrown out to delay the wolves.” We are no longer divine, and we are no longer even a genuinely distinctive animal, since we have found “worship, humor, conscientiousness” in the “dogs under the table” and even “fallibility” in the hornet.18 Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Animals of That Country” also uses the idea of the animal as a way of reflecting some large truth about

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humanity. In this case, though, the narratorless poem is explicitly aware that how we understand animals as a broad group reflects a deeper cultural truth. In setting up a contrast between “that country” and “this country,” Atwood is perhaps alluding to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” in which “that country” is characterized by songs that celebrate the immediacy of “the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas / Fish, flesh, or fowl . . . / Whatever is begotten, born, and dies,” as opposed to Byzantium, which is a world of ideality and art, “[un]fastened to a dying animal.”19 While Yeats sets up a contrast between recognition and denial of the animal, Atwood’s poem reflects the contrast between Old World and New World attitudes to animals. “In that country the animals / have the faces of people,” which is to say, in Europe animals are so intimately a part of culture that they have long been anthropomorphized, so that “the fox run / politely to earth” and the “bull, embroidered / with blood and given / an elegant death . . . / is really a man.” In European culture, the poem argues, these animals have been fully inhabited by the human imagination, reflecting a long history. “In this country,” on the other hand (presumably Atwood’s native Canada), the animals have the faces of animals. Their eyes flash once in car headlights and are gone. Their deaths are not elegant. They have the faces of no one.20

In the context set up by the poem the animals of “this country” seem poorly done by. They have not yet been integrated into art, made human, or given ceremonial deaths. However, there is a deep irony in the

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examples of “that country.” In Europe the wolves have mostly been slaughtered as demons, bulls are ceremoniously tortured as expressions of masculinity and martial skill, and foxes are hunted by toffs in tuxedos. So while New World culture (not including indigenous cultures) has not had time to develop deeply anthropomorphic conceptions of animals, this shallow history allows animals to be animals, not to have elaborate rituals of cruelty enacted upon them. The implication here is that in a country where there are still lots of wild animals, we have not had an opportunity to fetishize them. There is also the suggestion that we take them for granted—that they are simply a part of the background. It is hard to read “they have the faces of / no one” as something positive, except perhaps in the sense that the animals have remained incognito and so may have escaped our deliberate attempts to execute them. Yet it is also hard to imagine how this generalization about animals in “this country” is true, since sport hunting has always been popular in the New World and by now is in fact more popular in North America than Europe; game animals may now be said to have the face of trophies.21 Atwood’s complex poem presents a paradox about categorizing animals: claiming knowledge about animals diminishes them by enslaving them to human use and meaning, while refusing to acknowledge that the animal seizes our imagination also allows us to ignore actual animals. Bringing animals into culture and art always means anthropomorphizing them to some degree and allows us to project our ignorance about them. Indeed, as Atwood suggests, making animals into a fetish or ceremony allows us to ignore acts of cruelty and to treat animals as purely subservient and empty—tools for making meaning of our own lives. In European culture the elaborate rituals of killing are a way we appear to conquer death, to assert our mastery, while road kill in this country is a constant reminder of both our own mortality and our general indifference to animals. But letting animals fade completely into the background also allows us to ignore them. Until very recently, we have blithely destroyed critical animal habitats without any real sense that other animals might have a right to continued existence beyond our own needs for them.22

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The poetry of Marianne Moore similarly presents the animal as a  complex signifier. She is one of the most important poets of the animal—of animals as types (species) and as a general category. She wrote dozens of extraordinary poems on animals and arguably assumed the animal as part of her identity as a modern poet.23 Unlike many contemporary poets who write frequently about animals (such as Ted Hughes, Pattiann Rogers, and Richard Wilbur), her knowledge of animals did not come primarily through first-hand observation and encounter so much as from visits to museums and zoos and from reading books and magazines. This is highlighted in her poetry through her frequent use of quotations and notes and implied by her emphasis on exotic animals. Because her knowledge of animals often came through scientific books and magazines, which frame knowledge of animals abstractly, her poetry of animals is also frequently about animal kinds: the animals she encountered were already specimens, stuffed, mounted, and made inert through various modes of representation. Her poems tend toward abstraction even as they present specific and dazzling details. Poems such as “The Monkeys,” “The Fish,” “The Buffalo,” and “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake Charmers, and the Like” point to larger categories of the animal and symbolic/allegorical meanings we attach to those categories. As in many other poems by Moore and other modernists, the title of “The Monkeys” serves as the first words of the poem rather than announcing its actual subject. Ironically, though, the poem’s odd allegorical meaning reinstates the monkeys as the real subject: art critics. In four syllabic stanzas, the poem recounts an apparently real visit to a zoo, crisply characterizing some of its more appealing fauna, though in explicitly subjective terms.

THE MONKEYS winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras, supreme in their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin and strictly practical appendages

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were there, the small cats; and the parakeet— trivial and humdrum on examination, destroying bark and portions of the food it could not eat.24

The speaker neatly highlights the trip to the zoo, mixing generalization and specific detail. She too is a kind of critic, recalling a visit to a zoo and passing judgment on the animals she sees—the monkeys “winked too much” and the parakeet was “trivial and humdrum on examination.” The poem turns suddenly and explicitly allegorical when the speaker recalls “[the animals’] magnificence” in the past, especially that of the poem’s other major speaker, “that Gilgamesh among the hairy carnivora” whom “I shall not forget.” This animal delivers a nearly twostanza diatribe against those who have “imposed on us with their pale / half-fledged protestations, trembling about / in inarticulate frenzy, saying / it is not for us to understand art; finding it / all so difficult.” These lines make explicit that this speaking cat (presumably a lion) is, like the poem’s speaker, a critic telling us how to respond to art. That the poem offers a critique of criticism itself is not surprising, since this is a common theme of Moore’s poems. What is striking is that the poem begins as a description of a zoo, and that animality should be connected with the cultural self-consciousness represented by criticism. What do animals have to do with art criticism, and why should Moore’s supreme critic, her critic of critics, be a lion? As in “Poetry,” which is both poem and criticism and in which Moore famously calls for art that gives “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” animals in “The Monkeys” are both symbols and examples of authenticity against which the poem’s speaker measures the artifice and decline she critiques. Yet the animals of this poem are in a zoo, where they have become cultural artifacts, objects offered for our inspection and judgment. Just as the poem foregrounds its own artifice through the identical syllabic numbers in each stanza and by featuring a talking lion, its own contradictions are explicit, since the animals are at once human and nonhuman, beings beyond culture but here fully within culture. Like art, the poem suggests, animals are wondrous and accessible, open to the public, as it were, as well as otherworldly. But animals are also

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made products of culture and art, as they are in this poem and in a zoo, and so art can be “malignant / in its power over us.” For one thing, art creates expectations of what the animals should mean and how they should appear, which the zoo animals fail to live up to in their ordinariness (as in Hughes’s “The Jaguar”). Art and animals are also both commodified by global economies, which produce zoos as well as markets for art, and so art “proffers flattery in exchange for hem, / rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur.” Moore has much more to say about animal kinds in her other poems, as we shall see in the next chapter, but what matters here is that she invokes the animal as abstractly figuring a desire for what stands outside of culture and thus is (so goes the logic) authentic and self-contained.25 While the primary import of Moore’s poem is a critique of art and theory that supposes both realms to be detached from the “real,” as they claim their own relevance and autonomy, it also presents us with a depiction of the animal as symbolizing the real (as nature or anticulture). There are many poems that figure the animal as a category not primarily in contrast to the human but as essentially mysterious and unknowable, and thus linked to something pure. James Dickey has a number of poems that do this to varying degrees. Most of his poems about animals are related to hunting, an activity Dickey engaged in over much of his life, and many of them reflect on the animal to suggest some profundity about hunting, how it might involve an openness to the natural world—a recognition of its brutality and thus the falseness of the civilized world.26 As such, he is very much in the masculinist-modernist tradition identified by Philip Armstrong as “therio-primitivism,” which idealizes confrontation with animality as restorative because it allows the individual the prospect of an escape from modernity. Armstrong notes too that in tying such encounters so intently with hunting, this tradition (most obviously represented in Ernest Hemingway) “repeats the ideology of nineteenth-century capitalism, which defined competitive individualism as the fundamental law of both human and nonhuman nature.”27 Dickey’s poem “The Heaven of Animals” idealizes the animal as hunter, defined by pure instinct but placed “in heaven” in order to

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propose that there is something essentially good about it. “For some of these, / It could not be the place / It is, without blood.”28 That is, the heaven of animals, the speaker’s thought experiment on what Platonic animality might be, is a place of perfect predation, where the moment of catch “may take years / in a sovereign floating of joy,” while the prey “feel no fear, / but acceptance . . . / fulfilling themselves without pain.” The omniscient speaker of the poem has become an animal in the poem, glorying in the harsh reality of the nature of nature, recognizing that killing and being killed are the essences of animal existence—a rather narrow truth, but one well beyond the bounds of most ordinary human existence. Dickey’s haunting poem “In the Mountain Tent” presents the speaker (presumably a hunter, though here far from the acts of pursuit or killing) stuck inside his tent because of rain, reaching a kind of romantic union with the otherness of the natural world by imagining the animals beyond his perception. The process begins by “hearing the shape of the rain / Take the shape of the tent”;29 hearing the rain on the tent allows the speaker to use immediate sensory experience (the tent actually being a place of confinement, of sensory deprivation) to imagine and expand his awareness of the world around him. The situation is both a metaphor and a means for entering the space occupied by animals by first expanding awareness beyond the confines of the human skull. This is a lyric, spontaneous process, a “free-falling . . . / Through the thought-out leaves of the wood / Into the minds of animals.” Perhaps because the speaker is a hunter, himself responsible for the deaths of animals, this fantasy is also a way of imagining death, a loss of identity that allows for a mystical merging with “the dead, or the beast / Itself, which thinks of a poem.” The animal here both represents death and is the dead, the bodies of other beings and of the speaker. This mystical experience of becoming and rising from the dead needs the idea of the animal, both as part of the cycles of the natural world and as that being which cannot be known but is real and of the world, fully inhabiting the space beyond the human. Becoming animal is also represented in Dickey’s poems “Fog Envelops the Animals” and “The Rib” as a way of manifesting the more abstract “unfinished desire / For life, for death and the Other” (“The

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Rib”).30 The speakers of each of these poems is explicit in his inability actually to define the animal, to represent it, though this doesn’t stop him from imagining the animal as that category of being that enables human celebration of death and killing. Like Dickey, Galway Kinnell has written many poems about animals and our relations with them. Kinnell’s poem “To Christ Our Lord” depicts the mystery of the animal through the perspective of a young boy hunting at Christmastime. This smart and subtle poem centers on a boy’s experience of shooting a bird and then having that act blessed in a grace before the Christmas meal made from the bird. Both experiences are filled with unresolved conflict. During the hunt, He had not wanted to shoot. The sound Of wings beating into the hushed morning Had stirred his love, and his fingers Froze in his gloves, and he wondered, Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.31

Like the mariner in Coleridge’s poem, that he fires is a mystery, an act that is at once willful and without will, as though some instinct has taken over. Also like that poem, Kinnell’s poem meditates on the idea that the animal body can at once be sacred and beyond the scope of divinity. Like Christ, animals are of the body of God and sacrificed by God, given away for and to humans. At the dinner “the grace praised his wicked act.” In eating the animal, he must make another decision, as “the bird on the plate / Stared at his stricken appetite.” In this conflict too all he can do is “surrender / To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.” Both acts are in a sense naturalized by the fact that the boy knows, and the narrator tells us, that others animals hunt, kill, and eat as well. The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust And wolves floated lightfooted on the land Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen. Indoors snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.

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The poem offers an ambiguous justification of hunting, but it reveals genuine conflict over the act of killing based on an idea of affection for the animal. Paradoxically, the sense that we are also animals, comprised of flesh, is gained only in the mysterious act of becoming like the animal, giving up an aspect of consciousness. The poem figures the animal as kin and other, a contradiction encountered keenly by hunters who can kill and admire at the same time, though it is not necessary to kill to appreciate this central contradiction. Perhaps poems about hunting are a form of amelioration, a way of reflecting and communicating this mystery without actual killing. Wendell Berry’s poem “To the Unseeable Animal” finds a religious intimation of some larger truth in an encounter with an unknowable and invisible animal. In this poem the “unseeable animal” is a being felt in the presence of “the oldest sycamores,” “faithful springs,” and deep woods. The animal here is no particular creature but many possible ones, a presence simultaneously known and imagined. In that it can be imagined as watching us, that it is perfectly at home in the natural world, the animal becomes a synecdoche for God. “That we do not know you / is your perfection / and our hope.”32 So too in Denise Levertov’s well-known “Come Into Animal Presence,” the several specific animals the poem describes—the serpent, rabbit, llama, and armadillo—have in common that they appear to our imagination as complete, with “no blemish.” “No animal / falters, but knows what it must do.”33 As with Elizabeth Bishop’s moose, the human response to these animals’ singularity, disregard for “human approval,” and perhaps most of all silence, is joy. Here too the animal, represented by specific but iconic individuals, finally suggests a “holiness [that] does not dissolve.” Regardless of the religiosity of these poems, or the potential bombast in Dickey’s attempt to spiritualize hunting, these poems represent the animal as ultimately mysterious, beyond the grasp of our senses, and connected to a plane of existence somehow superior to ours. The imagination is only able to limn possible significance, and poetry presents the results. These poems present the animal as ultimately pure and other, not just in the modernist sense identified by Margot Norris and Armstrong as strongly implying a critique of progressivist notions of culture, but also

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as connecting with an ancient tradition that links the animal to the divine and unfallen. That the mystery of animals should be connected with divinity might seem like a modern phenomenon since it turns the pre-Darwinian chain of being on its head, with the “lower creatures” as the most divine and humanity as fallen, beast-like. Richard Wilbur’s poem “Beasts” makes this point, with the “beasts in their major freedom / Slumber[ing] in peace” under the full moon.34 Even the werewolf, returning to beast, finds contentment in the darkness, while people find evening “painful,” “making such dreams” that will convince them that nature is full of horror instead of peace. But the “peace of wild things” (to quote Berry again) has long had a hold on our imaginations, even as we feared, hunted, domesticated, and heaped abuse of various kinds on animals, and even as orthodox religious belief asserted human exceptionalism. Ancient cave paintings, revealing animals as forms of more distant omniscient powers, and Christ as lamb are two obvious examples of the animal linked to the divine. The anonymous medieval lyric “Cuckoo” associates the animal with spring, rebirth, and rejoicing. William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” presents animals as entirely of the realm of innocence, always divine, and the cruelty and pain we inflict upon them as signs of the corruption of our individual imaginations and collective culture. It is not implausible that Coleridge’s apparent sympathy for animals in “The Young Ass” and even “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has to do with his pantheism, the belief in “the one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,” as he puts it in “The Aeolian Harp.” The romantic yearning for perceptions of a consciousness in the physical world—confirmation that our own being is connected to the divine—can find in animals the most concrete (but still finally unknowable) sign of that other consciousness. A more clearly modern problematizing of the animal occurs in Lawrence Raab’s poem “For the Animals,” which puzzles over the problem of the animal as word even as it subtly satirizes the warm feelings of sincerity that words and images of animals may create. The duality of the poem is signaled in part by the fact that the poem’s epigraph is “for my mother,” whom the speaker of the poem acknowledges as having given him the names of the animals. That the mother created a sense of

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wonder by anthropomorphizing animals (or simply reading children’s literature to the speaker, which is itself filled with kindly feeling animals) allows the speaker to create such a space for himself: I let myself fall into the soft arms of animals and then into their dreams.35

Animals in the poem inhabit dreams, a bedroom, and memory and create a sense of home, suggesting the impossibility of actually representing either the animal or specific animals. At the same time, however, the explicitly constructed and anthropomorphized character of the animals in the poem reminds us of the appeal of actual animals and suggests that it is possible for a poem to become an expression of a utopian desire for accord, for a place in the present where the divide between animals and people might be overcome. It also registers that animal is in the end just a word, a strange signifier that comes loaded with enormous baggage, including racist implications and conscious and unconscious meaning. That the animal can be a signifier for the ultimately unknowable is also at the core of Susan Stewart’s “Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals,” which poses large unanswerable questions about what we can know about the inner life of animals (e.g., “Is it true that they dream?”), in part to suggest that most of what we know of the world in general comes from what we imagine (or dream).36 This poem of long incantatory lines suggests that we know that animals dream because “we can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams,” and we can guess at what animals dream by imagining what a woman might dream when she wanders into a farmhouse that reminds her of her past. This evocative poem suggests that dreams reflect and refract reality, intersplicing past and present, “this world or . . . another.” “Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.” Imagining animal dreams allows Stewart to write of a world that is our own but also strangely alien. Again, animals represent, or are, beings who

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more fully inhabit the world than humans do; the speaker asserts that “they do not dream of us” (a dubious claim, I think), though we clearly dream of animals. The very mysteriousness of animals—that they are at once wholly accessible, seemingly simple and of the world, and that their actual being, perception, and understanding of the world remain inaccessible to us—makes them creatures of poetry. A final broad purpose of the general animal poem is to alert us to the idea of a creaturely community, to take us out of the all-too-human world we mostly inhabit, or to point to intimate connections between humans and animals. Such poems reflect our need for a kind of respite from our increasingly urbanized, denaturalized, and environmentally threatened culture. Imagining the animal and the world of the animal is now an accessible and extraordinarily common mode of escape, as evidenced by the popularity of animal films, documentaries, television channels, and so on. Another motive, more urgent, is to call attention to the ways we have diminished animals through cruelty, ignorance, and our own relentless urge to proliferate. The poems by Coleridge and Blake that I have already mentioned can certainly be read this way, but more recent poems explicitly reflect a rise of environmental and animal rights awareness. Poems that focus on animal kinds and encounters with individual animals also raise these issues, of course, but I am interested here in poems that attempt to reflect and make sense of our concern for the animal as a category. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious way that poems suggest animals are part of a community is by suggesting they are kin, as we have seen already in several of the poems discussed earlier (such as Kinnell’s “To Christ Our Lord”). We gain this sense of kinship in different ways. Most obviously, we are animals and are part of the same natural world, but animals become kin through our encounters with them, and so they become a part of our identity. These are distinct ideas, but they are not mutually exclusive. The poetry of A. R. Ammons frequently explores these connections. “Corsen’s Inlet” and “Four Motions for the Pea Vines” show animals and humans as part of the same complex natural system, at once composing larger categories and rhythms and made up of smaller microscopic orders. The latter poem compares the growth of

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pea plants, the growth of a field, the behavior of a family of crows on the edge of the field, and the movement of women over the field. The rhythm is diffusion and concentration: in and out: expansion and contraction: the unfolding, furling:37

Both poems document a full-fledged human experience, based on careful observation of the natural world and the opening of consciousness to the ebbs and flows of other forms of being (neatly echoed in the halting enjambments and line indentations). The muted epiphanies of these poems are about a recognition of this sameness, that our own identities are ultimately the products of the same forces that create, and are formed by, other animals. Many of the autobiographical poems by Maxine Kumin also show how contact with animals allows them to become an intimate part of her sense of self. The poem “Feeding Time” simply describes the process of feeding the creatures she shares her farm and farmland with: the horses, the dog, the cat who follows her on her chores, the birds, and “now us.”38 At the end of the daily ritual of dinner, the speaker wonders about her children, who used to be a part of this family that the motherspeaker nourishes. The poem evokes as directly as possible a sense of the fellowship of animals and people, though all the animals she feeds are both a part of the family and a part of the physical world whose cycles remain the same. Her poems “A Mortal Day of No Surprises” and “Notes on a Blizzard” (among many others) show the speaker marking time in winter by taking careful note of the animals in the landscape around her. The animals connect the speaker to the bit of pastoral land she inhabits, though “when I’m scooped out of here / all things animal / and unsurprised will carry on.”39 On the other hand, in the poem “The Retrieval System” the speaker admits that the eyes of her companion

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animals “come up to link my lost people / with the patient domestic beasts of my life.” 40 Animals dead and alive bring back more faded memories of dead members of her family. “Fact: it is people who fade, / it is animals who retrieve them.” In this poem animals retain a more vivid presence than people and seem more of and in the world, even when they too have died and must be remembered. In part, this is because the speaker lives in the constant presence of these animals, while the people she tries to remember were somehow more transient. Nonetheless, the powerful links between animals and people here are evidence of the deep connections the speaker feels exist between human and nonhuman animals. A similar linking of animal and human occurs in “Telling the Barn Swallow,” a lovely lyric in which the speaker celebrates a rare visit from her daughter, who lives in Holland. The bird’s spectacular flight patterns as it searches for insects to feed its brood occur when the speaker’s daughter plays the cello and are thus linked for future retrieval. I tell the bird to cover well her hatch. I tell her that this hour must outlast the pies and the jellies, must stick in my head like a burdock bur.41

Richard Wilbur’s poem “An Event” suggests our complex relation with animals in a concrete image that yields several abstract reflections. The event described in the poem’s first stanza is the gathering of “small black birds, intent / On the far south.” 42 The birds are perhaps swallows, which the speaker hints at later in the poem in a subtle allusion to Keats’s “To Autumn.” The speaker marvels that they should “convene at some command / At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone / With headlong and unanimous consent.” Who has not seen the magic of thousands of starlings, each an individual, flying as though of one mind in a cloud (also called a “murmuration”), what Wilbur calls a “drunken fingerprint across the sky.” The mysterious relationship between individual and flock leads to reflections on the desire of the

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poet to capture and fix the moment in the poem, which he recognizes as impossible since the birds “tower up, shatter, and madden space / With their divergences.” It is by words and the defeat of words, Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt, That for a flying moment one may see By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

These final lines of the poem suggest that the process of trying to capture the spectacular moment leads to an equally ephemeral but profound sense of the connection between the speaker and the animals he has seen. Just as the birds gather and separate, just as the poem attempts to reflect one moment of interaction between the speaker and the living world, so too more generally do animals and people connect and separate. That these are “cross-purposes” implies a kind of symbiosis between birds and humans, as though they exist for us to appreciate their beauty and complexity, but also that we are all part of a vast web of life. Wilbur’s poem “Advice to a Prophet” makes this case much more explicitly and urgently. First published in 1961, it addresses the immediate threat of atomic annihilation rather than the slow burn of our environmental devastation. The poem asks the prophet, “When you come, as you soon must,” not to bother speaking of the obvious threats we are imposing on ourselves but to “speak of the world’s own change”—that is, on the effect we are having on the natural world through our various modes of general destruction.43 “What should we be without / The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,” the poem asks. The argument of the poem is that the most tragic effects of (and thus the most compelling arguments against) our myopic destruction of the planet are those we knowingly or unknowingly inflict on other living beings. “How shall we call / Our natures forth when that live tongue is all / Dispelled?” Because a coming prophet is assumed to speak of the highest things, he or she shall come to warn us that in destroying the planet we destroy our own souls—not in the usual sense that we won’t physically be able

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to survive in such a place, but in the sense that we derive our own nature, our very being, from our interaction with other creatures. Wilbur’s argument that in realizing our kinship with animals we ought also to become aware of our moral obligation to allow them to live and flourish is shared by many contemporary poets, and W. S. Merwin is one of the greatest of these. His poem “For a Coming Extinction” adopts the weary irony (“One must always pretend something / Among the dying”) of a speaker speaking for all of humanity, addressing the gray whale, whom “we are sending . . . to The End / That great god.”44 The disappearance of the whale will leave “behind it the future / Dead.” The grim irony of the poem is that in the darkness of nonexistence, before that great god, the whale will find an array of the already extinct, “the irreplaceable hosts ranged countless.” While this is certainly an explicitly angry and didactic poem (the speaker tells the whale to tell the god of the end “that it is we who are important”), it insists that we think of animals as a community that is essentially besieged by our relentless ambition. The more ambiguous poem “The Current” presents human awareness of the natural world through a metaphor of hunters or birdwatchers lulled into a daze, waiting in the marshes for so long that, “forgetting that we are water . . . / weeds grow up through us.” 45 The animals of the marsh current slide by, bringing the fleeting touch of eels and fish and the wave of black flukes, which barely awaken the hunters. The current is both the flow of life in the natural world and our own animal being, which yearns for a connection to that animal life. Again, whales here suggest extinction, and they too wave to our hearts as they disappear “from the Lethe.” Merwin’s rich poetry invokes awareness of specific animals, animal species, and the animal in general. He is always alert to the complexity and contingency of our thinking, that we are confined by our own prejudices, circumstances, time, and environment. And yet his poetry strives to show the dense texture of our connections to the world and the rich lives of other creatures. His recent poem “A Message to Po Chu-I” is a wonderful example of a poem that is both explicitly committed to environmental and animal causes and self-conscious about its own

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status as a complaint and intervention. The poem is a letter to the ninthcentury Chinese poet who wrote the poem “Setting a Migrant Goose Free.” The first verse paragraph of Merwin’s poem retells the story of the earlier one, in similarly direct language, about the poet’s exile and his purchasing of a goose trapped by boys, saving it from being taken “to market / to be cooked.”46 The speaker of Merwin’s poem notes the inconclusive ending of Chu-I’s poem, that “you let him go / but then where could he go in the world / of your time with its wars everywhere.” In the original the speaker sets the goose free but notes that there are wars everywhere, with soldiers always on the lookout for food and feathers for their arrows. The shorter second verse paragraph of Merwin’s poem turns to the speaker’s present moment, in which he reassures Chu-I that the goose has found a haven with him, though he has taken on the older poet’s anxiety about the goose’s future. I have been wanting to let you know the goose is well he is here with me you would recognize the old migrant he has been with me for a long time and is in no hurry to leave here the wars are bigger now than ever greed has reached numbers that you would not believe and I will not tell you what is done to geese before they kill them now we are melting the very poles of the earth but I have never known where he would go after he leaves me

The absence of punctuation of these nine-syllable lines helps to create an elegiac formality, much like that of Ezra Pound’s imitations of Chinese verse. The didacticism here is muted by the imitation of the original, which also speaks of wars and insatiable hunger. The juxtaposition of time frames makes our own sins (“melting the very poles”) seem both especially appalling and just another human failing. The goose rather than the speaker is at the center of the story of Merwin’s poem, standing

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for animals in general, since he survives as an idea and symbol. The last lines of the poem express profound regret—the speaker has been hanging on to the goose for twelve hundred years or so, the poem suggests, because of the vague fear of what might happen to it. Human interference (including the speaker’s) has made the goose’s natural migrations dangerous and untenable. It finds a home now not in the world but in the confined space of captivity and poetry. While of course we know more about bird migration patterns now than ever, and certainly much more than in ancient China, it is still true that we can’t really know what happens to the single bird. More generally, the poem expresses a sense of fear over the fate of the animal and a futile but sincere desire to cling to it, a sense that it is still in some way a companion. The poem finally expresses a deep sense of futility by depicting the saving of a single millennial goose, but it also acknowledges that fellow feeling (as well as cruelty and indifference) for animals is itself ancient and enduring. The urgency of the catastrophe we have inflicted upon animals in general perhaps tends to make poems on this topic unavoidably didactic. The challenge is one of scale. The sheer number of animals killed each year for food and the loss of species and animal populations (which involves failure to reproduce as well as premature mortality) are difficult for most people to fathom. Indeed, as individuals and communities we easily ignore these issues. On the one hand, it is undeniably true that nonhuman creatures are, as a group, suffering enormously under our domination of the planet. On the other hand, this group is an abstraction—the animal as an idea continues to exist no matter what we do to individual animals and to populations (herds, species, etc.). The challenge for a poet in addressing this issue is to make animal suffering, our obligations to the animal, and the very idea of the animal seem concrete. This is the achievement of the poem “The Animals,” by Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann.47 This free verse poem mixes generalizations about animals with specific details and examples. Its central trope is the idea of animals as companions, both in the sense of being domesticated as companion animals and in the larger sense that we share the planet with them. The speaker begins by noting the strange nature of our current relationship with animals; the poem’s first line quotes a classified ad for

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a “domesticated bearded dragon $400.” 48 This animal is not so much a companion, one imagines, as a curiosity and commodity, suggested too by the fantastical name for what is in fact a small desert lizard. The speaker gives a short list of more companionable animals: A calf asleep on a double bed, perhaps, or a hare with long ears crouched under a mahogany sideboard, thumping the floor. Or a koala that climbed up a four-poster bed surprising a seventeen-year-old in her nightie.

These are, notably, warm-blooded creatures, but not creatures normally thought of as pets. The calf is domesticated but is livestock, while the hare and koala are presumably wild animals who have wandered inside and in a sense chosen companionship for themselves. Other examples the speaker mentions in the poem are of “a neighbor [who] sleeps with a wombat in her bed” and “kangaroos [that] watch TV through her sittingroom window.” The people and the animals seem actual neighbors who have an implicit relationship by sharing the same land, and the boundary between domestic and wild is naturally blurred. These relationships are evidence that allow the speaker to generalize: We were once them, and now are their custodians. They know we are different and their eyes tell us to keep our promise.

We might be tempted to dismiss these lines because of their directness and simplicity, but they contain extraordinary wisdom. We were animals sometime in the past in the sense that “dew on the leaves . . . brushed our flanks”; that is, we had more direct contact with the natural world than we tend to do now, closeted in homes and cities. “We, the animals, / knew feelings, had a memory,” as animals now do as well. Cultural rather than physical evolution has changed our relationship to the natural world

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so drastically that “now we are their custodians.” By declaring ownership of the entire planet, by creating vast numbers of livestock and other kinds of domesticated animals, and by altering climate and habitats we have made all animals dependent upon us. Our difference from other animals is simply that we have power over them; we control their future as though they were pets. Yet our need for them as companions, the ease with which they become companions, evokes an awareness of a common bond—that we share something primal, that we need each other, and that we owe animals something. They seek us out now, the poem suggests, as though they know of this larger dependence. The poem ends with a story of another animal companion, which provides a stark allegory for the future of such animals. Bill came home after a fortnight away. Pot plants had been kicked off the veranda, there was an awful smell, and the front door was ajar. Inside the house chairs were overturned, papers and cushions trampled on floors, and in the bathroom, wedged against the washbasin, her putrid flesh held together by hide, Twinkle, a pony. A tractor winched the body out.

Presumably Twinkle, abandoned by her owner, was searching for company or food and died in that part of the house where we deal with our own waste. There is some irony here in “Twinkle” seeking out the most private part of the house, as though it was seeking not food but some measure of interiority. We have made all animals dependent upon us, the poem suggests, so that to ignore them now means their certain and miserable end. By including examples of wild and domesticated animals, Lehmann’s poem broadens our sense of which animals we ought to care about. But

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of course there will be no end to the animal as food source—only to the animal as kin in the larger environmental sense that Lehmann points to. Though there are many poems on the idea of meat (Robert Creeley and Charles Simic have powerful poems simply titled “Meat” that directly confront the process by which an animal is turned to edible flesh), and on the slaughtering of individual animals, I have found very few poems that address the fact that billions of animals are slaughtered every year for food, most of them in inhumane conditions. (One such poem is Les Murray’s “Cows on Killing Day,” which I examine in chapter 5.) The death of an individual animal we can mourn or celebrate, valuing the individual life or drawing some kind of ritualistic power from the account of its death. But the stark fact that we have configured our own oversized existence on the planet through a system that produces and destroys animals at a scale we refrain from representing constructs the animal not as something domesticated or companionable, as natural and part of the world, but as something infinitely malleable, decomposable, and unrepresentable. The factory farm animal is an industrial product, both an abstract idea and a brutal reality that we rarely glimpse49 and part of a system so depersonalized that poets and poetry recoil. While the poems I have surveyed here show the possibility of imagining the animal as a category in several ways, each way ultimately celebrates the animal or its uses. The absence of a poetry of the animal as factory product is itself a telling silence—a cultural reflection of our refusal to address this fact collectively, perhaps because, as Coetzee says in The Lives of Animals, it bears too close a resemblance to the Holocaust, about which poetry also cannot speak.

3 POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE The Species Poem

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mong the uncountable poems that feature animals there is an impressively large number (hundreds that I have found) whose more or less explicit aim is to describe and define a particular species. As Paul Muldoon says about his poem “The Hedgehog,” “As I tried to discover something of what made the hedgehog a hedgehog, I was doing something poets have always tried to do, and always will. The poet looks at the ptarmigan, or the tortoise, as if for the first time, and tries to convey something of its ptarmigan-ness, or tortoise-ness.”1 Evidence of his claim that capturing the essence of species is something “poets have always tried to do” might be found in the numerous anthologies of poems about animals now on the market, nearly all of which organize the poems along notions of animal kinds. (Interestingly, Muldoon’s own Faber Book of Beasts arranges them alphabetically by title.) It is perhaps not surprising that poets should approach animals through the lens of type, since taxonomy is one of the central means by which we know animals and think about them. Animals are those creatures whom we recognize first as belonging to a kind, and this is true experientially, culturally, and biologically. That we think of, perceive, and represent animals through the filter of a species concept is so obvious that it perhaps barely needs to be discussed. However, it is one of the central arguments of this book that there are in fact

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multiple filters, scales, and degrees of focus in our perception of animals, and so it is worth dwelling on the question of why poems about particular species of animals are so common, and why defining species would seem to Muldoon a natural topic for poetry. The simple answer to the question of why poets focus on animal species is that they are doing something we all do—that species poems reflect something intrinsic not just to how poets look at the animal world but to how people have always looked at the animal world. This desire, and indeed our ability to distinguish specific kinds of animals, appears to be hardwired into our animal brains. A condition of animal life is the ability to distinguish one’s own species from others, as well as to recognize animals as prey, predator, nuisance, danger, innocent, and so on. With our large and flexible primate brains, we are no doubt capable of recognizing more than most other animals,2 and culturally we have produced various systems (Aristotelian, Linnean, Darwinian, etc.) that have allowed us to identify many more—several million so far. Carol Kaesuk Yoon presents impressive evidence for this ingrained predilection for taxonomy, present across cultures, history, and age groups. We might also notice (and remember) that children begin to classify as they learn language, that their first words often include “dog” and “cat.” Indeed, it is clear that all animals recognize other animals as members of kinds, according to their varying abilities to identify prey and possible predators. That a Great Dane can recognize a Chihuahua as a member of its kind is one of the minor miracles of the animal world. We interact with the world by sorting it, finding patterns, and giving names to those patterns; species appear to be fundamental elements of the natural world, so that the act of naming an animal kind is not necessarily reductive but is a means of becoming aware of sets of defining characteristics. Moreover, the very nature of observing most animals, especially wild ones who flit in and out of our gaze, means that species identification is as far as we can go in making out the distinctiveness of animal being. It is an achievement, a production of knowledge, to be able to attach a name to a set of specific characteristics, even if we know that this set is incomplete and allows us to miss finer details. Species identification is always an act of naming or learning the name. Edward

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Abbey argues that in naming the natural world “we are lost,” but Aldo Leopold is more precise and pragmatic in acknowledging that because “we grieve only for what we know,” names and naming are also an essential part of an environmental ethic.3 Though awareness of animals as belonging to kinds, particularly species, is in some sense innate and pragmatic, it is also cultural and historical. While Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have insisted that the animal is a sign of a loss of specificity and identity,4 being animal for most of our cultural history has meant belonging not just to the vast otherness of the nonhuman but also to an order of seemingly Platonic types. The possibility of becoming anything other than a completely typical representative of a kind is reserved for humans alone. Even with pets, whom we allow some individuality, our obsession with creating and defining breeds reveals our desire to understand animals through some essence of collective identity. Culturally, the importance of an essentialist conception of species reveals itself in Genesis, with Adam naming the animals at the level, more or less, of species, rather than with the greater precision of proper names or the broader scope of classes. (We might wonder why it never occurred to Adam to name individual creatures.) The seemingly essential nature of species is at the root of the worldview of the great chain of being, the idea of a fixed hierarchy of creatures, with each filling a particular niche in the world and the hierarchy. The animal allegories I discussed in chapter 1 are also reflective of our fixation on animal species, our desire to resolve our awareness of the creaturely world at the level of species. That species seem essential, fixed in the natural world, and have an inherent and readily available meaning is what allows us to allegorize them. As historians as varied as Michel Foucault and Harriet Ritvo have pointed out, the representation and understanding of animals as species changed with the great taxonomic projects begun by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, which seemed to allow for an essential link between a system of naming and a complex order of the natural world— an order rooted in the reality of species.5 The taxonomic drive spurred by Enlightenment natural historians is crucial to the rise of the species poem, as we will see. It created a broad movement among professionals

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and amateurs who wanted to discover, describe, classify, and name (or learn the names of) new species. This drive was not slowed down by Charles Darwin, whose revolutionary idea was to call into question the fixity of species by revealing the complex and dynamic process of their creation. If species are always in the process of becoming and disappearing, then they are not Platonic or stable. Biologists have not been able to agree on a definition of species or on the degree to which they are even the site of evolutionary pressure. Biologists now understand species as statistical or probabilistic entities, or more intriguingly, as scholars of biosemiotics suggest, communities produced not so much by reproductive isolation as by sharing systems of communication. Species are perhaps best thought of as interpretive communities.6 While coming to know sentient creatures primarily through type is both cultural and instinctive, it is morally problematic, since animals are individuals as well as collectives. Defining animal worth in terms of species rather than individuals is a fundamental schism between environmentalist and animal rights ideologies. For the former, what matters most is generally the survival of groups (species), ecosystems, and habitats, while for the latter what matters are the lives of individual animals. As I noted in my introduction, J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Animals argues against species essentialism, which he sees as at the center of those forms of environmentalism that measure ecological health and value in terms of the survival of species rather than individuals. Whatever science and philosophy have to tell us about the speciousness of species, however, seeing animals through the lens of a species concept is clearly ubiquitous. Remembering Muldoon’s quote, we might wonder if there is an art form beyond the field guide that works to capture species essence. Why should this seem to poets like an ambition particularly suited to poetry? Put another way, what does poetry have to offer the cultural work of defining species? By looking at several examples of such poems, I want to reveal some of the ways in which poetry reflects and refracts notions of species. Perhaps most of all, these poems depict the process of observation, of detailing several characteristics seemingly unique to or definitive of the type. Identifying species, as bird-watchers well know, is above all a matter of giving a name to a cluster of such

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characteristics, and poetry foregrounds the pleasure and power of this act of naming. Poems can also reveal the tension between the reductiveness of the name of the type—its singularity—and an awareness that this type might contain multiple and varied characteristics. Poems that reflect animal types most explicitly reveal the work animals do for us, the interest they hold for us, as well as the (mental) work that we perform on them. As with all acts of classification, one needs to begin with empirical evidence, samples of the type; in doing this, I hope I will not be like those early naturalists—John James Audubon leaps to mind—who insisted on killing individual specimens in order to study the species. An early example of a poem that reflects attention to a particular species is the anonymous thirteenth-century lyric “The Cuckoo Song.” Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweth sed, and bloweth med, And springth the wude nu— Sing cuccu! Awe bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calve cu; Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth, Murie sing cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu: Ne swike thu naver nu; Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu, Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!

The lyric has been preserved because of its popularity as a folk song, which is in turn a result of the happy resonance between the human song and that of the bird it celebrates. The song expresses joy at the arrival of spring by marking and imitating the distinctive sounds of the male cuckoo’s mating call. The name of the bird is itself an onomatopoeic intonation of the song, and the poem’s rhythm and rhymes mimic the animal’s voice, making the poem a kind of birdcall—its singer or speaker

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is urging the cuckoo to sing, perhaps to speed up the coming of summer.7 The speaker addresses both a particular cuckoo and the species, so easily identified by its call and whose meaning is closely associated with spring, rebirth, sexuality, dance, and the body. The poem also notes and compares how several other species mark the arrival of spring through distinctive behavior (“bulluc sterteth,” or the bull leaps) as well as distinctive sounds (the ewe bleats after her lamb, the cow lows after her calf, and the buck farts—the Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of the word).8 That is, the poem focuses on identifying traits of species and acknowledges that these signs are also how these species express their joy at the arrival of spring. The poem reflects as natural and unproblematic the idea that species have modes of communication specific to themselves, and that humans can make sense of, and repeat, these signs. In his book Infidel Poetics Daniel Tiffany obliquely refers to “Cuckoo Song” in discussing an argument made by Virginia Woolf about how the first lyric poem must have been a response to birdsong. Tiffany argues that we find in this symbolic origin of poetry an account also of lyric obscurity—that is, of lyric as a mode that includes something alien and alienating. That the first poems were anonymous is in part because authorial identity was a nonissue—a poem was preserved (orally and later in writing) because of audience interest in the poem itself. Woolf’s origin myth interests Tiffany because it so neatly aligns the condition of anonymity with the content and form of the poem: “Anonymity as a human (and lyrical) condition has its origin therefore in the transference of a bird’s ‘voice’—an alien tongue—into human language. The character of birdsong thus prefigures the nature of lyric anonymity: a bird’s song is a proper name of sorts, an impersonal signature expressing the singular fact of existence ad infinitum. Indeed, the bird sings its tune again and again, like an automaton, unto death. Pleasure, for both the singer and the listener, appears to be an effect of the boundless repetition of ‘cant,’ conditioned by anonymity.”9 This seductive argument depends, however, on the idea that the birdsong, the “inhuman voice,” is marked by “placelessness and aimlessness”—in short, that it marks nothing, at least to human listeners. While the song of any bird must

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to  some extent remain uninterpretable and seemingly arbitrary, it is anonymous only to the completely uninitiated—the first lyric as the first poet hearing the first birdsong, and hearing it as disembodied yet pleasing sound. But one of the pleasures of birdsong for the human listener, and for the anonymous originator of “The Cuckoo Song,” is surely that the song is not actually anonymous—it is not by any bird but by a cuckoo. It is a “proper name” not simply of existence or bird existence, as Tiffany argues, but of species identity, and the pleasure of the song and the poem is at least in part from the fullness and simplicity of the cuckoo song— two notes endlessly repeated, a third apart, which is perhaps the simplest melody one can imagine, so easy to identify and yet so full of meaning that it has become the archetypal song of marking time.10 I do not want to overstate my own argument, however. Poems about species are not only attempts at the transparent decoding of species identity but also attempts to reach across species boundaries. Yet they do contain something of the infidel poetics that Tiffany sees in lyric’s transgressive nature. These poems have power because by presenting openings to animal language, they can impress readers “as being both abject (ostensibly beneath human nature) and totemic (symbolic of a higher collective identity).”11 Tiffany’s account helps us get at why animals are attractive to poets, and why poetry is a powerful mode for approaching and representing animals. The impulse to create and read lyric poetry has always included, Tiffany argues, an attraction to obscurity, to language that is transparent to some but obscure to others, which is true also of birdsong and other animal sounds. Lyric obscurity is a response to the desire to produce language that reveals meaning at the margins of comprehension and that allows for the creation of a special subset of readers and writers—those who understand. This dynamic is precisely what is involved in reflecting animal being, particularly at the level of species identity (expressed through specific signs of morphology, vocalization, coloring, and behavior), which is necessarily something strange to our own human identity and also expressive of our own animal being, our existence in the natural world. Poetry incorporates and mimics the otherness of animal being, even as it reveals and shares it.

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Writing poems about species thus helps to mark several communities—that of the perceived and described species, and that of the group of readers and writers who feel some strange attraction to the species by having come to know it to some degree. And it is necessarily a matter of degree. For instance, bird-watchers who have encountered and identified pileated woodpeckers (a strange but not rare North American bird, easy to hear but somewhat challenging to see) know both what is definitive and striking about the species and that its “spectacular” identity, as Roger Tory Peterson puts it in his ubiquitous field guide, is nearly impossible to communicate to nonbirders or even other birders who have not yet learned to recognize this species.12 Encounters, and moments of identification, create the feeling of special insight, experience that is in one sense the product of another creature but also marks the distinction and power of the individual observer. Field-guide paintings of species aim for utter transparency, to be pragmatic and definitive, which is why it makes sense to speak of the audience for these artworks as “users,” a description that is generally anathema to readers of poetry. Lyric poems about species express allegiance, attraction, and puzzlement and retain the possibility of keeping readers on the outside of the experience of identification, a distinction overlooked by Dana Phillips in his account of the practical value of the field guide.13 Such poems are in part displays of encounter, registering a kind of knowledge gained by observing animals, without necessarily providing full access to that knowledge. This strange duality of the species poem helps to explain why the number of animal poems in general, and species poems in particular, burgeons in the romantic period, as David Perkins has shown.14 These poems reveal a deepening connection with the natural and animal world, even as they mark what Tiffany calls the infidel nature of the poet and poetry—as abject, outsider, and threat.15 Writing poems about animals signals an expansion of the boundaries of concern and community and marks the writer both as an outsider from the human community because of his or her radical interests and as a careful observer of the natural world. Animal poems in the romantic period are evidence of shifting allegiances and community boundaries, of the place of the poet and the role of poetry.

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William Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” are among the bestknown animal poems in the language and foreground identification of and with species, as their titles announce. The speaker of “The Lamb” is of course a young child who directly addresses a lamb. The child knows the identity of the lamb before the moment of encounter the poem records, since he (Blake’s accompanying illustration shows the child as a boy) has already learned its name and a few of its key features: that it feeds “by the stream and o’er the mead” and has “softest clothing, wooly, bright; / . . . a tender voice / Making all the vales rejoice.”16 The poem reveals not just the child’s ability to learn the name of a kind of animal but also the pleasure that accompanies doing so, shown in his repetitions of “lamb” as the creature’s name. The speaker also uses species characteristics to answer fundamental questions about his relation to the lamb; that is, about boundaries between species. Identification in the poem means not simply recognizing the kind of animal but that it is also a child (a lamb), made by God, and like the human child of God meek, mild, and innocent. The child’s understanding of the lamb’s being is informed both by immediate perceptions and cultural learning, but it is focused on similarity, most evident in his assumption that the lamb will understand his words. Part of the power of the poem is that adult readers or listeners will think of the child’s words as filled with error, that he has made literal a theological metaphor, even as he explores and reveals some of the profound grounds of that metaphor, the cultural repetitions of the name of the lamb that the speaker dwells on—namely, lamb as animal, child, Christ, sacrifice, and food. This is a poem that reveals how central the idea of species is to cultural knowledge. Of course, the poem also works to undermine species essentialism, since the boundaries of the name and its definitive components are fluid. There is also a neat blurring of voices in the poem, lamb and child both bleating sounds of innocence, kinds of cant or babble. These are the sounds of a child, the poem suggests, beyond rationality and full awareness, making the vales rejoice as the sheep’s cries do. “The Tyger” is also the utterance of a speaker dwelling on the meaning of a particular species. Significantly, this recognition is through an encounter not with the physical animal but with a textual representation

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of it (as the variant spelling suggests), presumably through Thomas Bewick’s or Thomas Pennant’s popular late eighteenth-century natural histories of “quadrupeds.”17 Unlike in these texts, however, the tiger of the poem is barely described, paradoxically because the tiger at once looms so large in the human imagination and because it remains mysterious and unknown—just a description and a drawing. In the poem “fearful symmetry” is its only distinguishing characteristic. The symmetry refers presumably to its orange, white, and black striping, as well as to the more abstract symmetry of its utter contrast to the lamb in the chain of being. That it is “burning bright / In the forests of the night” also suggests that it has not been seen by the speaker but exists as a threat at the edge of apprehension.18 The question of how the speaker actually knows the animal and its kind is the poem’s latent puzzle. The speaker’s questions about the animal are about the broader implications of its existence—not on what the tiger means to an observer, but on what its existence as a supreme predator means for an understanding of God:19 “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” While the speaker appears to have had his conception of the world overthrown by a developing understanding of a single species (from an unknown source), the poem also works to undermine the possibility of understanding the concept of species. This uncertainty is suggested by the fact that the poem’s central question about who made the tiger remains dramatically unanswered. The Platonic and Judeo-Christian concept of species as a set of ideas produced by God, fixed and complete, is itself threatened by the incomprehensibility of the tiger. Moreover, as has been widely noted, the multiple images Blake produced of the tiger in his editions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience are strikingly varied. While the lambs in Blake’s illustration of that poem are all a part of a flock of nearly identical creatures (the lamb even appears full grown), the multiple versions of the individual tiger display dramatic variations of color (black and white, yellow and black, shades of brown, and other combinations, including red and purple), size, and facial expression (smiling, frowning, stunned, and stuffed). These are vivid representations of individual tigers rather than an attempt to produce a definitive drawing of the tiger.

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Many of the most famous poems of the English romantic period reflect responses to a particular species, mostly birds. Indeed, poems about or addressed to birds, like John Keats’s iconic “Ode to a Nightingale,” are commonly understood to reflect something essentially romantic, as well as the period’s excesses—Billy Collins avoids including any famous romantic poems in his recent anthology of bird poems because he thinks they are “flighty.”20 The reasons for the flourishing of the bird poem in the romantic period are myriad. For one thing, watching and identifying birds was already a popular British pastime by the late eighteenth century, in part as a productive response to the Linnaean taxonomic project.21 And because birds had been symbolic of poets and poetry since the invention of poetry, poems about birds offer self-reflective poets a means of naturalizing their own activities even as they reveal poetry’s necessary obligations to convention.22 The paradox of bird poems—that they can seem to be about poetry and its artifice even as they dwell on the naturalness of birdsong—is a paradox inherent in birdsong itself and another reason it is such a productive subject for poetry. Birdsong is meaningless because it comes from another species and because it is merely music, and meaningful because like language it is intentional and patterned, and we feel the effects of music as spontaneous meaning. Moreover, because birdsong is normally apprehended not as the song of a single bird but as that of a particular species, it can be understood as conventional (something merely repeated, whether by instinct or learning) even as it appears deeply imbedded in the natural world, specific to a single bird singing in the particular moment. It is possible, in other words, to recover the bird and its song from the history of conventions that has evolved from our continual, panhistorical fascination with birds and our history of reading these poems as only about poets, poetry, and humans. The desire to perceive and translate actual birdsong is explicit in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Nightingale,” although the poem also demonstrates how this desire must always be frustrated. The seeming lyric moment of the poem is a scene of sensory deprivation (“no cloud, no relique of the sunken day, . . . no obscure trembling hues, . . . no murmuring”), against which the song of the nightingale is even more

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dramatically apparent.23 The speaker’s curious response is not spontaneous feeling or insight but a quotation from Milton’s “Il Penseroso”: “ ‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird.” Though the speaker immediately rejects the quotation as wrong about the bird, a vain projection by a melancholic poet, we can think of the quotation as an analogy for nightingale music—a spontaneous utterance that repeats and reflects (onomatopoeically) the language of another poet, prompted by the bird’s own music—the poet’s own “chirping.” The speaker understands the spontaneous quotation as a failure to respond appropriately to the bird, however, and insists instead that “in Nature there is nothing melancholy,” and so the song must be always full of love And joyance! ’Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warbles his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music!

That Coleridge manages to slide back to the idea of melancholy—that the bird’s song still invokes potential loss, and that it is always a kind of “disburthening”—suggests the power of the convention the poem begins with and the impossibility of an unmediated and transparent translation of birdsong. The bird’s song continues to be an empty cipher into which the poet can pour his own meaning, which the rest of the poem enacts by drifting into various memories and fantasies that explicitly take him further away from the immediacy of this bird’s song. One of these is a memory or fantasy of another instance when he heard a group of nightingales singing to each other, which actually leads to a more complete description of the birds’ singing. They answer and provoke each other’s song, With skirmish and capricious passagings,

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And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping sound more sweet than all— Stirring the air with such a harmony, That should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day.

Like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” this passage recollects a moment of being absorbed in the act of listening to birdsong, an ecstasy the speaker is unable to attain listening to the single bird. Here, though, the possibility of fully inhabiting the music, of “know[ing] all their notes” is deferred to a mysterious “gentle Maid” who lives near “the castle,” rather than enacted through an imagined embodiment through music, as in Keats’s ode. Yet for all the poem’s deflections and wanderings, it vividly reproduces the emotion birdsong can produce in human listeners, which leads to the project of attempting to represent the animal, of translating its language into our own. It reflects, that is, both joy and melancholy: joy at the presence of animal song and melancholy at its alien, untranslatable nature. The listener’s desire is for direct contact with animal being through a full apprehension of its music as a kind of language, which would give an unmediated connection with the natural world. The poem’s deferrals signal the failure of the project.24 The poem’s final image is a memory of the poet’s infant child, “who, capable of no articulate sound, / Mars all things with his imitative lisp.” It is only in silence, and thus more perfectly in a prelinguistic, preconscious state, that the child can enact a spontaneous and joyous response to nightingale song, suggesting that it is forever beyond the reach of the poet and his audience. The child’s babbling is more like birdsong than the language of the poem. Coleridge’s poem is about the theoretical problem of reading animal signs and understands these signs (birdsong) as being both species specific and culturally constructed. Coleridge’s knowledge of the nightingale song consists initially of the ability to identify it, which is simple because the nightingale is the rare bird that sings expansively at night (the symbolic significance of which has of course made it poetry’s favorite bird). Identifying the song is complicated, however, by the fact that

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the nightingale does not produce a single identifiable melody—a repeated series of notes or warbles like the cuckoo or the wood thrush— but a wide range of pleasing sounds, not unlike the American mockingbird.25 (The nightingale produces its variety in dialogue with other nightingales, while the mockingbird produces its impressive range by paying attention to the host of other bird species it encounters). As music, one identifies nightingale vocalizations not as melodies but by recognizing consistency of variability—a range, tonality, and timbre—a bit like identifying the music of a favorite band, as opposed to just knowing a single song. Even as Coleridge’s poem presents a host of problems involved with understanding birdsong (including the almost automatic response of turning it into a human symbol), it also acknowledges that ultimately these songs produce in us an immediate emotional response (usually of pleasure and happiness, as Coleridge insists, correcting Milton) and a secondary desire to understand something about them. As David Rothenberg has shown, though we cannot know fully why birds sing, we know that there must be multiple reasons, such as demonstrating fitness in attracting mates, defining territory, and pleasure, and that these reasons are part of the meaning of birdsong. That we normally define birdsong by species suggests we are already aware that songs operate semiotically within a specific community and that we are eavesdroppers. On a larger scale, birdsong is culturally significant for us because it is vivid evidence of animal life around us; we hear birds as much as we see them, and the beauty of these songs (their aesthetic surplus for us) is a tangible sign of something in nature beyond mere survival, function, and evolution. All these reasons help to explain why there are so many poems about birds and birdsong; although these poems reflect the desire to anchor the lyric moment in an analogous natural form, they also point to an awareness of birdsong’s complexity and profundity, an awareness we can see stretching back into classical poetry and more recently in Rachel Carson’s invocation of its power in Silent Spring. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is probably the best-known poem about birdsong in English, though it actually describes only the speaker’s own experience and desires in response to the nightingale’s singing. It

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is worth remembering that Keats composed the poem after listening to  nightingales singing, as we know both from the poem and from Charles Brown’s record of its composition.26 The complexity of the nightingale’s singing is mimicked by the complexity of the poem itself. Each nightingale is a distinct singer/performer, and each performance is unique, not just a symbol of endless creativity, but an example of it, which the poem notes by being addressed to “a Nightingale” rather than “the Nightingale.” The melancholy the speaker describes in the poem’s first stanza is not that of the bird or its song (the speaker insists on the bird’s happiness), but the result of the speaker’s awareness of the gap between the bird’s song and the poet’s consciousness. Being “too happy in thine happiness” suggests sudden self-consciousness or perhaps simply the end of the bird’s song—the end, in any case, of living in the moment of perception, which is intensely a moment of identification. 27 The gap that produces melancholy is the distance between the bird and the speaker: its spontaneous creativity and his labor, its music and his language. The poem describes the process of how a desire to return to this initial intensity of identification with the bird leads to a literal flight of fancy, an entirely fictive experience of becoming the bird. While the bird’s song certainly is idealized in the poem as a form of natural beauty, as Helen Vendler argues,28 it is also a real sign of the bird’s existence, which has its own infidel truth. The poem’s speaker has read the bird’s song as an elaborate sign for the condition of being the bird, its umwelt—its own subjective experience of living in the world—and it is this experience that the speaker desires. In this sense, the poem’s climax occurs in the fourth and fifth stanzas, which describe the poet’s imagining of the bird’s world, as inspired both by the song and the speaker’s own sensory impressions of the world around him. He achieves this leap on the “viewless wings of poesy,” which includes a flight of imagination and a high degree of negative capability but is produced in the poem, he insists, by actual experience, even if this is necessarily translated into and through artifice. Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

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Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

The poem asks readers to imagine that the poet has transformed himself into the bird he has been listening to. The bird is in the woods at night, and so vision is limited to what can be seen by the moonlight as it dapples through swaying tree limbs and leaves. In this “embalmed darkness” there are only the odors of flowers and other plants, themselves the “murmurous haunt of flies.” The poem is an elaborate artifice, to be sure, an utterly fanciful attempt to translate limited perception of the bird into poetry. Its absurdity is in claiming to have bridged the gap between nightingale and human being, marked by the performative leap “Already with thee,” and that this imagined experience could itself be so fulfilling that “now more than ever seems it rich to die.” The poem is not so much about inhabiting the bird (although this is what the imaginative flight attempts to enact) as it is about inhabiting its music. The speaker is transported by song—which the poem attempts to reflect in part through the recklessness of its famous onomatopoeic effects, in which sign and signified are fused (like “Cuckoo Song”), marking the lyric as pushing beyond mere meaning. While Coleridge’s and Keats’s poems foreground the process of finding meaning in birdsong, many other poems of the period focus more

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plainly on description of the bird as an end in itself. William Wordsworth’s “The Green Linnet” is a poem about species recognition, a process made more simple, one suspects, when the species is not already freighted with cultural meaning. Like his sonnet “With Ships the Sea Was Sprinkled,” this poem reflects how perception singles out the one from the many. What is it about the green linnet (also known as the greenfinch, about the size of the North American house finch) that catches the attention of the speaker, whose “sequestered nook” has an array of “birds and flowers” to notice? Of all these, “one have I marked . . . / far above the rest,” yet this distinction rests on paradox. On the one hand, while the other “birds, and butterflies, and flowers, / Make all one band of paramours,” the green linnet seems singular, distinct from the bower: it is “sole in thy employment” and thus seems to make the bower its “dominion,” “too blest with any one to pair; / Thyself thy own enjoyment.”29 On the other hand, the bird embodies the beauty of the bower and actually does blend into it, reflecting the sun, shadow, and greenness of the place and making it difficult to see. The flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. My dazzled sight he oft deceives, A brother of the dancing leaves;

In part, this paradox is resolved by the fact that the bird reveals itself in song. Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves Pours forth his song in gushes; As if by that exulting strain He mocked and treated with disdain The voiceless Form he chose to feign, While fluttering in the bushes.

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The linnet’s song belies its camouflage and announces its presence. That the bird is simultaneously difficult to see and easy to hear is what draws the speaker’s attention (though this is true of many birds). Identifying a species requires sustained attention, partial sightings, and then, as this poem explicitly shows, a personal narrative of the meaning of the species. The final product, if one might call it that, is the joy of recognition. That the green linnet “mocked and treated with disdain / The voiceless Form he chose to feign” suggests that Wordsworth sees in the reality of the animal a subtle counterallegory of his poetic project in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” for instance, in which the poet seeks to find and speak for an invisible spirit that rolls through the entire natural world. In announcing only itself, and distinguishing itself from its surroundings, the green linnet becomes a symbol for the meaning of the tangible and specific over the intangible and general. No poet of the romantic period paid more attention to animals than John Clare. He wrote at least a hundred poems on birds and other animals, almost all focused on individual species. Indeed, most of these poems, like Wordsworth’s “Green Linnet,” reflect the experience of observation and identification, and collectively acknowledge that the process of recognizing species, translating the species-specific meaning gleaned from observation, is a sufficient purpose for poetry. In the poem “The Nightingale’s Nest,” Clare literally guides the reader to the bird—“Up this green woodland ride lets softly rove / And list the nightingale”—and repeatedly insists on the work it takes to see this diminutive and cautious creature. That is, the most obvious function of Clare’s bird poems is simply to record acts of identification by the poet, which are offered to readers as field guides. The poem “The Blackcap” is typical. The blackcap is a singing bird, A nightingale in melody; Last March in Open Wood I heard One sing that quite astonished me; I took it for the nightingale— It jug-jugged just the same as he—

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So creeping through the mossy rail I in the thicket got to see: When one small bird of saddened green, Black head, and breast of ashy grey, In ivied oak tree scarcely seen, Stopt all at once and flew away; And since, in hedgerow’s dotterel trees, I’ve oft this tiny minstrel met, Where ivy flapping to the breeze Bear ring-marked berries black as jet; But whether they find food in these I’ve never seen or known as yet.30

The poem is rich with precise descriptive detail and, like lyric poems in general, implicitly does work for both the community of readers and the individual speaker. One of the speaker’s goals is to define the species, which includes the bird’s placement in the class of songbirds. The speaker identifies many seemingly essential features—informing readers how we too might find and identify the bird—by song, size, colors, behavior, and habitat. The poem is proof that Clare has seen and studied the blackcap, an expression of allegiance with it (signaling that the speaker understands something about it), and a generous account that inspires readers to also mark the blackcap (which is the work of a field guide). But the poem also has explicit ambiguities—the described bird is not just a representative but a specific bird, here unusually of “saddened grey,” at first misidentified as a nightingale by its song. (In “The Nightingale’s Nest” the speaker misidentifies the singing bird as a female, presumably because he sees it near the nest and because male and female are nearly identical in appearance.) Because the speaker is concerned with the process of identification, he is largely focused on resemblances and differences—between kinds of birds and their likely habitats (in ivy, oak, and hedgerows), between the bird and the speaker, and in his language: “dotterel,” for instance, is at once a kind of bird, a fool, and slang for a decayed or headless tree. The poem translates specific experience

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into an exploration of the boundaries of type, of what makes this individual bird an example of its species, which can only be understood by comparing it to other classes. This exploration of types is also at the heart of “The Wryneck’s Nest.” The sonnet’s form implies completeness, an implicit ideal of the act of species definition, and the poem is indeed filled with information that would allow us to identify the bird. That summer bird its oft repeated note Chirps from the dotterel ash and in the hole The green woodpecker made in years remote It makes its nest—where peeping idlers strole In anxious plundering moods—and bye and bye The wrynecks curious eggs as white as snow While squinting in the hollow tree they spy The sitting bird looks up with jetty eye And waves her head in terror to and fro Speckled and veined in various shades of brown And then a hissing noise assails the clown And quick with hasty terror in his breast From the trees knotty trunk he sluthers down And thinks the strange bird guards a serpents nest 31

The wryneck is a kind of woodpecker but is also curiously snakelike in appearance and behavior. This confusion of types is what frightens the clown intent on stealing eggs. We prefer our species to be distinct and boundaries between them firm, preferences Clare’s animal poems both affirm and undermine. The poem celebrates this strangeness of the bird as what marks its distinctness as a species, though in doing so it also removes the confusion, potentially making the reader a better wryneck egg thief. A striking feature of many of Clare’s animal poems is that they include an account of human threats to the animal—often boys stealing nests and eggs, but also, as in “The Nightingale’s Nest,” the poet himself, whose actions as a guide to others threaten the security of the nightingale guarding her nest.

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Ere we were past the brambles and now near Her nest she sudden stops—as choaking fear That might betray her home so even now Well leave it as we found it.32

These accounts of threats, and explicit warnings against them, suggest that these poems are inspired by an ethic of care. It is as though the poems, by inculcating affection for the species in other readers, are a kind of repayment for the happiness the birds have provided the poet. Clare’s animal poems do many things, including bringing the beauty and complexity of animal life to human attention, which is the first thing an animal poem means. Taken together, his poems suggest that the work of species identification is well suited to the simultaneous precision and ambiguity of poetic language. Look, for instance, at Clare’s sonnet “The Flight of Birds,” which is an inventory of bird flight and song. The crow goes flopping on from wood to wood, The wild duck wherries to the distant flood, The starnels hurry o’er in merry crowds, And overhead whew by like hasty clouds; The wild duck from the meadow-water plies And dashes up the water as he flies; The pigeon suthers by on rapid wing, The lark mounts upward at the call of spring. In easy flights above the hurricane With doubled neck high sails the noisy crane. Whizz goes the pewit o’er the ploughman’s team, With many a whew and whirl and sudden scream; And lightly fluttering to the tree just by, In chattering journeys whirls the noisy pie; From bush to bush slow swees the screaming jay, With one harsh note of pleasure all the day.33

We can identify bird types, the poem suggests, by understanding what it means for birds to flop, “wherry,” “whew,” dash, “suther,” mount, sail,

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whiz, whirl, and “swee.” These terms are metaphoric and strangely onomatopoeic yet convey something about how specific species of birds fly. The poem concisely reflects some of the pleasures of bird-watching; we know a bird not just by color, shape, and markings but by how it flies, the variety of its songs and calls, and comparing these collective attributes to those of other birds—a kind of hermeneutic circle. Note too how the poem slides subtly from the visual (how birds fly) to the aural (the sound of their flight and, eventually, their calls and songs), which is also part of the pleasure of a sonnet—recognizing its type, hearing its distinct rhythm.34 Clare’s exploration of birds in poetry is no doubt informed by tradition, but it is also informed directly by his experience. Clare insists repeatedly in “The Progress of Rhyme” (a 345-line autobiographical poem on becoming a poet) on the meaning and power of birdsong as an inspiration for poetry. Recounting an experience of listening to nightingales, for instance, he dares to try to reflect the nightingale’s song in the poem itself. —‘Chew-chew chew-chew’—and higher still ‘Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer’—more loud and shrill ‘Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up’—and dropt Low ‘tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug’ and stopt One moment just to drink the sound Her music made and then a round Of stranger witching notes was heard ‘Wew-wew wew-wew, chur-chur chur-chur ‘Woo-it woo-it’—could this be her ‘Tee-rew Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew, Chew-rit chew-rit’—and ever new ‘Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig’35

This translation produces near nonsense, and as Rothenberg notes, it is only remotely like the sounds produced by the bird.36 These lines do suggest, however, the variety of the bird’s songs, and even more, Clare’s desire to forego convention and risk ridicule to capture something at

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least approaching the reality of the song of this species. While reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy,” in which a boy is left to dwell in silence after the birdsong stops, Clare’s poem ends with a sense not of loss but of purpose and fulfillment, a belief that his ecstatic response to birdsong, to its variety and beauty and spontaneity, is a foundation for his own understanding of what poetry can do. Indeed, Clare insists on the deep connections between words and music that birdsong inspires, so that after the bird’s singing stops, he “hummed the words again / Till fancy pictured standing bye / My hearts companion poesy.”37 Clare is the first great animal poet—a poet for whom animals, animality, and the diversity of species were central themes—because of his belief in the fundamental relation between natural beauty and language. His devotion to animals as a source of inspiration is marked by his willingness to write dozens of poems on the various species of animals he observed. We see this interest too in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, who also wrote hundreds of poems about or including animals, which, like those of Clare, are based in a cultural and personal tradition of amateur naturalism, though here likely inspired as much by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum to study nature, to reveal its latent symbolic content, as it is by a Linnaean project of taxonomy. Jonathan Skinner notes that “nearly 15 percent of Dickinson’s poems contain birds (264 of 1789 poems), with twenty-four species named,” and that about a third are actually about the birds.38 Like those of Clare, many of Dickinson’s animal poems are rich with description and are explicitly about the process of identifying the animal by recognizing it at the species level. Here is a particularly fine example: You’ll know Her—by Her Foot— The smallest Gamboge Hand With Fingers—where the Toes should be— Would more affront the sand— Than this Quaint Creature’s Boot— Adjusted by a stem—

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Without a Button—I c’d vouch— Unto a Velvet Limb— You’ll know Her—by Her Vest— Tight fitting—Orange—Brown— Inside a Jacket duller— She wore when she was born— Her Cap is small—and snug— Constructed for the Winds— She’d pass for Barehead—short way off— But as she closer stands— So finer ‘tis than Wool— You cannot feel the seam— Nor is it clasped unto of Band— Nor held upon—of Brim— You’ll know Her—by Her Voice— At first—a doubtful Tone— A sweet endeavor—but as March To April—hurries on— She squanders on your Head Such Arguments of Pearl— You beg the Robin in your Brain To keep the other—still—39

Although, as Skinner notes, the American enthusiasm for bird-watching began two or three decades after 1863, when this poem was written, the poem is explicitly about the process of recognizing the American robin and assumes the reader’s interest in identifying the species. Interestingly, the robin is so common in North America, and so emblematic of songbirds in general, that it is a bird we all already “know.” That adult readers will not need this information to identify the bird suggests that

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the poem might be thought of as a children’s poem—a primer for understanding birds at the level of species. The speaker of the poem insists on various distinct features of the bird that make it readily identifiable: its yellow feet, orange breast, brown back, black head, and song. Yet as Aaron Shackelford argues, though the poem seems to insist on the ease of identifying the bird, it is in fact characterized by “confusion and misidentification,” hinting at the artifice and challenge of defining an animal as a species.40 The poem’s refrain “You’ll know her” quickly becomes ironic. There is first the strange order of the features; why start with the feet, surely the least easily seen of the bird’s many features? The speaker is starting from the ground up, as though cataloging a dead bird rather than a live one.41 The description of the foot is also curiously roundabout: this is a foot like a yellow hand but makes less of an impression on the sand. The second stanza likens the yellow foot to a rubber boot or perhaps suggests that the upper leg becomes boot-like. Shackelford rightly notes that the entire poem consists of awkward and arbitrary anthropomorphic comparisons—the orange breast is a “vest” under a “jacket,” and the robin’s black head becomes a “cap” that from a distance could be mistaken for a bare head (presumably because it is distinct from the jacket and vest). The poem seems finally to insist on the gap between the imagined bird (the one that will not remain silent, the abstract conception/memory of the bird, awkwardly reconstructed in language) and the actual bird, the “other” that produces new song. We don’t know what we think we know about even the commonest of wild animals, the poem suggests, even as the complex reality of the animal is a source of profound interest and delight. Marianne Moore also wrote dozens of poems on individual species of animals: “The Buffalo,” “The Frigate Pelican,” “The Jerboa,” “The Pangolin,” “The Plumet Basilisk,” and “The Wood-Weasel,” to name a few. However, these poems allow us to see the identification of species as poetic work in a modernist context. Her poems are complex attempts to imagine and investigate both specific species and the species concept more generally, and she is explicitly more self-conscious, critical, and even clinical in this project than the romantic poems I have been discussing. The complexity of her poems arises in part from the fact that her

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observations of animals were often from a distance—through the cultural technology of books, pictures, zoos, and museums—and in part because these poems are not lyric encounters but abstract descriptions that strive for a kind of objectivity by discounting the value of any single perspective or observation. The tension between the precision of her nonce syllabic stanzas and the diffuse complexity of her sentences and sources mirrors the tension between the seeming precision of a species definition and its actual complexity as a community of individuals, or of the relation between the artificial specificity of taxonomy and the messiness of nature. Her poems about animals foreground the process of classification, making the Borgesian point that the classes into which we could place animals are endless. These poems acknowledge that species have their own separate and unapproachable reality, even as the poems translate that reality into human culture, creating original symbolic relations to our world. We can see these traits clearly in her stunning poem “The Jerboa,” which begins with a seventeen-stanza account (titled “Too Much”) of the use and meaning of various animals in ancient Roman culture, a catalog of the complexity and range of ancient interest in animals for art, food, and entertainment. For much of the poem, the reader probably has no idea what a jerboa is and what this animal has to do with the carnivalesque material world of ancient Rome, in which menageries were kept as displays of cultural conquest. These Romans could build, and understood making colossi and how to use slaves, and kept crocodiles and put baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick fruit, and used serpent magic. They had their men tie hippopotami and bring out dappled dogcats to course antelopes, dikdik, and ibex;

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or used small eagles. They looked on as theirs, impalas and onigers . . . 42

The jerboa enters the poem’s description almost accidentally in the fifteenth stanza in a comparison to the mongoose, pet of Roman emperors. The mongoose “was praised for its wit; / and the jerboa, like it, // a small desert rat, / and not famous, that / lives without water, has / happiness.” The jerboa becomes a symbol in the poem for “abundance” (the title of the second section of the poem) and self-sufficiency that is in stark contrast to Roman grandiosity.43 The jerboa has happiness because it escaped notice, and it survives through its perfect adaptation to an inhospitable landscape. The final seven stanzas of the poem give a precisely detailed description of “the sand-brown jumping-rat” that would allow you to recognize the animal if you happened to encounter one in your Saharan wanderings, as she surmises Jacob did. Looked at by daylight the underside’s white, though the fur on the back is buff-brown like the breast of the fawn-breasted bower-bird. It hops like the fawn-breast, but has chipmunk contours—perceived as it turns its bird head— the nap directed neatly back and blending with the ear which reiterates the slimness of the body. The fine hairs on the tail, repeating the other pale markings, lengthen until at the tip they fill out in a tuft—black and white; strange detail of the simplified creature,

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fish-shaped and silvered to steel by the force of the large desert moon.

The long and careful description of the minute creature becomes an end in itself, a sudden and almost arbitrary shift away from the realm of human culture and its co-opting of animals to the specificity of a small miraculous animal. The poem’s suddenly narrow focus, and this small animal, are in relief to the various forms of power, sovereignty, and exploitation the first section of the poem describes. This animal recalls other animals, the “fawn-breasted / bower-bird” and the “chipmunk,” again showing that the classification of species is necessarily comparative.44 One of the pleasures of the poem, and of species identification, is the recognition that focusing on life at the level of species is already to single out one from many millions, and to pull one’s attention away from the realm of the all too human, though by the end of the poem art is imagined serving the animal, rather than the other way around: “Its leaps should be set / to the flageolet.” Moore’s most intensely descriptive species poem is probably “The Pangolin.” 45 The nine-stanza, ninety-eight line poem develops an elaborate comparison between the pangolin (a scaled anteater) and “the being we call human.” While the pangolin, like the jerboa, is in fact a genus comprised of seven similar species, the name denotes something specific, a virtual species to nonscientists. Another armored animal—scale lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they form the uninterrupted central tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and gritequipped gizzard, the night miniature artist engineer is, yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica— impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.46

Like many of the animals Moore is drawn to, the pangolin is relatively unknown to her readers, reclusive, and unusual. Her interest in the

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creature is reflected in the sheer amount of detailed description she provides in the poem’s first six stanzas. These relatively long stanzas give a visceral sense not just of the animal but of the careful attention the poet has given to it. The description is precise and detailed. The conspicuous enjambments, like the arcane comparisons (e.g., the pangolin’s careful movement to “Thomas- / of-Leighton Buzzard Westminster Abbey wrought iron vine”), suggest the extraordinary work necessary to bring this animal properly to view. The challenge of the poem is to make this strange creature familiar, to reveal that it too has the “fragile grace” of art and human existence, to which it is repeatedly compared. The description of the creature also suggests the patience of the poet, as her gaze wanders over the pangolin’s body, habits, and habitat. We learn how it eats, that it eats stones as well as ants, that it rolls itself into a ball when threatened, and that it has “sting-proof scales” and a tail that is a “graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax.” “To explain grace requires a curious hand,” Moore states, implicitly comparing her own account of the animal to those monks who “graced the spires” of cathedrals with carvings of animals. She carves this animal into paper, since “the being we call human” is “writing- / master to this world,” and because the pangolin too is a creature of “exactness” with “certain postures of a man.” Moreover, man, the poem argues, has many postures like those of the pangolin, “slaving to make his life more sweet,” working day and night, “fearful but yet to be feared.” The poem finally constructs a sense of human identity, not by asserting some essential difference from other animals, but by turning to another animal and finding essential similarity in its own distinctness. “Man in all his vileness cannot set aside” the pangolin’s insularity, determination, and endurance (it is evolutionarily ancient),47 and by the end of the poem the grace of the pangolin— its fitness for and in the world—becomes a base on which to imagine possible human dignity. The animals merge in the poem’s final stanza, suggesting that the poem is not finally about defining either the human or the pangolin, is not either literal or symbolic, but is necessarily both. Not afraid of anything is he, and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle

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at every step. Consistent with the formula—warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs—that is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat, serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, “Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul.”

To prove that the concept of species is still a productive interest within modernism, and indeed that the species poem is itself a kind of literary tradition, we can also take note of William Carlos Williams’s “The Sea-Elephant,” particularly since Williams is a poet committed to the material and the particular, rather than to the abstract. The poem presents the sea elephant as specimen and spectacle. As with Moore’s poems, there is no lyric voice here but rather a multiplicity of voices: a narrator, a circus barker (“Ladies and Gentlemen! / the greatest sea-monster ever exhibited / alive”), members of the audience (“They / ought / to put it back where / it came from”), and strikingly the sea elephant itself (“Blouaugh! (feed / me) my / flesh is riven.” 48 The poem presents the sea elephant as a monster, its size and strangeness a source of human curiosity. Its meaning for all the speakers is its physical appetite, signaled by its size and the poem’s vague sexual innuendos. The human watchers are implicated, however, in making the giant seal a part of the circus and projecting their own discomfort about natural desires onto the creature. The irony of the poem is far reaching. It depicts our interest in the animal as reductive, prurient, and inappropriately moralizing; this creature has been stolen from the sea for our entertainment, though the speaker knows enough to recall scenes from the seal’s life in the sea. The poem’s final line—“Spring is icummen in”—is an allusion to “Cuckoo Song,” discussed earlier, and suggests an acceptance

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of the idea that animals can embody “bounty” and appetite, as well as signaling the dubious progress of our symbolism, since the cuckoo, lamb, and steer of the earlier poem have been replaced by the apparently grotesque sea elephant, and the song of the cuckoo replaced by “Blouaugh!” The most prolific and interesting modern animal poet is surely Ted Hughes. To some degree, he is in the modernist tradition that Margot  Norris and Philip Armstrong identify as primitivist, in which an engagement with the animal represents an escape from the temporary and false realm of culture. However, he is not so much interested in “animality in general,” as Armstrong suggests,49 as in the nature of many different species. His animal poems consistently present animals through the lens of species, type, and archetype. It matters that he was a committed observer of animals, lived with them on farms, and sought them out in the wild. He is certainly using animals as a way of defining his poetic career and identifying essences of the natural world and human being, but there can be no question that he was also interested in animals themselves. (These need not be contradictory impulses, of course.) Of his animal poems, there are about a hundred in the Collected Poems whose titles are common names for species or genera, including twenty in the collection A Primer of Birds, and not including the ninety or so that he wrote in Crow (which run the gamut from fable, myth, and mask to observation). Poems like “Black-Back Gull,” “The Black Rhino,” “A Hare,” “Jaguar,” “Pike,” and “Tern” aim to accomplish what Muldoon suggests all animal poems do, attempting to get at some essence of a kind of animal, to distill some definitive not-necessarilyhuman meaning.50 Where other bird/animal watchers put checks beside their lists of species seen and identified, Hughes wrote poems for them. To me his animal poems are evidence of the general phenomenon I have been exploring—poems that reveal “creatures . . . acting out their creature natures,” as Daniel Hoffman has put it.51 They acknowledge the significance of the animal to Hughes and are a record of his having witnessed, identified, and made sense of the distinctness of their being as abstracted types. These animals have made a mark on

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the poet through his encounters with them, and the poems are a mark the poet leaves of the animals, his mediation of the species into human culture. The sheer variety of animals Hughes represents also leads to an enormous variety of forms, modes of symbolism, and voices in his poems. They are symbolic to varying degrees, revealing species as embodying ideas of being in the world. While the poems of his Crow series reflect the animal as fable or trickster, the bird poems of A Primer reflect keen observation and meditation on specific birds. He said that his poems on birds involve “an armed truce between the life of energy inside men and the facts of the world outside, after severe fighting and heavy losses on both sides.”52 The poem “Shrike,” from A Primer, is a good example. Like most of his poems on species, it begins with a specific observation of a single bird, in this case, one in the act of killing another bird: “The talons close amicably / Round the accused / And her pipe of cry” (perhaps alluding to the German name of the bird, which means “choking” or “death angel”).53 It takes note of the shrike’s stark beauty, “painted for war / And recognition,” and hints at one of the most striking features of the bird—that it frequently impales its prey on thorns. It “digests his fame” and leaves a “jury of cadavers.” The short poem reveals what might be the essential paradox of this bird for human observers—that it looks like a pretty songbird (like a large chickadee) but kills and makes trophies of other birds. It becomes a symbol in the poem for “the sun’s justice,” which suggests both that everything dies and that this bird’s form of killing is highly visible; indeed, unlike many other predators, who quickly eat what they kill, the shrike leaves an enduring sign of its predation. This meaning is personal and human; the bird doesn’t see itself as a symbol, but the poem presents this symbolism as an indisputable part of the world. His poem “Tern” is one of my favorites, in part because the arctic tern was my own favorite bird as a child. It flies with the agility and speed of a swallow but is larger, though somehow with a more slender body. With its simple black-on-white markings, it might have been designed by Jean Arp. Like “The Jaguar,” this poem begins with a clear act of observing a single animal, describing the bird darting over the ocean swells at

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sunrise. As is always the case with bird-watching, we recognize an individual bird as belonging to a type; an unfamiliar and unnamed bird is an unseen bird, a blur of features. Giving the name, identifying it, is how we give recognition to animals that we can only see for moments at a time. The poem dramatizes and announces this act of vision and knowing: “That is the tern.” But the one word isn’t enough—a tern is both a sharp-winged white seabird with black-tipped wings (of which there are some three dozen species or subspecies) and is the kind of tern one knows in one’s own region. The poem attempts to capture the miraculous beauty of the bird’s body and movement. The poem articulates that admiration we feel for an animal’s singular perfection, revealing its abilities, behavior, and prowess. That is the tern. A blood-tipped harpoon Hollow-ground in the roller-dazzle, Honed in the wind-flash, polished By his own expertise— Now finished and in use. The wings—remote-controlled By the eyes In his submarine swift shadow Feint and tilt in their steel. Suddenly a triggered magnet Connects him downward, through a thin shatter, To a sand-eel. He hoists out, with a twinkling, Through some other wave-window. His eye is a gimlet. Deep in the churned grain of the roller His brain is a gimlet. He hangs, A blown tatter, a precarious word In the mouth of ocean pronouncements.

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His meaning has no margin. He shudders To the tips of his tail-tines. Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.54

As in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” to which this poem subtly alludes, the poem’s muscular language honors and reflects the meaning of the bird. It reveals the meaning of the bird’s beauty, even as it explains it as evolutionary adaptation. Or put another way, the poem articulates the specific physical intelligence of this tern and all terns. David Abram describes our awe at bird flight as a recognition that it is “not an isolated mind but rather the sensate, muscled body itself that is doing the thinking . . . [a] kind of distributed sentience . . . [an] intelligence in the limbs,” evolved and learned in the physical world, essential to survival.55 The poem reveals this distributed intelligence, as the bird is at once reduced to harpoon and gimlet and understood as a part of the wind and ocean: “His meaning has no margin.” The poem too is just a shriek, “a precarious word,” a gesture of recognition of this meaning, at once revealing and failing to reveal something essential about the species. Both “Shrike” and “Tern” draw attention to predation as central to the natural world and even to beauty, and certainly Hughes, like Robinson Jeffers, writes predominantly about predatory creatures. In his poem on the nightingale, its song even becomes an instrument of violence, a “sacred blade / Rending the veils, opening the throb of God,” though this is also just funny, as are his accounts of the moorhen’s “nervous collapse,” and the tree creeper’s “inchmeal medical examination / Of the tree’s skin.” Similarly, his accounts of the chipmunk as the “midget aboriginal American,” of mice as “dear little things,” of gulls as “wingwaltzing their shadows,” and of weasels dancing as making “brainless young buck rabbits / Simpering, go weak at the knees” show that his observations of animals reveal more than just stark truths about death, violence, and power.56 Many contemporary poets have similarly devoted much of their creative lives to documenting the diversity of animal being, including A. R.

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Ammons, Margaret Atwood, John Kinsella, Don Mckay, W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Pattianne Rogers, Kay Ryan, James Wright, and James Wrigley. Two dramatic motivations of the contemporary poet for poems on species are the increasing pressure human civilization is putting on other animals and the growing number of species we have made endangered or extinct. These existential threats to animals are almost always measured at the species level (and with some large animals, in terms of populations within species), and poets have worked to draw attention to threats to species we may not have heard of—such as Rogers’s “Justification of the Horned Lizard.” Don McKay’s poem “Identification” is an ode to the peregrine falcon, “o dangerous / endangered species,” and connects the difficulty of actually seeing and identifying the bird with the species’ own tenuous grasp on existence.57 Writing down the experience of fleeting observation is a desperate gesture at making permanent what is ephemeral and a feeble protest at the natural and unnatural world’s mutability. Only in poetry could we have James Dickey’s imagined “last wolverine,” which enacts vengeance for the demise of its species by eating the heart of an elk, mating with “the New World’s last eagle,” and producing an apocalyptic offspring that will rise beyond reason over hills Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die, That it has come back, this time On wings, and will spare no earthly thing.

This fantasy wolverine superhero enacts its vengeance by attacking men building roads, railroad crews, and traplines, even as the actual last wolverine—“small, filthy, unwinged”—leaves the world uttering only “Lord, let me die but not die / Out.”58 This poem recognizes poetry’s and the individual animal’s ephemerality, their relative meaninglessness in the face of much larger forces, but it serves at least as a rebellious elegy. The act of representing species seems to call forth the concision and implicit incompleteness of poetry, as well as its pressured language. Identifying a species through poetry is a way of coming to know something about the animal, of reaching across divides to meet some version

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of it. One thing that seems real about the existence of a species is that its members recognize each other—that they have a sense of themselves, their shared world. Species are a community of interpreters, individuals who share a system of semiotics, and poetry is one of the processes we use to approach and decipher the species’ always hidden sense of itself. Species poems are a pathway into this system and attempts to share what are provisional translations of that umwelt. Finally, the species poem is also an elaboration of naming, at once a limited acknowledgment and an honoring, even if, as Muldoon says in “Hedgehog,” we define the species as that which “shares its secret with no one. / We say, Hedgehog, come out / Of yourself and we will love you.”59

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I

n his poem “On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals,” the Australian poet Les Murray ruminates on the Australian government’s mass killing of brumby horses, water buffalo, and Asian cattle, all examples of domesticated animals that have gone feral and spread out over Australian landscapes. Australia is notorious for feral species run amok, from the cane toad to the camel, and now also for how it has attempted to control or eradicate them. Execution by snipers in helicopters is one of the many techniques that suggest the military scale of the Australian response. (The gunners involved in these operations have even put videos documenting this activity on the Internet, apparently for entertainment.) Murray’s poem explores the contradictions of this practice through a few descriptive details of the killing: “A necked bulging cartridge case and animal / both spin to oblivion. Behind an ear, fur flicks, / and an unknowable headlong world is abolished.”1 That the narrator can see the fur fly from the impact of the bullet makes sense when we realize that the helicopters fly just above the stampeding animals to make the killing easier. The poem’s speaker says that this “luxury massacre . . . smells of gas theory,” a kind of extermination aimed at purifying the landscape, echoing Nazi practices. “The last thing brumby horses hear / is that ideological sound, the baby boom.” The ideology that Murray identifies here is born of a “native self-hatred”—that is, a

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sense that because Australians and humanity in general have drastically altered the ecosystem, eradicating feral species might bring us to “a nonviolent dreamtime” when nature is fixed. Murray is critiquing a vacuous understanding of ecology in which the natural world tends toward a state of static harmony, which humans in our large-scale ignorance have destroyed. In the poem the militaristic slaughter of feral populations is symptomatic of both our “merciless human rearrangement / of the whole earth” and the insanity of our dream of a “green ending,” whose stasis may be created by shooting animals from helicopters. The poem also dramatizes the debate between animal rights and environmentalist values; in Australia particularly, animal rights activists and environmentalists are frequently on opposite sides in policy debates about feral animals, with the former resisting attempts to destroy them, while environmentalists argue for the elimination or control of feral populations as a way of protecting habitats and indigenous populations of species. The differences between the two sides are often stark: animal rights activists value the lives of the individual animals and defend their right to live, while environmentalists understand feral animals not as individuals but as populations threatening the habitats and landscapes of other more deserving indigenous species (including humans). While the poem largely frames the slaughter as “us against species,” the image of the effect of a single bullet abolishing “an unknowable headlong world” powerfully presents the death of the individual animal, not the species. The abolished world is the life, experience, memory, and being of the single creature, a world unto itself both in its completeness and its distance from our own. The animal’s world is “headlong” in its flight from the helicopter, its entire life focused on this one ineffectual escape. What is the moral status of the individual animal? The question is vexed and complex, in part because it is also vague. Does the life of an individual animal matter to anyone other than itself? Does it have moral status or rights? More precisely, to what degree are humans obliged to consider the value of the individual lives of other animals? The answer depends first on what kind of animal we are asking about. Even the most ardent animal rights advocate feels differently about the life of an insect

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or fish than about the life of an large mammal, and most pet owners feel very differently about the status of their dog or cat than about the life of a cow destined for slaughter. Broadly speaking, Western cultures value individual animals when they are pets but not if they are wild animals or livestock. And even more broadly, we accept that human lives are to be valued individually, but nonhuman lives matter only in extraordinary situations. Animal rights advocates, perhaps most notably Tom Regan, have made the case that progress in human morality has occurred precisely as cultures have developed awareness of the value of the individual, and that developing an understanding of animals as also capable of being “subjects of a life” is central to the progress of animal rights.2 That is, animals only have rights if we recognize and value their lives not as simple members of a broad collective but as single sentient beings. The rise of animal studies, and of posthumanism more generally, has not clarified the status of the individual animal. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, precursors of the contemporary movement to regard the relationship of thought to the animal, define the animal as by its nature collective and multiple (in packs, herds, crowds, and swarms), and thus lacking in individuality. The animal is more or less equivalent to a deindividuated collective unconscious, opposed to (human) ego. The goal of “becoming animal,” one of their most frequently cited ideas, effectively signifies resisting or escaping the idea of the human as individual, autonomous, and progress driven—concepts constructed, they argue, by ideologies of reason and capitalism. The idea of the individual animal exists for them only as a fetish, “family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history.” The individual is an idea, a reification of subjectivity. Their central example of becoming animal is a literary figure; strangely, it is Ahab, who “becomes whale” in his pursuit of Moby Dick. They note the seeming contradiction here—that Moby Dick is not a pack or collective but a creature whose behavior and appearance distinguish him from others of his kind. Indeed, this is precisely why Ahab pursues him. Their reading of the novel is much like their reading of animals—archetypal and eschewing the complexity and detail they otherwise claim to champion. For Deleuze and Guattari, Moby

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Dick is symbolic not of the individual but of the “anomalous,” which is “neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics.”3 However, the novel contradicts their narrative in other important ways: Ahab doesn’t become whale but does become monomaniacal and tyrannical (subjugating the rest of his crew) in his attempt to enact vengeance on the single animal whom he thinks bears malevolence toward him. Moby Dick is Ahab’s singular opposite—a whale with a clearly identifiable will and intent, who is more plausibly understood as acting to protect his brethren. The whale’s agency ultimately defies Ahab’s desire for vengeance. For all their insistence on multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari remain bound to rather essentialist notions of the categories of human and animal. “What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly? . . . The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing. . . . What we are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.” 4 It is telling that the animal remains for them an abstraction, made more specific only by referring to species. I have been suggesting throughout the book, and will examine more carefully in this chapter, that to see an animal as an individual is anomalous within the dominant discourse about the animal. Deleuze and Guattari show how powerful the resistance to the notion of the individual being is within certain strains of animal studies, which tends to see valorization of the individual as a symptom of bourgeois sentimentality.5 To recognize and give ontological and moral status to a single animal does not require fetishizing or humanizing the animal, or insisting on a pure or ideal condition of autonomy. It does not presuppose hierarchy. First and foremost, it involves noting that whenever we see another creature, we see an individual animal with its own “headlong life.” There are, in fact, lone wolves, and we know, for instance, that elephants and chimpanzees mourn

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individual deaths. Packs themselves are comprised of many single bodies.6 On the one hand, resistance to seeing animals as individual is a consequence of historic anthropocentrism that understands animals as part of a vast and inferior collective that exists on the planet only to serve human needs. On the other hand, within animal studies, as Deleuze and Guattari show, this resistance is also the result of projecting onto the conception of the animal contemporary ideological debates about the value of the community as opposed to that of the individual. Turning the animal into a symbol of collectivity is fundamentally anthropocentric. As Jacques Derrida and animal rights philosophers have argued, moral concern for the animal itself must include a regard for the single animal. Thus, implicitly rebutting Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida begins his seminal essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am” by describing how he becomes aware of his pet cat “as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.”7 For all the questions and elisions that Derrida’s essay reveals and dwells upon, he focuses here on a moment of presence, the certainty of the being of the individual animal, his companion.8 The creature simultaneously forces itself on his awareness and begins Derrida’s meditation on the vexed boundary lines between human and animal as categories of thought. While pet ownership may well be a bourgeois indulgence, it is nonetheless true that it is frequently through companion animals that we begin to fully ponder the nature of individual nonhuman animal lives, as is true of Derrida too. We recognize their agency, their will and desires. We grieve their deaths. Unless we believe that the process of domesticating pets produces animal self-consciousness and a biologically different kind of animal, it seems imperative for us to see the individuality of those animals we are most familiar with not as extraordinary but as evidence of individual agency widespread in the animal world. Whether we pay attention to the individual animal at the beginning, middle, or

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end of our meditations about the human-animal boundary, or about the animal itself, we need to acknowledge that it is important that we do so and that it brings about its own moral benefits and perils.9 The poems I survey in this chapter all reflect attention paid to an individual animal and thus, at the very least, do the crucial work of “bring[ing] the animal center stage as the main focus of study,” which Jonathan Burt sees as the way forward for animal studies, as opposed to “ever more refined and complicated reworking of the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal.’ ”10 As I noted in previous chapters, the category of poem I am bringing to attention in this chapter, like all literary genres and animal genera, has indistinct boundaries, and many poems may be read as belonging to different categories, depending on the degree to which the reader allegorizes or generalizes. Thus, to return to one of my earliest examples, Chaunticleer in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is both an early account of a singular rooster (whose agency is at the center of the poem’s many thematic concerns) and a complex allegory that quickly elides any notion of an actual bird. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” similarly reflects a broad allegory about the relation of human spirit to other “supernatural” beings and asks us to consider that wantonly killing a single nonhuman animal might be a grave crime, worthy of profound punishment. Interestingly, though the punishment of the ancient mariner hinges on his seemingly unmotivated killing of the albatross, the poem also works hard to reveal how all individuals (whether human or animal) are connected to (or entangled with, as Donna Haraway suggests)11 larger communities. As I have already noted, anthropocentrism is so powerful a framework that we can read nearly any poem about any animal as completely about humans. We can look at any animal directly and still see only ourselves. However, there are many poems that make explicit that they are inspired by, and draw crucial attention to, encounters with individual animals or animals as individuals. These poems are inspired by the moral awakening that comes with recognizing an animal as the subject of a life and reveal the complexity of the sympathetic imagination that helps to produce this awareness.

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Historically, probably the first poem to dwell on an individual animal is Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”; more specifically, the final seventy-three lines of fragment B on Smart’s cat Jeoffry.12 These lines, now frequently anthologized as a separate poem (which is itself a sign of cultural interest in our relationships with pets), conclude the fragment’s long series of canticle-like statements, many of which catalog aspects of nature and culture that reflect the glory and mystery of God’s order. That Smart “will consider [his] Cat Jeoffry” as a part of a broad survey of the sacred is in keeping with the poem’s broader assumption that the particular and individual is always connected to, as well as being a sign of, the abstract and holy. Thus, Smart asserts that his cat has a soul, the Judeo-Christian signifier of individuality. To have a soul is at once to be a part of the holy substance of God and to be distinct. A soul is also a definitive (and circular) quality of humanness, so it is all the more remarkable that Smart so jubilantly depicts Jeoffry as also holy. He too “is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.” Like humans, this one cat is part of the order of creatures made holy by being created by God. He “worships in his way”; for instance, by cleaning himself ritualistically every morning, and by keeping “the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary, / For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.” Also, amusingly, Jeoffry keeps the cat Sabbath, “for one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.” Smart gives examples of ways that Jeoffry displays catness and “is of the tribe of Tiger,” but he also notes how his being one of God’s creatures is evinced by the blessing of his individual agency—that he is a particular cat with distinct behaviors: “He is a mixture of gravity and waggery . . . , / he can fetch and carry . . . , / can jump over a stick . . . , / can spraggle upon waggle.” Smart includes the fact that Jeoffry has been bitten by a rat, which provokes the speaker’s concern, as he interjects “Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry.” Jeoffry is healed by the “divine spirit,” making clear that he is blessed. Jeoffry “is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly,” because for Smart he is a powerful sign of God’s justice, that it extends to the creature who was his companion in the asylum.

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Because Smart’s poem wasn’t published until the middle of the twentieth century, it reflects an aberrant moment in literary history, and it has had virtually no influence on poets or other readers in the intervening time. Instead, the cultural work of poetry for individual animals largely begins in the romantic period, during which we see the rise of a form of lyric poem that is particularly receptive to and productive of new scrutiny of individual animals. Borrowing from Frederick Garber’s book Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter, I call this the lyric of animal encounter, and it is important because it is a mode of poetry about individual animals that has been successful and popular; examples of this mode continue to be written and read today. The lyric of animal encounter is a version of the romantic lyric—it is relatively short and in the first person, and it appears to be or allows itself to be read as about an actual experience. The experience the poem describes is an encounter with a specific animal in a specific time and place. The encounter is meaningful for the speaker in terms of the animal itself; the poem’s speaker recognizes the animal as something distinct and living in the world, and the poem reflects as well the effect or meaning this encounter has on the speaker. In this way, the poem’s speaker and the animal are always in a meaningful tension. In reflecting the actual encounter, the poem resists abstraction and generalization—resists using the individual animal to figure the poet, a species, or animality in general. It is in this resistance to abstraction that I see the lyric of animal encounter as making the most of the potential of the romantic lyric to invoke the actual animal, to explore and present liminal states, and to approach and recognize the other while not reducing it to absolute similarity or difference. Put simply, these poems self-consciously negotiate their own inescapable anthropomorphism by beginning with the possibility that the animal can be perceived as an individual.13 My candidate for what a biologist would call the holotype (defining example) of the poem of animal encounter is Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” which I examine later in this chapter. The origin of this mode is the intensified interest in animals during the romantic period. The sheer number of poems on animals, as David Perkins has shown, points to a genuine interest in animals as literary, philosophical,

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and ethical topics.14 Other romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, develop the lyric of encounter more broadly, with animals as occasional subjects. Frederick Garber identifies “The Solitary Reaper” and “Stepping Westward” as key examples, though he offers dozens, including “To the Cuckoo” and “The Green Linnet,” in making his case that the encounter is crucial to Wordsworth’s originality and importance as a poet. For Garber, what is appealing about Wordsworth’s celebration of moments of encounter is his emphasis on singularity (“a single thing—one unique object standing alone”); on materiality, the physical reality of the object and the experience of perceiving it; and on the realization that the subjectivity of the object exists but cannot be known. As Garber puts it: “His protection of the discreteness of the objects he experiences, his refusal . . . to overwhelm them with his own urgent, impelling being, is in part a protection of his own individuality, which he does not want to lose by blending it with another or by being swamped.”15 Poems like “Simon Lee,” “The Ruined Cottage,” and “Anecdote for Fathers” present the encounter (with other people) as an almost elemental meeting of separate beings, in which the speaker steps back from being fully able to know the other. These poems present the paradox that an awareness of and respect for the subjectivity of another being requires one to be more or less silent about it. They also present the speaker as altered by the encounter, his consciousness changed by an awareness of another. Interestingly, Garber notes that in Wordsworth’s lyrics of encounter, the poet frequently invokes the problematic boundary between human and animal; that is, the speakers of his poems link encounters with unfamiliar people—the leech gatherer (in a poem where the relation between human and animal is an explicit topic), the Highland lass, and Simon Lee—with encounters with animals. The people of Wordsworth’s best encounter poems are unfamiliar, inexorably draw the speaker’s gaze, and live closer to animals than the poet himself. As Garber argues, and Perkins and Christine Kenyon-Jones note as well, for Wordsworth, encounters with animals are not a frequent occasion for his lyrics, but his few animal poems follow a similar pattern. The best example is the “Boy of Winander” passage in The Prelude (also published as “There Was a Boy”). Even when the speaker or the boy of

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Winander attempts to transform the voices of the birds into something else, a symbol of something transcendent and immaterial, the birds and the time and place of the encounter remain “substantial.”16 This is true even of poems such as “To the Cuckoo” and “To a Skylark,” which are less about observing the animal than using an idea of the animal for personal uplift. That is, though these birds are transformed into metaphors for the poet’s desire, the poems nonetheless anchor this desire in a specific and concrete moment of observation. We see this in “The Green Linnet,” which foregrounds the time and place of the encounter (May, “my orchard seat”) and indeed the act of observation itself. One have I marked, the happiest guest In all this covert of the blest: Hail to Thee, far above the rest In joy of voice and pinion, Thou, Linnet! In thy green array, Presiding Spirit here today, Dost lead the revels of the May; And this is thy Dominion.17

Though the poem also does the work of identifying the species, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, it is worth noting that virtually every conscious act of the speaker involves singling out what to see. He defines the behavior of the bird itself as singular, refusing to merge with the rest of the scene, and thus “sole in thy employment.” This emphasis on singularity and immediacy is more striking when one realizes that most other poems about animals in the romantic period feature the animal as a symbolic part of a narrative, or as is largely the case with John Clare’s poems, attempt to define the animal as a species, based on a recollection of many encounters. It seems clear to me that Wordsworth is genuinely interested in animals as instances of consciousness other than his own, even when he also uses them as symbols for aspects of nature. Consciousness inheres in the idea of the individual. More influential examples of this early

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mode of the genre are John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Both are undoubtedly inspired by actual encounters with real birds, are addressed to single birds, and reflect the fact that many birds (especially the small reclusive songbirds these poets write about) are mostly heard rather than seen. I think David Perkins is right that though the birds of these central romantic poems are not necessarily humanized, the poems nonetheless “transform natural behavior of the birds into metaphors of human desires,”18 though resisting this tendency can only ever be a matter of degree. The actual encounter is overweighed by the requirements of high literary art, so that the poems ultimately reflect more about the poet and his imagination than the being that inspired it. It is as though the poets are still too encumbered by literary and cultural conventions about the animal, or even by embarrassment, to allow the animal to be the poem’s central topic. I have been arguing that we can find in the romantic period the origins of the lyric of animal encounter. I have also suggested that it evolves into a form that ultimately allows the animal a more central place in the poem and in our culture. An old-fashioned historicist genealogy of the genre would explore who among later poets read Wordsworth’s encounter lyrics, including the ones on animals, and took them as a serious model for their own work. I suspect later works are a refashioning or evolution of the models created by Wordsworth and Keats, produced not simply by a literary desire to imitate previous authors and genres but by the desire to represent meaningful experience with a literary form suited to express the meaning of that experience. The romantic lyric allows for the reflection of the immediacy of the encounter, signals the importance of it, and because lyric is inherently a kind of fragment, leaves the meaning of the event and of the animal itself unfixed. A paradigmatic and influential example of the lyric of animal encounter is Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” which I reproduce here in its entirety. A Bird, came down the Walk— He did not know I saw—

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He bit an Angle Worm in halves And ate the fellow raw, And then, he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass— And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a beetle pass— He glanced with rapid eyes, That hurried all abroad— They looked like frightened Beads, I thought, He stirred his Velvet Head.— Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb, And he unrolled his feathers, And rowed him softer Home— Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, Leap, plashless as they swim.19

The poem concisely tells the story of a single encounter, of the bird approaching the speaker and the speaker approaching the bird. The speaker conspicuously anthropomorphizes the behavior of the bird in the first three stanzas, assuming a kind of familiarity and equality. The lyric turns on the ambiguity of the stirring of the bird’s “velvet head,” which is both physical and mental. The grammatical construction of the poem’s second sentence suggests that it is the speaker of the poem who is “in danger, cautious” in offering the crumb, though it seems true as well for the bird, and this crucial ambiguity points to the poem’s self-consciousness about the human-animal boundary. The speaker is cautious in part because the act of attempting to offer food to the bird is also a gesture of good will and toward some level of mutual

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understanding—the bird needs to know that the speaker means no harm. The speaker’s approach fails, as does the initial humanizing attitude of the speaker to the bird. The bird refuses the encounter, and the speaker has paid it special attention. Yet the bird’s flight offers a new occasion for the poem, a new act of observation. The suddenly more artful language, the sumptuous metaphors of swimming and rowing in air, highlight the bird’s difference from the speaker and signals the real epiphany of the poem, produced by the sudden awareness of the bird’s difference and independence. At the same time, this language expresses the speaker’s awe at the bird, a sense that the bird has revealed something of itself, and that the speaker’s act of attention has been rewarded after all. Walt Whitman has also powerfully represented encounters with individual animals in his poetry. Section 32 of “Song of Myself,” like the “Boy of Winander” section of Wordsworth’s Prelude, presents an example how such encounters produce lyric moments within larger narrative poems. The section begins in abstraction, with the speaker describing animals in general as a way of making a broad critique of the human condition: animals “are so placid and self-contained. . . . / They do not sweat and whine about their condition. . . . / They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.” From this simple idea of the animal as the not human, the speaker approaches the animal, choosing a single companion from the collective—a movement also from the idea of the animal to the actual body of an animal. Myself moving forward then and now and forever, . . . Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms. A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears, Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

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His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him, His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.20

This is also a movement from philosophy to lyric, from thinking to being and acting. Typical of Whitman, the speaker also moves quickly from observation to physical contact. Though it is always possible to think of riding a horse as a form of domination and mastery, Whitman evokes it here as a quasi-sexual union of rider and horse, producing mutual pleasure (as in Philip Sidney’s ironic sonnet, discussed in chapter 2). Riding the horse expresses the speaker’s desire to be in contact with the single animal, and the fullness of experience and meaning that contact gives. This passage is also a way for Whitman to express allegiance to his own animal body.21 Whitman’s most ambitious lyric of animal encounter is “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” It is one of his best-known poems, perhaps because it is in some sense also his most conventional—a romantic lyric that finds in birdsong a trope for the poet’s own creativity. It is important for this chapter because it depicts one of the world’s greatest poets making the case that his poetic imagination has its origin in an encounter with a single bird. In this most Wordsworthian of Whitman’s poems, the adult speaker, inspired by hearing a mockingbird song, recalls a summer when as a boy he paid special heed to a particular mockingbird. The speaker tells the story of the boy’s encounters with the bird, through which the boy learns of the bird’s loss of its mate. He recalls that “every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, / Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating” the bird’s singing and nesting. When the “she-bird” fails to return to the nest, “nor ever appeared again,” the boy continues to observe and hear the male bird: “all summer in the sound of the sea . . . / I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird, / The solitary guest from Alabama.”22 The speaker insists on this connection with the single bird, whose song and story “I of all men know,” including his guess that the bird has migrated from Alabama (which is unlikely). That he has “listen’d long and long” to the bird’s remarkable singing leads to the poem’s most audacious trope: the

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seventy lines of the boy-speaker’s “translation” of the bird’s song. These lines articulate at length the desire and pain of the bird as the boy imagined it, and at least through its unusual rhythms, it will strike readers either as vaguely protomodern, or absurdly anthropomorphic. O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more.

In the context of contemporary anthropomorphism, where talking animals are often ironic and comic, the pathos of these lines can quickly turn to bathos for most readers. While this may be impossible to overcome, we can retrieve some sense of the power of Whitman’s version of birdsong by recalling the original context. First, Whitman actually does figure some aspects of mockingbird song in his lines, through the varying line lengths and the frequent repetition of long and short phrases. Like these lines, the songs of mockingbirds are enormously varied and long; they include the songs of other birds, often repeated in snippets (like rhyming couplets). Second, mockingbirds do mate for life and raise chicks together, so the story that the boy tells of faithfulness, loss, and grief bears some semblance to mockingbird behavior. There is at least the desire here, in both the boy and the adult, to know and represent the bird that so profoundly affected the poet. What the adult speaker is marking in the italicized lines is the connection the boy had made with the bird, his belief that spending hours watching and listening to the bird has given him a full understanding of its situation. This is an understanding only he has, which is true in part because he believes he is the only one who has truly seen this bird, singled it out for prolonged observation. The ventriloquized birdsong shows the poet broaching profound difference and exhibiting a similarly expansive sympathy. It also shows him, as in section 32 of “Song of Myself,” simultaneously immersed in human culture and aware of the animal. Most of all, the poem shows that Whitman imagines individual animals can also understand death

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as the ultimate existential threat. Observation of the animal has made the poet most profoundly aware of this threat and produces the desire in the speaker to form an articulation of loss (as immortal poetry) that might stand against oblivion. Written at the end of the year 1900, Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush” is also a meditation centered on an encounter with an individual bird, “an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled plume.”23 Although the poem is symbolically freighted, beginning and ending with evocations of the tragedy of the human condition, the poem’s climactic lyric moment centers on animal encounter. The speaker is in an explicitly symbolic pastoral landscape—the bleakness of the cold and grey winter day suggesting that the end of the nineteenth century signifies death and decline rather than rebirth. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

Interrupting the landscape and the speaker, the aged thrush sings its “full-hearted evensong / of joy illimited.” The bird and its song are also explicitly symbolic—of “some blessed hope” in the face of “growing gloom.” As in Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” and Keats’s ode (to which the poem explicitly alludes), the speaker here insists that the thrush song must be one of joy, in spite of the seemingly melancholic appearance of landscape and sky. Indeed, it is surprising that the song of a bird can have so much symbolic power here. Only in poetry, one might think, can a single birdsong interrupt not just the despair of the poem’s human speaker but also the decline of human civilization. What gives the song such power? Here it is not the abstract quality of birdsong (which in Keats’s ode rises above history because it always exists and thus has the

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quality of Art, a Platonic form of joy and beauty). The contrast to Keats’s poem lies in how Hardy’s speaker recognizes that the life of the individual thrush gives its song meaning. This bird too faces death—it is old, and the bleak winter will probably kill it. Whatever meaning the thrush’s song has comes seemingly out of its own desire and joy, in contrast to the speaker’s extremely generalized woe. The speaker also suggests that the thrush has access to some other air “wherof he knew / And I was unaware.” This suggests, on the one hand, a sense of the animal other, that like Shelley’s skylark the thrush does not “look before and after, / and pine for what is not.”24 On the other hand, that the speaker also immediately finds the bird interpretable suggests that he feels a bond with it—that they share this space and both live in the face of death, which is an affliction of the individual creature. Thus, right at the turn of the century, the poem figures human and animal life together as rooted in the corporeal being of individual bodies. That all creatures share this individual life, and face death, ironically suggests some solace.25 Robert Frost is another major poet who has written many poems of animal encounter, and who has many poems about animals in general. The poem “The Pasture” is the introductory work in the edition of his collected poems (The Poetry of Robert Frost) and is about an interaction with an individual animal. In it the speaker invites his reader to come with him to meet the “little calf / That’s standing by the mother.”26 That the calf is “so young / It totters when she licks it with her tongue” is a realistic pastoral detail. It is also an example of and symbol for the kind of intimate contact with the natural world that Frost’s poetry collection promises, a promise frequently fulfilled through attention to individual animals. Some of his most well-known poems center on individual animals: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” includes the speaker’s awareness that his horse “must think it strange” that the speaker pauses on a dark snowy night, suggesting that the horse in some way stands for normalcy, an individual with clear purpose and agency. “The Wood-Pile” ends with the speaker contemplating the creator and purpose of a stack of firewood in “a frozen swamp one gray day” (reminding one of Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush”), but the center of the poem describes the speaker’s encounter with a bird whom he finds surprisingly easy to interpret.

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A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand.27

That the speaker never identifies the bird suggests that he is more interested in it as a single creature than as a member of a species. He also does not see it or know it well enough to identify it, perhaps thus ironically suggesting that the speaker is ultimately more interested in himself than the bird. The speaker’s obsessive self-consciousness (that is, his awareness of his own identity and its purpose and agency) is indeed one of the ironic themes of the poem as a whole. And yet the bird does hold his careful attention, and the speaker’s seemingly casual anthropomorphizing of it allows him to project or symbolize his own solipsism. This remarkable and deceptive passage in fact gets at much of the complexity of our attempts to approach and know the single animal. In the first place, it shows how the speaker’s (and our) interest in the animal is nearly automatic and unremarkable. That the speaker notices the movement (and not the sound) of the bird, and follows it with his gaze, is presented as natural. Indeed, the speaker continues to report that he pays attention to the bird even after he dismisses it by saying “I forgot him.” It also shows the naturalness of the bird’s apparent interest in him. The poem thus suggests that any two individual creatures alone together pay each other attention, regard each other as having possibly malevolent agency, regardless of species difference. Both bird and speaker, after all, take “Everything said as personal to himself.” The most delightful

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part of the poem is the confusion reflected and created in the phrase “And say no word to tell me who he was / Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.” Who, after all, is “who” here? It is, or can be, both bird and speaker, each thinking foolishly of the other, though to be fair to the bird, it is unlikely it would have perceived an earth-bound man making postholes in the snow as he crosses a frozen swamp as a threat to one of its feathers. In the end, beyond the speaker’s own self-centeredness, the encounter ironically reflects our need to find agency and purpose in the life of another creature, a need prompted by the registered presence of an animal. Frost wrote two other excellent poems of animal encounter, both in the form of short narratives with powerful climaxes that echo Wordsworth’s “Boy of Winander”: “The Most of It” and “Two Look at Two.” Like Wordsworth’s poem, “The Most of It” is about a solitary figure shouting across a lake and receiving an “echo of his own [voice] / From some tree-hidden cliff.” The poem’s protagonist is alone in a wilderness, seeking a “voice” to echo his own, “not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original response.”28 This too is an echo of Wordsworth’s desire to find clear signs in the natural world of a “sense sublime . . . / a motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought.”29 The external sign that Frost gives in this poem is “nothing . . . / Unless it was the embodiment that crashed / In the cliff’s talus on the other side,” which is, “instead of proving human . . . , / a great buck” that swims toward the calling man and stumbles past him along the shore. The poem presents this encounter as a primal scene, the spectacle of the animal’s power, and as nature’s only response (which may not even be a response) to the man’s invitation. Although deer can vocalize, this one remains silent. The individual animal body, its power and movement (in contrast to the man’s inertia), and its effect on the water and landscape are all signs of its will and agency. It is evidence of the sufficient force of life and individual will in the world, an animal force mocking the man’s ineffectual loneliness. The poem “Two Look at Two” is the optimistic counterpart to “The Most of It,” featuring a couple whose “love and forgetting” have led them to hike far up a mountain, and whose contentment suggests they are

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looking for nothing in particular.30 There they encounter their version of an animal echo—a doe and a buck, each of whom meets their gaze and passes on “unscared. / Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.” Here as well the individual animals are elemental and symbolic. The encounter produces in the couple “a great wave . . . / As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor / Had made them certain earth returned their love.” Interestingly, though the man and woman travel as a pair, the doe and the buck arrive and depart separately, suggesting that what is echoed here is not necessarily the love between the man and the woman but love between creatures as individuals—each encounter is a powerful confirmation of the idea that there may be happiness when we peacefully meet the gaze, and address the existence of, another individual creature. Poets are drawn to reflect on encounters with animals because these experiences are deeply meaningful, and because that meaning is necessarily difficult to articulate, since it involves some attempt to understand the animal. Focusing on an individual animal induces one to wonder about the sentience of that animal and its singular perception of its world. Poems of encounter suggest the reality of the individual being rather than the species. Moreover, all of the poems I have examined offer the possibility of transcending one’s individual humanity through contact with a nonhuman animal. This transcendence is one way, as Frost suggests in all three of the poems I have just looked at, of overcoming our isolation, not just as a species, but as conscious individuals. Contact with an animal produces a shock of surprise, recognition, joy, or fear, which is ultimately why this is such a consistent topic of poetry (and art in general). Our visceral experience of proximity, of narrowing the gap that separates us, is what it means to come in contact with the individual animal, rather than with ideas about animals or species. Such contact also produces in the human perceiver a sense of wonder and care and provides evidence that our own bodies yearn for contact with, or at least direct awareness of, other bodies, including those of nonhuman animals. There are hundreds of modern poems that depict the thrill of encountering other animals, many of them already familiar, though critics tend to read them as primarily about human self-exploration rather than as about the significance of animals. An important and powerful example is

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Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” one of several brilliant lyrics of animal encounter she wrote.31 The poem is too long and complex for a complete reading; what interests me is the climax of the poem’s narrative, when the nuanced evocation of a specific place and time in the life of the poem’s “lone traveler,” a curiously distanced first-person speaker who never refers to herself, is interrupted by the appearance of the moose on the road. The poem is Wordsworthian in being about a halted journey, in which the speaker is simultaneously brought out of herself and to herself. What is interrupted is a web of memory and a fractured but increasingly complex sense of identity produced when the speaker leaves her grandparents’ home by bus. Before the encounter, the dominant emotions are loss and isolation. The poem is in part about its own ability to evoke the past, but it also showcases how an unexpected encounter with a large and unusual animal (contrasted in part by the multiple references to dogs in the first part of the poem) manages to interrupt virtually every aspect of the poem—the bus voyage, the speaker’s isolation and depression, the narrative the poem seemed to have been telling. The bus has stopped “with a jolt.” However, what everyone on the bus notes is the animal itself rather than the catastrophic collision just averted, and the speaker celebrates this interruption as a new presence. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches: it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses).

The bus passengers have all been turned to children, “exclaim[ing] in whispers, / childishly, softly,” while the moose “looks the bus over, /

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grand, otherworldly.” The poem explicitly asks the question “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” The question is profound—why should an encounter with an animal produce powerful emotion? Why does it almost invariably do so? Joy suggests a sudden revelation. The experience of seeing a moose is a rare one, and a moose is an unusual creature. This moose seems to seek out the encounter, approaching the bus and sniffing at the hood, presumably not really aware of the people inside the vehicle. The encounter is highly mediated—it is dark and the speaker is inside the bus, peering ahead through the windshield. But the sudden union of feeling produced by the encounter is in sharp contrast to everything the poem has so far described and foregrounds the individual animal itself as palpable, real, and yet “otherworldly.” The poem ends with the bus starting up again, the “craning backwards” of the observers, and the mixing of the “dim smell of moose” and the “acrid smell of gasoline,” reflecting how the presence of the animal is dramatically more powerful than the memory or representation of it, already polluted by human interference. The poems I have discussed so far have been about encounters with wild animals, who are normally more distant from our lives and more fleeting in their contact with us than domestic animals. Even when the poem’s speaker insists on the symbolic or allegorical meanings of these encounters (as with D. H. Lawrence’s well-known poem “Snake”), the value of the life of the individual animal can still be felt. This is the case too in Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Hurt Hawks.” The bird and the speaker’s experiences with it are repeatedly put to work in the poem for heavy-handed symbolic meaning—even a hurt hawk knows more about the “wild God of the world” than most people do, the speaker insists.32 Yet in spite of the poem’s obvious symbolic work (further implied by the title—that this hurt hawk stands for all hurt hawks), the experience the poem describes is an intense encounter with a specific bird, and the description and the speaker’s own emotions betray a deep attachment to it rather than to its symbolic meaning. Thus, although the speaker insists at first that the injured hawk can live just “a few days,” he admits that he feeds it for six weeks, even as he says that the bird approaches him “asking for death.” I read the poem finally as a

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powerful statement of belief in the meaning of the hawk’s life, that it possessed something that Jeffers might as well have called a soul, even if he didn’t believe in the concept: What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

For most of the poem, the speaker has been arguing for his own transcendence of the human by embracing an idea of the wild animal as presented by the hawk—that he can now see some aspect of the natural world that he could not before. At the end of the poem, though, he suggests that the experience with the hawk has made him believe it has itself transcended reality. Wildness refers on the one hand to animals that are not domesticated—not bred and not brought into the home.33 On the other hand, it also refers, as Jeffers argues in his poetry, to the antihuman, that purely biological life that human culture appears to transcend. Contact with a wild animal can give brief awareness of this life, which has somehow remained beyond the range of human influence. Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Caribou” makes a similar argument in response to a fleeting encounter with a small herd of presumably migrating arctic caribou that the speaker observes through binoculars from a small aircraft.34 Most of the poem’s details emphasize the remoteness of the animals and the ephemerality of perceiving them. Shadows shift from the whiteness of forest, small As they move on the verge of moon-shaven distance. They grow clear, As binoculars find the hairline adjustment. They seem to drift from the purity of forest. Single, snow dusted above, each shadow appears, each Slowly detached from the white anonymity

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Of forest, each hulk Lurching, each lifted leg leaving a blackness as though Of a broken snowshoe partly withdrawn.

The speaker’s highly mediated perception of the caribou still brings him in close, reflecting our longing to see wild animals. He moves from seeing the herd to seeing individual creatures, “single, snow dusted.” The caribou give no sign of responding to the human gaze. They simply disappear from the speaker’s view. Nonetheless, this attenuated contact still allows the speaker to conclude that these creatures have a “mission,” and that “they move through the world and breathe destiny. / Their destiny is as bright as crystal, as pure / As a dream of zero. Their destiny / Must resemble happiness.” Though they are a herd, this sense of their purpose and agency comes from seeing their shared movement as acts of individual purpose. The happiness of seeing them, the poem suggests, comes from even just a faint awareness of this agency. We think of a herd as having some kind of collective will, but the poem suggests that we might also see this as multiple acts of will, collected. The great poet of the specific and concrete is William Carlos Williams, and although he did not write many poems about animals, he does have a few terrific ones. “The Sparrow” self-consciously reveals much of the complexity of imagining and representing the individual animal. It is both an earnest poem of lyric encounter and a subtle parody, a poem about an individual bird, sparrows in general, and in an oblique way the poet’s father, to whom it is addressed and for whom it serves as elegy.35 The poem’s opening lines describe the initial encounter with a bird and nicely set up its conflicts between the casual and the formal, the trivial and the profound, and the physical world and the ideas we attach to it. The sparrow who comes to sit at my window is a poetic truth more than a natural one. His voice, his movements,

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his habits— how he loves to flutter his wings in the dust— all attest it; granted, he does it to rid himself of lice but the relief he feels makes him cry out lustily which is a trait more related to music than otherwise.

The lyric moment here is after the encounter, with the speaker pondering its meaning, producing the immediate claim that there is a clear distinction between “poetic” and “natural” truths. The “poetic truth” of the sparrow is presumably (and self-reflexively) the meaning we or the poet attributes to it, as opposed to an objective meaning. But this opposition quickly slides into confusion. First, the speaker’s careful recollection of the encounter with the sparrow suggests that he is talking about an actual sparrow, whose behavior he has observed as it moves from the window to the ground. Second, the referent for the pronoun “it” becomes ambiguous, suggesting a collapsing of the distinction between poetic and natural truths, and between the observed behavior of the sparrow and the meaning the poet attributes to it. This confusion also suggests that the bird is by its nature poetic, and that what poetry does with the animal is as natural as the bird’s singing, a crying out lustily. Much of the rest of this long lyric explores these connections between the sparrow at his window, sparrows generally (the behavior of the species that he has witnessed over years), the sounds they make, and the significance we draw from all this. It documents the poet thinking about the bird following the encounter, foregrounding the realization that the individual animal and our moments of perception of it have their own distinct existence and meaning, and that our ideas about the animal will

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always wander into varying degrees of anthropomorphism. The “he” the poem begins with, the individual sparrow that the poem suggests is the initial object of the speaker’s interest, becomes the totemic sparrow that is identical to (or the identity of) the species that spans the globe: “Even the Japanese / know him / and have painted him / sympathetically.” “He” also becomes other sparrows and groups of sparrows the poet has seen, as well as images and representations of him. The final long descriptions of the bird offer examples of “his lovemaking,” which the speaker has apparently observed firsthand. He gives two examples: one of courtship, in which the male “throws back his head / and simply— / yells! The din / is terrific”; and of an instance “I saw once” in which a female is the aggressor, catching him by his crown-feathers to hold him silent, subdued, hanging above the city streets until she was through with him.

In these two examples, an instance of “typical” species behavior is countered with a description of a presumably unusual event, suggesting that species identity is a kind of fictional abstraction, countered by the reality of individual beings, or is a kind of collective that consists of all the moments of behavior of its individual constituents. Another tension throughout the poem is what it means to compare a human to a (relatively insignificant) animal. As the poem’s insistence on behavior (i.e., singing and sex) suggests, both species are driven by fundamental desires, which we might call instincts and which yet are “practical to the end.” These drives produce music, noise, poems, and offspring: “his innumerable / brood,” the poet himself, and this poem. Further suggesting a comparison of human to sparrow, the poem is grounded in an allusion to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew in which God

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is said to be aware even of the death of a sparrow.36 The life of the individual sparrow and its meaning in the world and as an emblem for the poet’s father are emblematized ironically at the end of the poem by a wisp of feathers flattened to the pavement . . . .................... left to say and it says it without offense beautifully; This was I, a sparrow. I did my best; farewell.

Like the rest of the poem, the ending mingles the absurd (we are invited to imagine talking roadkill) and the profound. A wisp of feathers on the pavement is almost nothing, insignificant except as a token of a life now over, given meaning only by the poet who saw it and recalls it. And yet it is also made into a symbol for both the unknown life of the bird and, perhaps, of the poet’s father. Pets are the animals we are most likely to see as individuals, and about whom countless poems have been written. It is in the nature of being a pet that it is singled out, brought into the home from a herd or a shelter, and given a name. That poets (and readers) have many encounters with pets is unsurprising. To encounter or meditate upon the individuality of a pet requires no special act of perception or luck or travel. Domestication has made animals familiar. They are already ours in imagination, and also biologically in the sense that we have directed evolution for all domestic animals, have made them more amenable to our purposes and desires. Beyond simply naming them, we are also pleased to recognize personalities in our pets. The challenge for poets is to make common experience meaningful and original. Poems about pets are important because, as I suggested early in this chapter, our experiences

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with our companion animals can and should be a spur to our growing awareness of the meaning and value of other animals: wild animals whose lives we affect by altering the planet and hunting them, and those numberless and nameless domestic animals on factory farms, whose existence we generally only note when their flesh appears on our plates.37 There is perhaps no poet in whose work a reader feels the continual presence of domesticated individual animals more than Maxine Kumin. She has written hundreds of poems about the animals that share her farm and home, celebrating them because they are a constant presence in her life. “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” presents the seemingly prosaic nature of sustained interaction with a horse as a cause for celebration—that working with (in this case) a timid horse is not about a single epiphany but is a long process that leads to “that kind of trust” that allows horse and human to work together.38 The poem’s title links the process of working with the horse to that of working at poetry: both involve repetition, labor, imagination, and trust that there is someone else (the horse and the reader) who understands. Her most powerful evocations of the individual animal come in the series of love poems for Amanda, her “sensible Strawberry roan.”39 Together these poems express insight into the extraordinary bond that develops between Kumin and one of her horses. Moreover, like Mark Doty’s and W.  S. Merwin’s poems about their dogs, these poems celebrate the life and identity of this single horse without any embarrassment, acknowledging a wide range of feeling and meaning in relationships with beloved pets. In “Amanda Dreams She Has Died and Gone to the Elysian Fields,” Kumin describes coming upon the horse sleeping in a field in the morning.40 The careful description of the moment reveals the speaker’s absorption in the life of this creature, her regard for it, and their mutual trust. The comic title points to the impossibility of knowing what the horse is thinking or dreaming, but that its contentment is palpable. These are the poem’s final lines: We sit together. In this time and place we are heart and bone.

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For an hour we are incorruptible.

This is a way of becoming animal very different from that imagined by Deleuze and Guattari, but one the poem shows as common and powerful. The poem describes a moment of contact with another animal that is based not in thinking but in a kind of shared reverie, in the speaker imagining what the horse is dreaming. The poem’s power comes from the suggestion that dream and imagination are animal sensibilities of the body (“heart and bone”) that allow for the possibility of love between creatures. This is a kind of becoming animal only possible with a companion and when both human and animal can take physical and spiritual pleasure from extensive contact. James Wright’s well-known poem “A Blessing” also celebrates the transformative power of contact with horses, in this case “two Indian ponies” that come to “welcome my friend and me” by the side of the road.41 The poem is typically read as reflecting the neediness of the speaker or even as an example of neosurrealism, interpretations that undermine the possibility that an encounter with an animal can be meaningful in itself.42 Certainly the speaker of the poem is effusive in imagining the animals’ emotions; he leaps from identifying the place of the encounter in the first line to the effect of the encounter in the second, expressed through the personification of the “twilight” that “bounds softly forth on the grass.” The yearning the speaker feels in and for the horses seems to spread into the landscape, a sign of how transformative this sudden bond with another creature can be. The animals themselves, “those two Indian ponies,” are already in some way familiar to the speaker simply as horses and because of the geographical context. The reality the poem aims to describe is of the power of this desire of man and horse for mutual contact. The speaker expresses this at first by insisting on full knowledge of what the horses feel, and that this can only be joy, rather than, say, hunger: their eyes “darken with kindness”; “They have come gladly”; “They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness / that we have come.” That “they love each other” and “there is no loneliness like theirs” succinctly expresses that the speaker

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can only imagine and project, and that the emotion he reads in the animals is foremost an expression of his own response to them. And yet the two ponies do “come over” to meet the two humans (reminding us of Frost’s “Two Look at Two”), and one of them “nuzzled my left hand,” which together with the “light breeze,” a Wordsworthian metaphor of shared consciousness, “moves me to caress her long ear.” This climactic moment of contact produces the speaker’s epiphany: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” These lines are pure metaphor—we cannot step out of bodies or break into blossom. They are effective because, like the physical joy they express, they are mysterious and suggest the felt reality of an impossible transformation. This is a physical response to contact, felt as emotion and expressed as metaphor, idea, or dream. And yet the effect of such an encounter, as documented here and in many of the other poems I have discussed, is undoubtedly real even if it is also mysterious. I am reminded again of Bishop’s wonderful and insistent question in response to seeing the moose: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” a question explicitly echoed by Denise Levertov in her poem “Come Into Animal Presence.” 43 The emotional effect of physical contact with animals explains the enormous success of animalassisted therapy, as well as why pet owners apparently live longer than those without pets.44 This power is revealed in the etymological confusion in the word pet, which means to domesticate, make a favorite, and to stroke.45 Our bodies yearn for contact, and there is special power in contact with nonhuman animals, part of the meaning of which, Wright’s poem suggests, is that it helps overcome our sense of being alone as individuals or as a species in the world.46 Levertov’s poem “The Cat as Cat” addresses this relation to the familiar animal with laconic wit, the title proposing that the speaker will try to see her cat exactly as it is, though this also means just dropping the article, from the cat as species to a cat, the one the speaker has “on my bosom.” 47 The short lyric is full of such oppositions: the cat as sleeping and purring, as a creature of the home and “squirrel killer,” as animal and “fur-petalled chrysanthemum,” as physical creature and as “metaphor.” The cat is a pet and a wild animal. Its sleeping state is marked also

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by the “flex and reflex of claws, / gently pricking through sweater to skin,” an act that suggests both comfort and pain, the cat as pet and predator. The “tune” of the poem belongs to the cat—its purring and its identity—the narrator insists, though it is in the language of the speaker. The cat as cat comes into focus through these rhythms of perception and interaction, playfully suggested in the poem’s final words, addressed to the cat himself: “I-Thou, cat, I-Thou.” Borrowed from Martin Buber, the phrase “I-Thou” is about an understanding of self and other that is dialogic (as is demonstrated in the poem), but Buber developed his philosophy in thinking about how humans can come to know each other, overcoming the other’s otherness (“I-It”).48 Levertov is perhaps mocking the seriousness of her philosophical claims in the poem of coming to know her cat, but at the same time the two creatures of the poem are in a deep bond, with the speaker “looking too long in his pale, fond, / dilating, contracting eyes.” Especially in the context of Levertov’s many other poems about animals, the final line can also be read as evidence of the speaker coming to an unironic regard and respect for the life of the individual animal, of transcending her cat’s otherness. Her eyes, like those of the cat, “reject mirrors.” 49 My goal in this chapter has been to survey the ways poems can represent and think about animals as individual beings. I end with a brief discussion of elegies about animals, since they perhaps most forcefully acknowledge and honor lives of individual animals. Elegies for animals are interesting in part because they so clearly test and reveal the degree to which animals may be thought of as close to us, as worthy of honoring because they are a part of our community. At least since John Milton’s “Lycidas,” elegy has been marked by artifice—elegies are often not so much about sincere grief at the death of another person as they are an explicit way of displaying a commitment to a tradition of poetic convention, of poets acknowledging poets, recognizing that poets do much of the work of canonization. However, this implicit deal making (think of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”) cannot be a part of the animal elegy, since the individual being remembered and canonized is clearly not a part of the linguistic transaction. The grief that is a response to the death of a nonhuman animal has a special meaning—and in

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the case of a pet is also often surprising, its depth revealing finally how much the life of an animal can matter. We see these facts about animal elegy reflected in Wordsworth’s great elegiac ballad “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears. She seemed a thing that could not feel, The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force. She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees.50

This poem is not normally read as about an animal, of course. My point is that it easily can be read as about an animal, in part because the “she” of the poem, the mourned creature, is left anonymous, in striking contrast to the conventions of elegy.51 The poem is about the shock produced by the death of another being, and how nearly inexpressible the grief produced by this loss is. The first stanza sets up the bond between speaker and the beloved other while she was alive; the second stanza attempts to reveal the stark facts of her existence now, as a corpse, in the ground. It is relatively easy to see that the speaker is (or was) a child with a deep attachment to the other being, and who never considered the possibility of its death. That the child might be speaking of a beloved animal is, I think, entirely plausible, if not provable. For instance, the word “human” in the first stanza is normally read as referring to the speaker himself, the nature of his fears. But it might also be read as referring to the being he has no fears about. Especially for a child, the idea of the mortality of his or her first pet is absent or at least very different from the fear that other people (parents and siblings, say) might die. A companion animal is very much a being of the present moment, with whom a child will share mostly physical experiences. The fear or anticipation (that is, the meaning) of the death of a pet seems comparatively

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insignificant before the creature dies. That is part of why one’s grief at the actual death of a pet is so unexpected. It is only a dog. It should not have affected us this much. Moreover, the death of a pet is very often the first death we encounter, the first corpse we see, the first (and perhaps only) burial we do ourselves. That the speaker describes her as a “thing” in the third line has long puzzled readers, but it makes some sense if we read the poem as about a pet, whose status as animal makes it a thing to others, a mere animal body. In the poem, “thing” implies kind, a category of being somehow separate from that of the speaker, in terms of both mortality and classification. The second stanza too seems apt for describing how one discusses a dog in the past tense—that it has stopped moving, that it no longer plays. “Animal movement” is the prime realm of signification of the beloved animal, and in death it is this meaning and presence that are lost.52 A more explicit but similarly concise and devastating poem on the death of an animal is Philip Larkin’s “The Mower.” The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.53

The poem’s title alludes to Andrew Marvell’s short series of “Mower” poems, in which the poet poses as a naïve pastoral worker who meditates on love rather than mowing grass with a scythe. Robert Frost too

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has a poem about mowing (the sonnet “Mower”), though his speaker is actually meditating on the beauty of the labor of using a scythe. Larkin de-idealizes this erstwhile pastoral trope even further: the mower is now the machine, pushed along mindlessly by the speaker. It stalls twice as it fails to cut up the hedgehog (a creature about the size of a squirrel), suggesting that the mower’s pusher, the speaker (also a mower, of course), failed to notice the damage he was causing until he paused to inspect the machine. Being aware of the history of mowing poems helps one to see that the mower and mowing are symbolic of humanity’s changing relationship with the natural world. The machinery and the system it helps to create (mowed lawns, suburban houses, consumerism, etc.) reduce us to passive and unthinking mowers. We cut grass not knowing the worlds we alter and destroy. These things are implied by the poem, but what is explicit is the death of the single animal, the one the speaker has observed before and, like Dickinson’s feeder of birds, has reached out to. This is not a pet but still a kind of companion, a creature with whom we share some fundamental quality of being. The creature is barely known, but its death and the speaker’s responsibility for it create an absence, a sense of loss. What the poem makes explicit is that the death of an animal can be felt and articulated as equivalent to the loss of a human life. “Next morning, I got up and it did not” rings with the same existential truth as Wordsworth’s “No motion has she now, no force.” The next line is wonderfully paradoxical: “The first day after a death, the new absence / Is always the same” suggests at once the permanence of death and that on subsequent days, we forget. The moment is only kept forceful in the language of poetry. Elegies for dead animals are surprisingly numerous though not widely written about.54 I think this is in part because criticism is slightly embarrassed by these too-sincere and revealing poems. Grief over the death of pets is always an awkward topic—we know it is sincere and deeply felt but also feel that such sadness is somehow misplaced, since a pet is “only an animal.” Good poems about dead pets are hard to write: How does one make private grief public? How does one do so while avoiding cliché and sticky sentiment? Honoring a life and death always means finding the right words, good words, and in this, as with all poetry, it is

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easier to fail than succeed.55 The best I have read are by W. S. Merwin in his recent book The Shadow of Sirius. The title itself suggests that the entire book is marked by memories of dogs, that Merwin is looking back on his long life in part through the memory of the individual dogs who have marked portions of it. At the book’s center is a section of eleven poems, all of which are elegies of individual dogs. The final poem of this series, “Dream of Koa Returning,” speaks for itself, articulating a grief and acknowledging the life and meaning of the presence of the dog he names in the poem’s title. The poem creates a space in language where an animal and a human might really meet. Sitting on the steps of that cabin that I had always known with its porch and gray-painted floorboards I looked out to the river flowing beyond the big trees and all at once you were just behind me lying watching me as you did years ago and not stirring at all when I reached back slowly hoping to touch your long amber fur and there we stayed without moving listening to the river and I wondered whether it might be a dream whether you might be a dream whether we both were a dream in which neither of us moved56

5 OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

T

he structure of this book reflects my commitment to the idea that there is a strong correlation between how we categorize animals and how we write poetry about them. However, I have also argued all along that part of the power of poetry is its ability to resist preexisting structures of thought—to investigate, disintegrate, and refashion them. One of the tendencies of poetry, part of its DNA, is to copy and mutate, to build on convention and to be original by breaking from convention. Not surprisingly, then, there are many poems that do not fit my scheme, that foreground a mixing of categories rather than any single category. I am going to refer to these poems as hybrid, both because and in spite of the fact that in literary criticism this has become an overloaded term referring almost entirely to notions of cultural mixing.1 For Mikhail Bakhtin, hybridity undermines the monological within a particular social arena. For Homi K. Bhabha, hybridity is a salubrious part of the postcolonial landscape and involves the ultimately beneficial mixing of identities, discourses, and cultures.2 What often appears forgotten in the critical discourse of the hybrid, however, is that its origin is biological, referring to the crossbreeding of species.3 This origin reveals the wonderful ambiguity of the term, which I would like to recuperate for this chapter: that hybridity involves the

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crossing of seemingly natural boundaries, a process capable of reinvigorating lines or producing infertile or monstrous offspring. Hybrids are mongrels, half-breeds, crosses, mules, curs, and freaks, even as they are also new amalgamations and mosaics, strong and distinct new individuals. Within cultural studies the concept of hybridity is both embraced and contested because of this doubleness. It suggests a fruitful mixing that somehow allows for the possibility of keeping heterogeneous elements distinct, while also retaining a noxious essentialism in implying the existence of pure, original biological kinds. Thus hybrids can be both vital and degenerate, politically progressive and regressive. For Darwin, hybridity revealed something of the fundamental complexity and fluidity of the natural world itself. Hybrids show that species are not fixed and Platonic entities, always mating within their kind.4 The biological roots of hybridity thus suggest randomness and experimentation, fecundity as well as sterility, biological relatedness as well as distinctness, and it is this richness that I would like to explore in poetic representations of animal hybridity. I am interested primarily in the most (in)fertile of hybrids—crosses or crossings between animal and human. One could of course argue that all animal poems are a kind of hybrid, a gesture toward or co-optation of the animal into the human realm, but I will be looking here at those poems that most clearly foreground the idea of mixing itself, that represent a creaturely hybrid. Human interest in hybrids, in the mixing of human and nonhuman bodies, is evident in the earliest human art. Prehistoric cave paintings and sculptures include many representations of human-animal figures, both humans and animals drawn over and into one another and single representations that combine human and animal features. Such representations defy easy interpretation, but anthropologists suggest that early representations of hybrids reveal that art itself held the power of metamorphosis, and that human and animal did not yet exist as separate and distinct categories as they do in Christian understanding.5 This early version of the hybrid links the biological and the cultural, giving a glimpse into what animal studies might embrace as a kind of paradisiacal origin. Early poems in English, like Greek epic poems, are filled with

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hybrid creatures. Grendel and Chauntecleer, whom I examined in chapter 1, are both hybrids, imagined as simultaneously human and beast, for tragic and comedic effect, respectively. This explicit mixing, as I argue there, troubles simple allegorical readings: the animal does not merely stand in for the human but is a part of the human, and vice versa. An interest in representing hybridity brings with it an awareness of challenges to form and orthodoxy. Hybridity is not just about beings or identities that are in some way mixed; it is also about the struggle to imagine and represent them, how to bring them forth. Thus the study of hybridity in literary and cultural studies often has to do with the colonized or subaltern subject speaking through the language and cultural forms of her colonizing culture; a hybrid production is successful to the degree that an original subject retains something of her distinct individuality, while at the same time borrowing from and altering the language and form she has inherited. Within the realm of American poetics, hybridity often refers only to matters of form, stemming from the reductive idea that modern and contemporary poetry have long been divided into camps (narrative versus lyric, Language versus official, immanent versus transcendent, and avant-garde versus traditional), though there are those who try to hybridize these oppositions and see something exciting in attempting to do this. As Mark Wallace writes, “In literature, the hybrid distorts the normal unifying marks of many literary concepts. Genre, technique, tradition, or the identifying marks of a movement or school: in the hybrid, all these things are subject to mismatching and deforming.”6 Poetry about human and animal mixing presents similar challenges and rewards, though here it is never the lion who speaks but always the human speaking for the animal. I hope to show that in spite of the fact that in representations of animals the human always does the speaking, it is still possible to reveal something of the reality of the animals and the animal in the human, and that embracing hybridity can be an effective way of doing this. Marianne Moore is the great modern poet of hybridity, both in the sense of exploring and creating human-animal chimeras and in representing hybridity through her experiments in form. In her introductory note to her own quixotic endnotes in the Complete Poems, she refers to

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the collage technique of sprinkling her poems with quotations from eclectic texts as her “hybrid method of composition.” And alluding to the centrality of the animal in her poetry, she describes annotating her sources as possibly turning “one’s work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters.”7 In chapter 3 I examined some of Moore’s poems as exemplifying ideas of species identity, since in many of her poems this is the category through which she apprehends and represents animals. This tendency to think in categories also lets her explore the mixing of types. As I noted in my earlier discussion of her poems, Moore’s knowledge of animals, examples, and sources are themselves other cultural media (books, museums, movies, magazines, etc.), so she is aware that the animals she is viewing and representing are cultural products, several steps removed from the animals she is circling and moving toward in her poems. Her animals are thus often hybrids from the beginning—not actual animals, but human visions of them, the multiplicity or pliability of which allows her to experiment with notions of what animals are, why they seize our imagination and recreate themselves, mutate, or morph. There is no clear boundary in her work between poems that are about species and about hybrids, since her poems are, in her own wonderful phrase, “imaginary gardens with real toads.” However, we can see that some of her animal poems reveal the “real toads” while others are more concerned with the “imaginary gardens” they inhabit. These latter poems are more clearly hybrid in that they foreground the fabulous creatures that real animals can become in our cultural imaginations. My first hybrid specimen is “The Plumet Basilisk.” This long poem begins and ends with descriptive accounts of a lizard found in South and Central America, but the poem is in many ways about multiplicity rather than distinctiveness. While the poem attempts to describe this creature, its meandering account reveals something hybrid. That is, the animal is both a real creature and the creation of some preexisting human cultural need for fabulous reptiles. The word basilisk refers to a creature of medieval myth, a deadly and venomous serpent that could itself be a cross between bird, reptile, and man. The plumet basilisk was discovered much later in the New World and given the name “basilisk”

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(also its Latinate “scientific” nomenclature) because of its dragon-like appearance. The actual animal is thus newer to our awareness than our imaginings of it suggest it should be. The creature is invested with human meaning that makes it something fabulous and that hides its actual nature from us. The poem develops this meaning even as it includes many details of the actual lizard. The poem’s first stanza is a good example of its duality, its simultaneous modes of indirection and precision. In blazing driftwood the green keeps showing at the same place; as intermittently, the fire opal shows blue and green. In Costa Rica the true Chinese lizard face is found, of the amphibious falling dragon, the living firework.8

The poem’s nonlyrical (or encyclopedic) narrator begins by describing the basilisk’s luminous green color, though it takes a while to figure this out, since she gives other instances of this color’s elusiveness: it can be seen at a specific point of the flame produced by burning driftwood or in flecks in the normally red and yellow fire opal. This is a kind of green that, like the animal, is difficult to see but distinct and clear when it is seen. The poem’s second sentence involves several more imaginative leaps. We move from the animal’s color to a kind of geographical riddle, one that is also symbolic of the animal’s doubleness. The basilisk is found in Costa Rica and other parts of Central America but wears the “true” face of the “Chinese lizard”: that is, of the representations in Chinese art of dragons. The ambiguity of what is “true” here is central. The true face is both the actual face of the lizard and the actual face of Chinese dragons. This doubleness—that the creature has its own truth and one of the human imagination, and that this doubleness is distinctive of the creature itself—is the hybrid idea of the animal the poem explores. (The poem also mixes identical syllabic stanzas with a few mutant free-verse stanzas and a mutant with an extra line, or tail, about the animal’s tail.) The basilisk is a “living firework,” a “dragon,” “boatlike,” “god,” a

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“serpent dove,” “butterfly or bat,” “air plant,” “alligator,” “bird-reptile,” “interchangeably man and fish,” “fire eating into air,” and so on. It is the same as, but different from, “the Malay Dragon” and “the Tuatera,” lizards from other parts of the world, complex descriptions of which interrupt the description of the basilisk. In the second stanza one of the basilisk’s distinctive attributes—that it can run on water—is described as “he leaps and meets his / likeness,” which is an account both of the lizard jumping onto his reflection and of the poem’s central trope, of “likeness” as doubleness. The basilisk is a “king with king” in multiple ways: because he has a reflection on water, because his running on water makes him like Jesus Christ, and because this beast is sovereign: “He runs, he flies, he swims, to get to / his basilica.” His name has anointed him king, and the roots of the word “basilica” somehow link the strange power of dangerous animals and kings. Yet the basilisk is also king in the sense of being uniquely adapted, surviving by avoiding capture through its ability to spring across land and water. In another of the poem’s hybrid metaphors, the basilisk’s tail’s painted stripes, though seemingly painted “as by a Chinese brush,” suggest a musical “octave,” which becomes a cue for a long description of a jungle symphony that the poem’s hidden speaker imagines the basilisk hearing with delightful precision, presumably because of its oversized ears (which the narrator never directly describes). The poem celebrates this creature as magically superior to our prior imaginings of it yet only fully apprehended through art, so that its real character is hybrid. In perhaps the poem’s weirdest metaphor, the basilisk is “our Tower-of-London / jewel that the Spaniards failed to see,” suggesting both its rare beauty and that it is again linked with the sovereign and destructive power of human desire represented by the mythical basilisk. So too it is “innocent” and “gold-defending,” and in the poem, readily visible and quickly gone as it falls in the final line “into the sheath / which is the shattering sudden splash that marks his temporary loss.” Another version of animal-hybridity that Moore explores is the talking animal. A talking animal is always hybrid, of course, made partially human. It is a fairly common feature of children’s literature, animated films, and even novels, but, as I have noted before, surprisingly rare in

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serious poems about animals. The speaker of Moore’s poem “Melanchthon” (first published as “Black Earth”) is an elephant ruminating on what it means to be an elephant. The poem begins as though we are overhearing the speaker midlecture, addressing the animal directly and answering the question, What, exactly, are you? Openly, yes, with the naturalness of the hippopotamus or the alligator when it climbs out on the bank to experience the sun, I do these things which I do, which please no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am submerged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object in view is a renaissance.9

There is obvious comedy in a talking animal, at least initially. The particular comedy here is that the elephant speaker is highly articulate and philosophical as it tries to explain its essential nature. It is who it is because it does the things it does, an embodied view of existence that points to a fundamental similarity between human and animal. The poem’s elephant speaker submerges itself in mud: “Do away / with it and I am myself done away with,” which can mean that the elephant needs mud and water to survive the heat, that this is an activity that partially defines elephant behavior, and that the encrusted mud (its new surface) is now a part of the elephant. The poem here also poses the question of what defines being—learned or instinctive behavior, its actions or its body, culture or genetics. Being elephant is inhabiting “elephant-skin,” as the speaker says in the fifth stanza. The speaker spends most of the first half of the poem explaining that skin is both definitive and something that “I inhabit,” a covering for the self. The poem is also about the paradox that although this animal reveals so much about itself—it is

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large, inhabiting a lot of skin, and it “openly” does the things it does—it has even more of itself, its consciousness, to hide. The creature’s skin can also be read by others since it is “full of the history of power,” suggesting that the poem might be about race as well as animal hybridity. The poem is also about the speaker’s “renaissance,” about being reborn as an English speaker, rising out of the mud, and confronting the other that is not itself, the human: the being with “the wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made / to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear // that tree-trunk without / roots.” The hybrid here is a point of view simultaneously elephant and human,10 allowing for the fundamental question: “What / is powerful and what is not?” This begins as a question about what defines and drives the elephant—what makes it what it is. It quickly turns into a question of what can affect it. “My soul shall never // be cut into / by a wooden spear.” The question about power is in part about the symbolic meaning of the elephant as the strongest and largest of land animals, a beast whose strength humans have long admired, allegorized, and harnessed. But it is also a question about the elephant’s own ability to survive human predation. Its “feats of strength” are physical, but its “spiritual poise,” which is both elephant and human, is more mysterious, located both in its physical being and in something else. As a hybrid figure, the elephantspeaker of the poem both lacks (as elephant) and has (as ventriloquizing speaker) the ability to “shout / its own thoughts to itself like a shell.” In the end, the relation between elephant and human, or any two individual beings with consciousness (and the elephant has the largest brain of any land mammal, about four times the size of a human brain), is one of mutual ignorance and isolation, a struggle to read the other: “the I of each is to // the I of each / a kind of fretful speech / which sets a limit on itself.” The hybrid figure in the poem creates a meeting space, where we might see the “beautiful element of unreason” beneath the skin of both elephant and human. It perhaps goes without saying that the hybridity of the talking animal, or more precisely, of speaking as animal, is problematic and unstable (as we saw in the previous chapter in Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”).11 One might say too that this is in the nature

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of the hybrid. While the mostly lyric poetry I examined in the previous chapter depicts the human speaker approaching the individual animal, and even speaking to it, these lyric poems keep the boundary line between human and animal subject fairly clear. A poem with an animal as speaker obscures this line and crosses into usurpation and absurdity. I would argue that for these poems to become hybrid, they must foreground the trouble of the crossing, reminding us that speaking for an animal is an experiment in testing human-animal boundaries and not a slide into sentiment, amusement, or allegory. The Australian poet Les Murray, to whom I turn in a moment, calls his series of poems with animal (and other) speakers “translations,” and it is helpful to think of poems with animal speakers as an extreme form of translation—one doomed to fail, but still with the earnest belief, as Walter Benjamin says about translation between languages, in profound communicative kinship. For Benjamin, the successful translator needs to believe in the possibility of the intentionality of the language of the other, that there is some “pure language” that all languages have in common and that translating must in some way posit or imply. Benjamin was of course referring to translations of literary texts, not of animal being; however, his notion of translation as double, as altering the original even as it alters the translator, well describes the kind of hybridity produced by speaking as an animal. Speaking for or as an animal assumes the existence of some common intentionality in the world, that the consciousness produced by living in the world implies the possibility of communication within and between species. And while this seems pleasantly plausible when we speak to or for our companion animals, it seems something fantastical when it becomes poetry. Poetry of the speaking (or translated) animal can produce a hybrid space in which, as Benjamin writes, the poet’s own “language [is] powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. . . . It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed.”12 The desire to translate is, finally, an act of sympathetic imagination, which Percy Bysshe Shelley saw as one of the essential characteristics of poetry. Speaking as an animal can work if the speaker actually tries to meet the

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animal halfway, producing a language that defamiliarizes the human as it makes the strangeness of the animal seem familiar. The full title of Les Murray’s collection of speaking animal poems is “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” (a subsection of the book Translations from the Natural World, 1992). This collection’s forty poems feature nonhuman speakers, including eagles, dogs, cows, lyrebirds, kangaroos, horses, and elephants but also trees, DNA, air, and even puss. Collectively, the work echoes that of John Clare, giving voice to the complex identity of a formative landscape through careful observation of its other creatures (though not every poem reflects Australian fauna—for instance, “The Octave of Elephants”). Each poem is the presentation of a nonhuman being that has some distinct intentionality in the world and is clearly a part of that natural world. So too the poems warp standard English and deform the lyric, even as they experiment with conventional poetic form and are all still recognizably in English. Each is individually an example of hybridity, and collectively they insist that living creatures are distinct and interdependent. “Bats’ Ultrasound” is, as Murray calls it, the “ancestor” poem of the project (and the opening poem of “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” as it is reprinted in New Collected Poems).13 The poem is a swift rebuttal of Thomas Nagel’s too-famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” which posits that it is impossible to imagine the consciousness of another species, particularly one of an animal that has modes of sensory perception that humans lack.14 The poem has two stanzas of whimsical “objective” description that already suggest that knowing a bat involves mixing human and other. The bat lives “sleeping-bagged . . . / in rock-cleft or building.” Because “their whole face [is] one tufty crinkled ear,” they exist in sound, and the poem works to explain and approximate this sound: “Insect prey at the peak of our hearing / drone re to their detailing tee.” That is, the hum of insects in the night air is the high note “re” (the second note of an octave), above which is the pitch of the bat ultrasound. The poem then modulates into bat “language,” which like Whitman’s mockingbird voice, is italicized.

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ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh? O’er our ur-area (our era aye ere your raw row) we air our array, err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery our eerie ü our ray, our arrow. A rare ear, our aery Yahwey.

Though all the words here are English (with the exception of ü, which refers to bat ultrasound, as well as, perhaps, the word you), together the strong mix of vowel sounds and a few nonstopped consonants produce a theremin-like jumble of noise, an analogy of the echolocating sounds emitted by bats. In English the bat-speaker is describing how echolocation works while also noting that the bats’ habitat was their “ur-area” before the “raw row” of humans. This clever stanza is simultaneously human and bat, language and a rough approximation of bat music, enacting hybridity as literally as possible. Just as a poem’s language can aim simultaneously for meaning and beauty, the bat ultrasound is here the bat arrow, tracking down insects, and music of praise for the “rare ear, our aery Yahwey.” As Helen Lambert has argued, Murray’s poem “Lyrebird” (from “Presence”) also foregrounds animal song so that “the idea of sensible meaning slips away.”15 As with “Bats,” the speaker of the poem shifts from external observer (“chinks in a quaff display him or her, dancing in mating time, or out”) to first-person bird: “I mew catbird, I saw crosscut, I howl she-dingo . . . I ring dim. / I alter nothing. Real to real only I sing.”16 The lyrebird’s imitation of sounds is precise—“real to real”—but it is also just a recording (as on reel-to-reel tape), a representation like the poem itself, which is chock-full of onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhyming of all kinds, and puns. By the end of this thirteen-line poem (a lying sonnet?), “it is unclear who is mimicking whom,” as Lambert notes.17 The lyrebird invokes the muse of poetry and the poet as liar, since it is a remarkable mimic, perfectly reproducing the sounds of other animals and humans. The lyrebird is hybrid, at once natural and human, a natural

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and technological marvel, and the mimicking poem thus does not have to go far to speak as this animal. Murray’s poem “Raven, Sotto Voce” also features a bird-speaker who ponders the strange communication of humans in the animal world. The raven is suddenly quiet (sotto voce) as it becomes aware of human presence and then speaks through this silence.18 The “stalk” before it is “so unlike every other flight, or walk . . . / it’s out of whack / with all lives around.” The stalk is a human or human effigy, a scarecrow, perhaps, standing in for a human. A scarecrow is intended to symbolize a fearful human presence to other animals, and this raven notes how “out of whack” this human is: “Its head has eyes in the neck, in the back.” It is a “prime of lies” that “stills normal sound,” suggesting too that the stalk might be a human stalker, a hunter carrying a stick or gun, causing a ripple of silence to go through the life around it. The fear produced by this disturbing human presence “makes loosely shared flesh speak / in flashed silence, in whirrs.” So the raven, a normally loud and vocal bird,19 understands silence as meaning, even as the bird speaks softly to itself in the poem. “The first pan-warmblood talk” is both the silence and the Benjaminian notion of an ur-language that signals understanding between animals as well as human kinship with animals. The poem presents the human as disrupting this kinship and normal animal communication, a predator whose forms of communication are awry even as the implied critique of the human in the poem suggests sympathy for it and for animals in general. Both of Murray’s bird poems are hybrid in that we are never allowed to forget that the speaker is really human (for one thing, both poems foreground prosody), even as they appear to capture not just characteristics of the bird species but also of how they might think.20 Most of Murray’s translations represent distinct species attributes and so are in that sense “species” poems, although poems representing migration, fruit, clay, DNA, puss, and the animal perspective on the birth of Christ (in “Animal Nativity”) suggest Murray’s interest in testing and undermining categories of being. The poems “Pigs” and “The Cows on Killing Day” present animal speakers becoming aware of their

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impending slaughter.21 Like several of the “Translations,” the speaker of these poems is plural: “us” pigs and “all me” cows. The language in both poems is simultaneously harsh and beautiful, ungrammatical and powerful. As in Barbara Gowdy’s novel The White Bone, Murray tries to imagine and articulate the shared terror of animals as they face impending death, allowing his own language to become strange rather than cloying. The poems are hybrid too in that they express mostly somatic experience linguistically. The cows speak in the present tense: “Teats all tingling still / from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths.” The pigs in the slaughterhouse line recall experience before the “sore cement” and the “pole that lightning’s tied to.” They were happy and powerful: “We ate crisp. / We nosed up good rank in the tunneled bush. / Us all fuckers then.” They can see down the line, hear what is coming. Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then. Not the terrible body-cutting screams up ahead. The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling here in no place with our heads on upside down.

It does not seem surprising that pigs in a slaughterhouse would have some understanding of what is happening, that those ahead of them are having their throats slit as they are hung by their feet, that their screams are of terror, and that knowledge of impending death leads, as it does for humans, to an instantaneous memory of aspects of life that make it valuable. For the cows too the plurality of the speaking voice suggests that the herd knows what is happening to the others, that the speaker is thus simultaneously dead and alive. A stick goes out from the human and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear. Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

As Coetzee argues in The Lives of Animals, what goes on in slaughterhouses is so horrific that we have mostly sealed it off from our awareness

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and normalized it as an abstraction (the livestock industry) to make it seem unproblematic. By imagining himself as an animal, Murray is able in these poems to give us some sense of the experience of slaughter from the animal perspective. Because the trope of the speaking animal is so common and so often associated with childish anthropomorphism, it is worth examining one more speaking-animal poem: A. R. Ammons’s “Turning,” whose ambiguously animal speaker addresses a lion who is in the process of killing it. The poem presents a version of hybridity in creating an artful human expression of animal being, and also in suggesting that predation (as in James Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals”) involves a fusion of two beings into one. Indeed, we can never be sure who the speaker is. It is likely an animal, perhaps a gazelle or an ostrich, who turns from a waterhole to see a lioness stalking it. But the poem invites us to imagine the speaker as human as well, since its identity is never made clear, and the poem’s intensely metaphoric language foregrounds human concepts of beauty, language, artfulness, and hunting. This is a poem that literally romanticizes the act of predation, representing it as a kind of sexual encounter. She came to my chest and we fell into the waterhole. . . . ............ never have I seen more beauty than is in this evening Her paw touched my lips as if she loved me passionate and loud so I said Loose lioness and her lips took the words from my throat her warm tongue flicking the living flutter of my being So I fumbled about in the darkness for my wings and the grass looked all around at the evening 22

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We often think of predation as the epitome of animality—ruthless, thoughtless, and amoral—and this horrifies and fascinates us. Representing this moment instead as one of beauty and love can suggest a celebration of the natural, of this fundamental aspect of the natural world, in which all organisms survive by consuming others. Or it might suggest the modernist idealization of hunting that I discussed in chapter 2. To me it suggests something of the paradox of the speaking animal, that this most extreme form of anthropomorphism is both a desire to bridge the gap between animal and human and an awareness that this form of becoming animal is impossible and absurd. The poem thus contains a pointed irony in the lioness taking the words from the speaker’s throat and a broader satire of our desire to romanticize the animal. The hybridity I have been exploring in this chapter hinges on the idea that language is both a barrier in coming to know and represent the animal and poetry’s primary asset. A solution to this paradox is, as we have seen, to create an explicitly artificial space, an imagined hybridity, where common ground between human and animal might be explored. Giving animals language, speaking as one of them, is one strategy. Rather than having the animal be the speaker of the poem, however, Pattiann Rogers imagines that an animal might be taught to speak in “Teaching a Sea Turtle Suddenly Given the Power of Language, I Begin by Saying.” The poem is in the second-person, a direct address to the unspecific sea turtle, who is hybrid in understanding English and in being both human (since we are the actual readers) and turtle (since readers are asked to imagine themselves as turtle). The speaker’s intent is seemingly benign, to give the turtle names for “everything you didn’t know / you knew before your voice.”23 Each new word or phrase, the speaker insists, is “bringing a salt-pulsing neuron simultaneously / into existence,” thus giving the turtle something substantial, new understanding and a change in its brain. This will bring about the “creation of yourself,” a new self-awareness, but also the creation of a new hybrid creature, a talking turtle. So the turtle’s environment, “this green translucent continuance / through which you turn and function, rolling and twisting / . . . is called “The Great Sea.” In the second stanza, the speaker reveals that she is gently touching the turtle, “tracing all the boundaries

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of that which is called ‘self,’ ” as though to signal to the turtle that it is being spoken to and that selfhood is located in the animal body. The speaker insists on language as rooted in the physical, as though language revealed objective facts about the turtle and its world, even as that language alters the turtle. The speaker is also explicit about the paradox of imposing a human language, and probably a human conception of language, onto the turtle and therefore doing something potentially not benign. She makes the turtle “say ‘silence’ and listen. / Say ‘silence,’ ” thereby destroying the turtle’s silence. In making the turtle know, she is teaching it also to “say ‘compelled’, / say ‘driven,’ say ‘recognition of compulsion.’ ” In the fourth stanza she describes the sea current and instinct, as well as the effect of her commands, another form of compulsion, which she imagines can actually give the turtle the knowledge she has of language and the turtle and, by making it aware, a degree of free will. She describes the turtle’s life cycle, which it has already experienced and so of course already “knows.” In the fifth stanza her language becomes more explicitly metaphoric, suggesting that the speaker is trying to communicate with the turtle because it has seized her imagination. Say “birth by the nearest silver egg buried in the sky.” Say “invisible glass turtles pulling up the black beaches above, leaving in the night the scattered glow of their daring eggs.” Say “fancy.”

These lines reveal something of the mystery and beauty of the turtle; they are about its inexplicable knowledge of migration and its instinct for life. However, these lines are also comic, since the increasingly metaphoric and fantastic images created by language here are more or less inexplicable even to human readers and probably to the speaker herself. It is a language made strange by imagining the animal as human, the speaker as animal. The poem is a love song to the turtle or perhaps the idea of the turtle, a desire to create some new version of it that will understand human admiration of it and, implicitly, human power over it.

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There are also poems that represent hybridity not as an implied overlap of human and animal but as an explicit combination of them, as Kafka has done in several stories, including “The Metamorphosis” (man turned to insect) and “Report to the Academy” (ape turned to human). This hybridity is about crossing over and reporting from the other side rather than overlap. James Dickey’s well-known poem “The Sheep Child” imagines this doubleness with two speakers—a first-person human narrating about his childhood and a sheep child who speaks from within a bottle of formaldehyde in an Atlanta museum. This transgressive poem invites readers to think of the sheep child as both fantastical and possibly real, a legend “farm boys wild to couple / With anything” tell each other to “keep themselves off / Animals.”24 It is a story the narrator has “heard from somebody.” It goes without saying that dead infants cannot speak, let alone a sheep child “pickled in alcohol,” so the italicized section of the poem in which the preserved creature speaks after death, remembering his one day of life, is a wild imagining indeed. And yet many boys are wild with sexual desire, and some boys and men have had sex with farm animals, a reminder that the human body is animal and acts on desires as other animals do. This is the power of the hybrid myth that the poet-narrator remembers and why he dares to make it speak now in the poem. The sheep child’s monologue gives a somewhat explicit account of the sexual encounter and his own birth. The poem’s strongest lines are about the creature’s brief life, an explicit representation of the human-animal hybrid. I woke, dying In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need, And the hill wind stirred in my wool, My hoof and my hand clasped each other, I ate my one meal

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Of milk, and died Staring.

This is a modern version of classical myth, which represents hybrids of god, man, and animal, a glimpse of the “more than human.” This virtually embodied hybrid speaks from a simultaneously debased and idealized perspective, briefly rendering a vision of human being prior to civilization, language, or some other fall from a more natural condition. Its perspective is also that of the pastoral (of which the poem is also a satire), offering a brief but impossible harmony of human and animal. Like Robinson Jeffers and Ted Hughes, Dickey is no doubt inviting readers to recognize and even embrace the animal in us, our connection to the natural world, which is made explicit in the poem’s satiric final moralizing about how the legend of the sheep child keeps most boys safely masturbating while they wait for marriage and then “raise their kind.” In “The Sheep Child” Dickey revels in the grotesqueness of the human-animal hybrid. The sheep child is a monster, a horrifyingly unnatural creature. The poem traffics in the shock value of bestiality, of imagining and detailing an actual crossing of human and animal, and human to animal. The poem poses the question of how this crossing can be at once desired (physically by the father of the sheep child, and figuratively by the human narrator, who embraces the memory of the story) and disgusting and debasing, flesh in a bottle. This hybrid forces us to confront what is discomforting about the human-animal divide. Something about the animal—the body and the physical world—disgusts and troubles us. We escape, control, and destroy it while some other part of us loves and desires it, recognizes the animal as us. Dickey’s poem makes us fully aware that the idea of the human depends upon a continual suppression of our animality, and that the concept of the animal is a receptacle for those parts of us that disgust. Dickey’s wonderful poem “For the Last Wolverine” imagines hybridity from the perspective of Native American myth about the wild animal. The poem begins with the announcement that “they will soon be down / To one,” that the endangered wolverine, like all species headed

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toward extinction, must inevitably and briefly have a single final survivor.25 The narrator indulges his own imagination as well as the hypothetical future animal: “Let him eat the last red meal of the condemned,” the heart of an elk, which will cause an idea to “stream into his gnawing head,” just as the idea has flowed into the speaker’s. The last wolverine, Dickey joyfully and angrily elaborates in his vision of the wolverine apocalypse, will “walk / Out into the open,” climb to the top of a “single spruce tree,” where it will have a vision of heaven and then mate “to the death” with “the New World’s last eagle.” Out of this mating comes “something gigantic legendary,” an avenging winged wolverine that will wage “holy war against / Screaming railroad crews” and resist human domination of the natural world. Interestingly, the wolverine figures prominently in Claude LeviStrauss’s The Savage Mind, his examination of the fundamental structures of human classification. Levi-Strauss argues that the wolverine is for the Hidatsa people of North Dakota the mythical origin of the knowledge of how to hunt eagles, which involves the human hunter putting himself in a trap, so that he may catch the eagle with his bare hands when it comes to investigate the bait. The wolverine is the source of this knowledge, Levi-Strauss surmises, because it is notorious throughout aboriginal cultures for being a raider, rather than a victim, of human traps. The wolverine, like the eagle hunter in the trap, “knows how to  deal with this contradictory situation” of being both “hunter and hunted.”26 The wolverine is still more interesting to Levi-Strauss because it is an elusive animal that is nonetheless widely featured in native myth and so is a good example of the “historical and geographical problems, as well as semantic and structural ones . . . related to the exact identification of an animal which fulfills a mythical function: Gulo luscus.”27 The wolverine is unknowable and the possessor of extraordinary knowledge, real and unreal, an anachronism known and named by Western science. For writers like Dickey and Levi-Strauss, the wolverine is also hybrid, possessing human, animal, and even celestial knowledge, which makes it powerful in native understanding. This is presumably also what makes it interesting for Dickey, who may well have read Levi-Strauss’s account.28 Dickey also suggests this intrinsic hybridity by referring to

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the original wolverine in the poem as “skunk-bear,” an animal that is not one thing but several, its multiplicity allowing it to morph into other forms but ironically not saving it from extinction. For Dickey, imagining the multihybrid (wolverine-elk-eagle) is liberating, a way of accessing and representing the more than human, and an announcement of allegiance with wild animals, a becoming fierce. Dickey’s poem ends by acknowledging that the last wolverine will ultimately be “small, filthy, unwinged” and “will soon be crouching // Alone.” The poem is also explicitly about the poet co-opting the wolverine and the hybrid versions he creates: “The timid poem needs // The mindless explosion of your rage.”29 The idea of a wolverine fighting to the last (an aspect of its behavior and reputation), the desire that the poet has created out of hybrid notions of animal “to eat / The world, and not to be driven off it,” is the need of the poet to create, to resist and write against death. The poet and the poem are the “blind swallowing thing” as much as the animal, and the poem forcefully represents the idea that artistic creation is akin to the animal instinct to resist death. “I take you as you are // and make of you what I will.” This is also explicitly self-serving, of course, since aspects of civilization that make poetry possible are also those that build roads, railways, and even steel traps. This is yet another way in which the poem is hybrid, serving animal and human, insisting contradictorily that both are primary. Probably the best-known modern American poem that depicts a human becoming animal is Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear.” The poem recounts the experience of a person hunting and then seemingly becoming a bear. It is told in the first person, though the identity of the speaker remains indeterminate, in spite of the detail recounted in the story. The setting of the story and the hunt it relates suggest that the speaker is Inuit—he hunts a bear in the tundra over a period of many days, using a deadly bait made from whale blubber and a wolf’s rib made “sharp at both ends.”30 Yet the language of the poem is formal, grammatical, and precise, with no obvious gesture to signal that it is in some sense a translation from Inuit culture. The initial strangeness in the mode of telling is that its present tense suggests repeated rather than immediate action, particularly in the first section.

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In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close and see it is lung-colored and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

That the story the poem tells might be something that happens more than once is contradicted by the end of the poem, in which the speaker appears to have been dramatically altered by the experience the poem describes. This disorienting of reader and speaker marks the cultural otherness of the speaker, that he is in some sense foreign to the language and form of the poem, and intensifies the transformation that his story describes. The speaker’s hunting of the bear is ingenious and slow, relying on the hunter’s intelligence and patience. The bear (presumably a polar bear, though it is also unidentified) is “stabbed twice from within” by the wolf rib it has unwittingly eaten, and the hunter tracks the bear by following and eating its bloody scat. After seven days of tracking the bear, “living now on bear blood alone,” the hunter finally comes upon the dead creature, eats a portion of “his thigh,” cuts the bear open “down his whole length,” and wraps himself in the carcass for warmth and shelter as he sleeps. The full power and meaning of the poem come from the fact that the story of the hunt is told twice, in the first four sections from the perspective of the hunter, and in the next two from the perspective of the bear as seen by the hunter in a dream he has while asleep in the bear. Both accounts are rooted in the physical details of each experience, giving a sense of the hunt’s necessity and inevitability, even though the bear’s account is framed as a dream. The human speaker must hunt, and the bear must try to escape and yet die. The two accounts are thus radically different—the human is the driving force of the hunt, and the bear has little idea of what is happening except that it is bleeding from inside— and yet they are also oddly similar, linked by the idea that the speaker

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of both stories is the same. The poem itself gives no initial reason to judge the hunter; like the ancient mariner, he does what he does seemingly without forethought. However, the poem gives a powerful account of the bear’s awareness of its own death. Until one day I totter and fall— fall on this stomach that has tried so hard to keep up, to digest the blood as it leaked in, to break up and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze blows over me, blows off the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood and rotted stomach and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear, blows across my sore, lolled tongue a song or screech, until I think I must rise up and dance. And I lie still.

The poem presents a seemingly plausible account of becoming bear. The “I” who subsequently “thinks” he awakens should be the hunter, but it could be the hunter dreaming as bear, or the bear, or some new hybrid version of the two. Like the ancient mariner, he appears doomed to wander after his killing of the creature. And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me the next groaned out, the next, the next, the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway,

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was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

The human has been made bear by eating its shit and blood, taking the excremental animal into himself, even as he has also gone inside the animal. The poem works to obscure and invert boundaries—of human and animal, inside and outside, sustenance and excrement, and transcendence and abjection. The animal may be hunted because he is not human, but this hunt comes at extraordinary cost to both. Interestingly, the poem dramatizes a crucial aspect of actual Inuit belief—that in eating other animals, one also ingests their souls. This belief, especially as dramatized in the poem, contrasts sharply with the common American understanding of hunting and eating animals, in which the animal is simply meat, with life, soul, consciousness, and shit left out.31 Poetry here is the process of articulating this profound link to the animal, creating a clearly human voice that might yet speak for the abject condition of the animal as food.32 Human-animal hybridity in the examples I have surveyed thus far has been about representing the animal as human and the human as animal. Imagining hybridity allows writers to look into the evolutionary and cultural histories of our relationships with animals. It is also a way of acknowledging that the problems of addressing and representing the animal are so intractable that solutions cannot be sincere or unmediated, because the animal as animal will always be outside the realm of human representation. However, animals, and the idea of the animal, are so central to our existence that they need representing and exploring. Thus the idea of human-animal hybridity and representations of hybridity have also become a means of thinking about problems of form, especially the relationship between language, originality, intentionality, and identity. There are many poems in which human-animal hybridity is a means of exploring the very function and purpose of poetry and the boundaries and problems of language. This flips the problem of representing the animal in poetry on its head: instead of using poetry to investigate the animal, poets use the animal (and hybrid versions of it) to investigate the meaning and power of poetry. Such poetry recognizes

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that the category of the human is in large part defined by our language, and that we cannot escape its bounds to imagine beyond the human. We can posit and identify nonhuman languages, but we cannot speak them or use them to represent ourselves or other animals. James Wright’s “The Morality of Poetry” is an important example of how thinking about poetry as an art form that roots around in the paradoxes of language can also lead to the question of the animal. This gorgeous poem presents itself as a romantic lyric in the vein of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” or Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with the poet- speaker meditating on the sea before him, wondering about the purpose and origins of poetry. I stood above the sown and generous sea Late in the day, to muse about your words: Your human images come to pray for hands To wipe their vision clear, your human voice Flinging the poem forward into sound. Below me, roaring elegies to birds, Intricate, cold, the waters crawled the sands, Heaving and groaning, casting up a tree, A shell, a can to clamber over the ground: Slow celebration, cluttering ripple on wave.33

The speaker is addressing other poets (especially Whitman), the sea, and language itself. There is a powerful tension in this opening stanza between the too-human voice removed from the physical world of the sea and gulls (ineffectually flinging words “forward into sound,” or uselessly into the ocean) and yet taking in the flotsam of the world to produce something ordered and meaningful. The poem’s formality, expressed in its rhyming and insistently iambic lines, and the epigram from Whitman signal that the question the speaker addresses is ancient and fundamental, “dithyrambic,” as the speaker says at the end. Where do poetic images come from? the speaker asks. What relation do these words, any words, have to the world? Can individual consciousness summon and control the words and images that come to it, or does the sea, the world

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itself, drive them onto the shores of awareness? The repetition of “human” in the opening lines suggest that human consciousness is isolated, remote, and different from the world it inhabits: that the sea is capable of “roaring elegies to birds” but not to poets. But the poem presents the speaker as moving from this “human” isolation toward something more “Dionysian,” a breakthrough toward language that connects to the world or awareness without language, truer to the world and thus better (hence the sardonic title of the poem). And this progress comes through seeing “a hundred gulls,” and from them “a single naked gull” that “shadows a depth in heaven for the eye.” It is these living bodies of birds, and the single one that rises above them, that interrupts his song and then moves it forward. “Gulls ensnare me here,” the speaker says, undermining his “cold lucidity of heart” and his desire to map out the “careful rules of song.” The animal here is of course a symbol, a word, a dead image that comes from previous poems (particularly Whitman’s mockingbird); but it is also the opposite of all these things, the kind of life that the poet and the poem yearn for but cannot represent or access directly, the poet’s experience of the bird. The bird has no voice in the poem, and the speaker cannot become the bird, yet the bird manages to signal to the speaker the failure of his ambitions. Openly she soars, A miracle out of all gray sounds, the moon, Deepening and rifting swell and formal sky. Woman or bird, she plumes the ashening sound, Flaunting to nothingness the rules I made. ................................. I let all measures die. My voice is gone.

The paradox here is that the speaker yearns for a voice like that of the bird, and its seemingly direct relationship with the physical world, but knows he cannot have it. The animal takes away his voice, though he actually keeps speaking. And yet his poem, his desire for poetry, has been altered by his encounter with the gull, producing a kind of

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“mindless dance” that includes “joy,” a far different state from the one the speaker begins the poem in. This is a bare hybridity, 34 a desire for an animal voice that poetry cannot actually have but can figure and approach.35 James Wright moved from poems like those of Wallace Stevens in their complexity and formality to free-verse poems of disorienting simplicity, which invoke and then reject or disrupt patterns of form, narrative, and naturalism. This change occurs in his third book of poems, The Branch Will Not Break. Many of the poems in this book also figure animals, often as suddenly intruding on and altering consciousness. These poems suggest hybridity in that their speakers see animals as full of some crucial meaning inaccessible to language and thus the poet, but also as plain evidence of the kind of obscure meaning that poetry longs for. These poems also signal Wright’s (and modern poetry’s) ambivalence toward tradition and poetic form. He is suspicious of poetry’s claim to be a special language with some ability to access and reveal truthful experience. This suspicion focuses on the idea of the lyrical voice, which implies a speaking subject with an awareness of the world and an ability to deploy language to investigate and make sense of it. The ideal lyric speaker is in a sense supremely human, a creature controlling and controlled by language and thus reflective of how we have defined ourselves to be different from animals. This self is disconnected from the body and is a master of the universe of language. Wright’s pastoral surrealism disrupts this idea of the lyrical subject without actually getting rid of it, implying that the meaning of poetry comes not from some all-powerful human self but from something stranger—the interrelation of language and the world. Here, for instance, is probably the most famous poem of Branch, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house,

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The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.36

Until its final line, the poem is almost a parody of lyric spontaneity—a speaker-poet in the tradition of Wordsworth and Frost, who defines himself through a precise and detailed perception of his surroundings in the moment, presumably to find some solace and discover the vitality of his imagination. Or like Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” he appears to construct some kind of imaginative unity, a sense of place, through a full attention to his various senses. With these invocations and conventions, the last line of the poem comes as a shock—how can such small presences produce the dramatic conclusion that he has “wasted” his life? This question has been answered in many ways by readers and critics, but I would like to suggest that it has something to do with the figuring of animals that occupies nearly every line of the poem. The world that impinges on him in this lyric moment, that is carefully set up in the poem’s linguistic dance, is one of animals always in the background. These animals do not (as in “Blessing”) have any interest in the speaker or the human world in general. They are the world, living as they do. They are an expression of fullness and meaning, of living, that signals a human failing. To be human in this poem, or at least to be the first-person speaker of a poem, is to live in language, in a search for meaning. The animals have a home and know where to be. They produce waste without apparently feeling the need to produce, and thus without being aware of the failure to produce (meaning), to have “wasted my life.” The hybridity of this poem, like that of many other poems in Wright’s book, 37 is in the idea that the speaker’s longed-for meaning lies in a space that includes animal

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presence, though paradoxically it cannot be found in the words of the speaker himself. The hybridity figured in Wright’s poems includes the complexity of form, at once lyric and not lyric, poetry and not poetry. The presence of this hybridity suggests that there is no one way to break out of the human traps of the past into something new, but that, as Jacques Derrida has also suggested, making sense of the animal as a sign (“that therefore I am”) can be a newer and truer avenue open to poetry. Similarly, Cary Wolfe has argued that for contemporary critical theory, “the power and importance of the animal is almost always its pull toward a multiplicity that operates to unseat the singularities and essentialisms of identity that were proper to the subject of humanism.”38 We can see this hybridity as an attempt to deconstruct humanism in other contemporary American poets as well, many influenced by Wright and other experimental poets of the 1950s and ’60s, who see themselves resisting what Charles Bernstein calls “Official Verse Culture.”39 Robert Creeley’s poem “The Animal” is paradigmatic of this hybridity, almost a manifesto for it. Shaking the head from side to side, arms moving, hanging as the sign of pride, mouth wide open to eat the red meat in the jungle, in the heat. But I am not animal, move, discontinuous, on

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two remote feet. Then it spoke, then hair grew, and eyes, and I forgot myself—oh no, oh not (they say) this like an animal he eats, and looks like an animal at us. It spoke. Who said it could not, who did not know.40

In the first stanza the animal is an object studied and defined, its own anatomy (“the head”) also in a sense dismembered, a categorized component rather than part of a unified self. This is what it means, from a behaviorist standpoint, to be animal. The animal is primitive, fundamental, and its bodily signs “mean” something of basic behavior and survival. The “I” of the third stanza is perhaps the normal human speaker of poems, not like this other creature, who is both human (with arms hanging) and not, since it does not speak. Being able to say “I” defines the not animal. Yet the animal defined in the poem is real—a creature out of the prehistoric past, our evolutionary ancestor—and a trope for the kind of human we and the speaker have become (the speaker also stands, eats, is represented, and may be “the animal” of the

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whole poem). The poem presents both an abstraction of the animal and a comic portrait of an individual, a human being momentarily seen as animal, a dumb body, by “they,” human outsiders. Thus human and animal are both “discontinuous,” evolutionarily different from what has come before, and individuals separate from the species. The idea of hybridity in the poem is again one of simultaneously being human and animal and of the impossibility of such a state, which points to, without revealing, something concocted and not right about the entire human project. Hybridity is thus necessarily abstract—a figment of our language and imaginative abilities—even as it is something biological, since we are also animals who have evolved in the natural world, just like all other organisms. So too poetry is a way of representing and forgetting the self, a process of constructing the self and recognizing it as other. These effects are heightened by the poem’s short free-verse stanzas and emphatic enjambments, signaling arbitrariness, ambiguity, and minimalism (the poem’s form echoes William Carlos Williams and mocks him). The long thin shape of the poem is also an abstraction of the human silhouette. The poem’s wonderful last sentence describes human as animal, or animal as human, and is a question to readers about the nature of animality. Who are we to say that the animal cannot speak, since we cannot know? But of course we do know, since we are speaking the poem. Jorie Graham’s poem “History” begins in a seemingly direct encounter with animals and becomes about exploring the complexity of this experience to such a degree that it turns inside out, reveling in the problem of understanding and representation rather than in the complexity of the animal. The first verse paragraph of this long poem presents the beginning of an experience marked by black storks descending out of the sky and the interruption of some undescribed perception that preceded it. So that I had to look up just now to see them sinking—black storks— sky disappearing as they ease down, each body like a prey the wings have seized . . .

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Something that was a whole story once, unparaphrased by shadow.41

The speaker of the poem is aware that the arrival of the birds signals some seemingly complete meaning, a “whole story” or “whole cloth” either of the birds themselves, their history, or of something symbolic. The “many black lowerings” of the birds (and her thoughts and words) signify “knowledge,” something “absolutely true.” The birds have come to the speaker and revealed themselves. This is a revelation, but the speaker does not know what is revealed. “Perhaps as they hang on hang on it is the afternoon? / Voice of what. Seems to say what.” The black storks are symbols of death and birth, part of a larger world, like the frozen river that the speaker is next to, in which everything is “doubled”: present and past, the living and the dead, the above water and underwater, and the above ground and underground. In this deep awareness of the complexity of being, the speaker can only speak of “the creature, the x” (italics in original), which is “me notched into place here,” as well as every other creature in and along the river. The x is unnarratable—there is no word for this sameness of being in her and the storks and the other animals, only the “being here and then the feeling of being.” The poem’s drive is toward an epiphany of shared animal being, pushing beyond language into something irreducible and fundamental. Everything has its moment. The x gnaws on its bone. When it’s time it will know. Some part of it bleats, some part of it is the front, has a face.

But this “x” turns out not to be creaturely but something more disturbing and unknowable. The knowledge that the speaker is driven toward is not of animal being but something far more abstract and dispersed: physical and historical forces that, like the water still flowing under the frozen river, push the world and its particles (x) forward. So “x is on a

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chain” and is the “sounds now of monks / copying the texts out.” X is part of a chain, tied to a chain, and itself a chain. It is “the gnawing now Europe burning.” “Even this favorite beast,” the speaker realizes, is the “gleaming chain.” The animal epiphany the speaker expects, the sense that seeing or being animal reveals some connection that exists prior to language, becomes an awareness instead of a deeper linking to nature and history’s brutal determinism, what she refers to at the end of the poem as the world’s fate, connected with death, ice, and darkness rather than light. This knowledge comes to the speaker not from close observation of the animal but through language itself, in a series of associations prompted by the processes of perception, thought, and writing that produce poetry. Susan Stewart’s poem “The Owl” makes a similar link between animal encounter and an essential process of thinking through language, but her poem begins more self-reflexively with the thoughts that produce poetry and ends in animal. The first couplet of the poem is “I thought somehow a piece of cloth was tossed / into the night, a piece of cloth that flew.” 42 This may reflect the glimpse of an owl or just the imagining of one. In either case, the incipient moment is not one of animal encounter but one of supposed human action—human-made cloth, tossed by a person or by the wind, which the speaker identifies by finding the right words. Perception produces language and vice versa; poetry produces the belief that perception is only made real by being articulated precisely. The poem is self-reflexive about its own creation, about a dark, nagging idea, which is the need to search for an origin for the sudden awareness of the cloth, seen through a window on a winter night. The speaker comes to realize that this image is not produced by “human hand” or “god.” It is something other, perhaps animal, but it is also something the speaker instructs her readers to look up and read about and “the kind / of thing astronomers // look down to write in books.” Ultimately, however, the speaker names this presence, and the poem, “the owl,” “the name that, like a key, locked out the dark.” The title refers to something other that escapes language, the actual bird that the speaker might or might not have seen.

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And still I thought a piece of cloth had flown outside my window, or human hands had freed a wing, or churning gods revealed themselves, or, great news, a northern owl, a snowy owl, descended.

The poem suggests that the animal, the hope for and the idea of it, are all linked, a longed-for meaning that can only occur in the poem itself. For other poets, human-animal hybridity as a signifier of multiplicity and unknowability becomes something absurd. Animals matter, and the problem of the boundary between human and animal is fundamental but also something we cannot get past. What poetry does allow, however, is play and exploration. In the poetry of Charles Simic, for instance, we are far from allegory and much closer to surrealism’s idea that in playful association truth might make an appearance. Hybridity here is gestural and funny. His poem “Animal Acts” comically lists, in a series of sentence fragments, animals who appear to be in a freak show or circus, doing miraculously human feats. The poem’s examples of animal acts move swiftly from the faintly plausible and amusing—“A bear who eats with a silver spoon. / Two apes adept at grave-digging”— to the absurd: “Rats who do calculus. / A police dog who copulates with a woman . . . // A bedbug who suffers, who has doubts / About his existence.” 43 These “animal acts” are entertaining, presumably, because of the contradictions revealed by animals doing what only humans do. These “acts” require training and are illusions of the kind that Frans De Waal argues entertain “because our culture and dominant religion have tied human dignity and self-worth to our separation from nature and distinctness from other animals. Since we are the only ones who eat with cutlery—a sure sign of civilization—we are amused to see apes trying to do the same.” 44 But Simic’s examples reveal the absurdity of this distinction and how uneasy our laughter at such acts should be, since they show that the veneer of civilization is thin. “Grave-digging” reminds us that humans,

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like apes, die and return to earth. More sinister, a police dog who copulates with a woman suggests the brutality of police force, that rape is used for brutal subjugation and is often followed by murder. While the examples of the middle stanza seem comic and harmless, the final example of “a chicken who / Cuts his own throat” reminds us both that this is what we do to animals and that humans frequently commit suicide (and that “chicken” also means coward). The poem’s power comes in part from so clearly revealing that humans associate animals, and the animal, with radical innocence (“The miraculous / Laughing dove”) as well as with bestiality, violence, and death. The poem’s final stanza pulls the curtain back on these acts slightly; they depend on a trainer with sugar and whip, who bribes and punishes to produce his illusions of animals with human abilities. The human is the sovereign, a stand-in for civilization, culture, and language itself. But this trainer is also just another act, huddled with the animals in a cage. The poem’s final image suggests those awful paintings of anthropomorphized dogs playing poker, “smoking cheap cigars,” but here in cahoots with the trainer in learning to cheat. It is a comic image and one that implicates the poem itself as an animal act, whose notions of inside and outside, master and beast, depend upon tricks played with marked cards. Simic’s animal poems are simultaneously light and dark, innocent and disturbing, because animals in his poems are human signifiers— cultural ideas and words—and yet contain vestiges of something primary, natural, and real. They are always hybrid. In “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand,” the poet wittily characterizes each finger with reference to animals, while revealing his body as also animal and more than animal. The poem suggests that animals are natural in the sense of being the first metaphors that come to hand. His thumb, for instance, is a “loose tooth of a horse,” a “rooster to his hens,” and a “fat worm” and could “go hunting with wolves.” The poem “Strictly Buccolic” mocks the concept of the pastoral by playing with the idea that this strangely enduring genre requires the presence of the animal, “these mellifluous sheep,” while at the same time being highly artificial, sheep with “regulation white fleece / Bleached and starched to perfection.” Pastoral reduces the human to “the famous mechanical wind-up shepherd,”

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who is also like a trained dog, “always studying the rules.” This implicates poetry directly, since pastoral poetry has long foregrounded the artifice of its own conventions.45 The poem “Crows” explicitly presents the animal as both empty and overdetermined signifier. Just so that each stark, Spiked twig, May be even more fierce With significance, There are these birds As further harbingers Of the coming wintery reduction To sign and enigma: The absolutely necessary Way in which they shook snow Out of their wings, And then remained, inexplicably Thus, wings half-open, Making two large algebraic x’s As if for emphasis, Or in the mockery of . . .46

The crows’ existence, their being perched on a branch, the position of their wings, are “fierce / With significance” because of the presence of the human observer. They are signs of the “wintery reduction” of the world to black and white, life and death, and most of all, the realm of text itself. The poem flirts with the idea that this encounter is real, that these intelligent birds know something we do not (which they surely do), that they are sending us a warning. Yet the signs of the birds are also random, indifferent to and separate from human existence, empty “x’s.” The actual animals, which the poem points to but exist only outside it, mock those in the poem and the human observer. The poem is also just words,

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a parody of the human need to find meaning in the world and of poetry’s need to define it. My final examples of hybridity are prose poems by Russell Edson, whose hybrid forms not coincidentally also feature a wide variety of hybrid animals. He is most well known for developing the prose poem itself, which he refers to as “a beautiful animal . . . mating a giraffe with an elephant.” Robert Bly has said that Edson “writes the poetry a chicken might,” 47 comically alluding to the idea that sense and nonsense might be produced by allowing animals (monkeys or chickens) to randomly arrange letters and words. With Edson, though, there is also always the notion that animals might have some idea of what they are doing. Here is Edson’s “Ape and Coffee”: Some coffee had gotten on a man’s ape. The man said, animal did you get on my coffee? No no, whistled the ape, the coffee got on me. You’re sure you didn’t spill on my coffee? said the man. Do I look like a liquid? peeped the ape. Well you sure don’t look human, said the man. But that doesn’t make me a fluid, twittered the ape. Well I don’t know what the hell you are, so just stop it, cried the man. I was just sitting here reading the newspaper when you splashed coffee all over me, piped the ape. I don’t care if you are a liquid, you just better stop splashing on things, cried the man. Do I look fluid to you? Take a good look, hooted the ape. If you don’t stop I’ll put you in a cup, screamed the man. I’m not a fluid, screeched the ape. Stop it, stop it, screamed the man, you are frightening me.48

The talking ape is already a hybrid, of course, like Kafka’s Red Peter (and more recently, Benjamin Hale’s Bruno Littlemore and Will Self’s Simon

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Dykes), though the speech of Edson’s ape is a severe falling off in dignity and philosophical sophistication from that of Red Peter. The poem enacts various kinds of mixing and confusing of categories. A spat about spilled coffee leads to a philosophical argument. The ape is pet or spouse, belonging to the man, but also an independent thinker and actor. The conversation between man and ape shows the man exerting his authority as husband or owner: he makes the accusation that the ape has gotten on the coffee, threatens the ape, and screams that he is frightened by the ape. On the other hand, the ape is the apparently rational creature here, insisting that an ape cannot be spilled on coffee. The man has made a fundamental category error, and he is the apparently irrational one, seeming to inhabit a universe with alternative physical laws. Because to him the ape doesn’t look human, and because he does not “know what the hell you are,” the animal is responsible for the man’s mistake. The reader, like the man, must begin by assuming that the man is sovereign and right and not the absurd character in the poem. Not only does the ape seem to speak the truth in the poem, but his modes of speaking are also much more varied: he whistles, peeps, tweets, pipes, hoots, and screeches. Yet this variety of sounds can suggest animal or human. In its brevity and its being simultaneously prose and poetry, this “poem” adopts the form of classical animal fable. Here too category is invoked and inverted, for if this poem is allegory, the meaning or referent of the allegory is opaque. Allegory implies a one-to-one correspondence of signifier and signified, vehicle and tenor, but here the point seems to be to suggest that categorical binaries (human and animal, man and ape, liquid and solid, accuser and defender, master and slave, prose and poetry, comedy and horror, etc.) are merely words with seemingly arbitrary relations to the real. In Edson’s “Ape,” a mother and father argue about the edibility of a monkey literally “dressed” for dinner, with onion rings around its fingers and a “ribbon tied in a bow on its privates.” 49 The father, who is “damn sick of ape every night,” thinks it is not dressed enough, screaming that he wishes mother would “put underpants on these apes; even a jockstrap.” To him, these apes “aren’t dinners, these are post-mortem dissections.” To mother, his distress is a sign that he suspects her of

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being “in love with this vicious creature. That I would submit my female opening to this brute. That after we had love on the kitchen floor I would put him in the oven, after breaking his head with a frying pan.” In “The Adventures of a Turtle,” what looks like a turtle is in fact an elaborate marionette controlled by the “true turtle, wearing long underwear” in a “small room” somewhere inside the shell.50 Edson’s animals reveal and revel in the notions that everything is always hybrid, that categories are as false as they are real, and that these categories find their origins in human language rather than the world. Edson’s animal poems anticipate Derrida in exploring the idea that human-animal distinction is at the root of the structures of language, form, and power, and that hybridizing categories might be a form of creative resistance. Edson’s poems incite powerful, visceral effects. For Edson, the poet is a monkey, mixing and matching arbitrary signs. In removing or confusing intentionality and referentiality, Edson’s texts can come to seem like enclosed systems. It is an axiom of hybridity, however, as it is of animality, that nothing is one thing, that nothing is closed off. Even in Edson’s work, which is almost obsessively focused on the human-animal divide, a notion of the animal not as language or trope but as a living, breathing, and sentient body comes back, a return of the repressed. In “Where Charity Begins” scientists (symbols here of machinelike productivity) turn animals into people, almost. “The dog-boy still has a tail, and keeps lifting his leg.”51 “But charity begins at home,” begins the last paragraph. “Now they want to see if they can become animals.” Scientists want to reverse engineer the process, as it were. This is an expression of human dominance of nature, but also a recognition that a return to the animal is where charity begins—at home, the cliché goes. Crossing the boundary that divides human and animal might produce an aberration or freak but is also a sign of an imagination that is always testing the constraints of ideas of the human.

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n his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel makes a sound argument against reductionist accounts of consciousness, using as his prime example the difficulty of imagining nonhuman animal awareness. While he assumes it is very likely that other animals do have an experience of subjectivity, he also argues that fundamental differences between species (such as a bat’s ability to echolocate) make it impossible for us to know that subjectivity, and that imagination is ultimately of no help. Although his claim that we cannot know what it is like to “be a bat” is in some way selfevident, his argument has nonetheless given credence to the idea that imagining animal being and difference is a fool’s game that cannot lead to insight. In a revealing footnote, however, he suggests that “it may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination.” This book has been motivated by my strong sense that poets have been trying to transcend this barrier, as well as trying to make sense of what it consists of and how it works, for a very long time.1 Indeed, this barrier has been for many poets a particular source of inspiration, a problem for which poetry might be the means to a solution. This book began from of my sense that animals have long been a crucial topic and trope of poetry, and that scholars both literary and

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philosophical have been blind to the sheer variety and number of poems about animals. That there are now many anthologies and websites that collect poems about animals is a sign that perhaps the general poetry-reading public (which is alive and well) is ahead of academics in their understanding that poetry has something to say about the meaning and presence of animals. I don’t delude myself by thinking that my book has been a complete study of animal poems. It is a sustained foray into the field, an exploratory effort, one that joins a still nascent conversation about the question of the animal in poetry. There are hundreds of poems I know about that I have not discussed, though I hope that my discussion of categories of animal poems and of specific examples can inspire others to read and study those poems as well. There are also thousands of poems about animals that I have not read or that I do not yet know about, though I and others will keep seeking them out. Most of this book consists of close readings of poems rather than sustained theoretical thinking. I make no apologies for this. Some theorizing is essential; it is in any case unavoidable, since all readings involve theoretical implications and assumptions, and it is better to examine them than to leave them invisible. At the heart of this book is the idea that the boundary between human and animal in the history of human thought has been foundational and problematic. It has been policed by culture in general and philosophy more specifically to produce valorizing conceptions of the human, generally to the detriment of other animals and often of other humans. Claims that humans (or certain subsets of them) are the only creatures who have language, make art, create symbols, love music, do math, and think abstractly are extraordinarily common because we want to define how we are special and made in God’s image. I find myself wanting to make them too, though I have now read enough ethology to know that these claims are usually signs of hubris and of our often willful ignorance about the lives of animals. At the same time, I do not want to assert that all animals are basically alike, that the only approach to animals in their variety is one of extending the category of the human through an unselfconscious anthropomorphism.

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Having completed my sampling of poems, it behooves me to state plainly my key insights. First, it is possible to approach and reflect something about actual animals and our experience with them in poetry. Animals in poems are not always or entirely allegorical or symbolic. They are not always just another way for us to talk about ourselves. The process of reflecting nonhuman animals in poetry can help us to see, understand, admire, and even revere them. Second, there are a number of different ways of thinking about animals. We see them as categories and individuals and as mixes of categories. We gain knowledge from moving between concrete particulars and abstractions. We feel we know something essential when we identify a category and when we feel we have found something distinct—both are valuable forms of knowledge and both are limited and limiting. Categories are useful and apply to both animals and poems about them. Third, poetry reveals tendrils of meaning about animals that other kinds of writing and thinking do not—its inherent speculativeness, ambiguity, opacity, and openness encourage self-questioning and sympathy, skepticism and conviction. These qualities are surely not the only or primary ways of thinking about animals, but they often reflect us at our most creaturely and compassionate. They open up new possibilities of thought, startling us with wonder as effectively as the discovery of a new species of mammal or the sighting of a rare bird. They can shake us out platitude and rigidity. And they can inspire us, I hope, to treat actual animals with more respect and justice. The poems themselves are front and center in this book. I have given sustained readings of many of them in part because close reading is the work I know how to do. Close reading is the empirical evidence of any argument about literature. Paying attention to the complexity of a poem involves carefully articulating the poem’s multiple meanings, its contingencies, and how it puts those meanings into play. As John Keats suggested, reading and writing poetry requires negative capability; it allows us to say and think several often contradictory things at once and feel that they are all true, and that this state of mind is useful because it helps us to see the limitations of our own thought, even as it points us  to new thoughts. Finally, the close reading of poetry mirrors the

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attention that poets frequently give to animals. For example, John Clare’s account of his careful approach to the bird in “The Nightingale’s Nest” and his detailed description of the nightingale and its song reveal the crucial fact that coming to know and care about animals involves observing them over long periods of time, as hard as that may be. Poetry demands similar degrees of sustained and careful attention. As I wrote in my introduction, helping us develop our ability to pay attention to animals in the world is the crucial work of animal poems, and the crucial work of this book. Probably all poems about animals can do this, but I am especially drawn to those poems that display and develop our imaginative sympathy for animals, that express awe and wonder, that reveal knowledge, and that help us acknowledge that other animals also have a rightful place in the world. I will end with a poem that does this work explicitly and well. It documents the careful observation of a single animal and generalizes about its kind, even as it expresses deep skepticism about generalization. The poem implies that human culture pays too little attention to animals, that it understands animals as existing only to serve human needs and as expendable and disposable when they do not. Most of all, the poem shows that simple observation of animals should quickly convince us that animals have sentience, intelligence, and self-regard. They also have some sense that we are the creatures who most control their destinies and thus can regard us with suspicion and disdain. And so, John Kinsella’s “Goat”: Goat gone feral comes in where the fence is open comes in and makes hay and nips the tree seedlings and climbs the granite and bleats, through its linethrough-the-bubble-of-a-spirit-level eyes it tracks our progress and bleats again. Its Boer heritage is scripted in its brown head, floppy basset-hound ears, and wind-tunnelled horns, curved back for swiftness. Boer goats merged prosaically into the feral population to increase carcass quality. To make wild meat. Purity cult of culling made vastly more profitable. It’s a narrative. Goat has one hoof missing—just a stump where it kicks

19 6 CO DA

and scratches its chin, back left leg hobbling, counterbalanced on rocks. Clots of hair hang like extra legs off its flanks. It is beast to those who’d make devil out of it, conjure it as Pan in the frolicking growth of the rural, an easer of their psyches when drink and blood flow in their mouths. To us, it is Goat who deserves to live and its “wanton destruction” the ranger cites as reason for shooting on sight looks laughable as new houses go up, as dozers push through the bush, as goats in their pens bred for fibre and milk and meat nibble forage down to the roots. Goat can live and we don’t know its whereabouts. It can live outside nationalist tropes. Its hobble is powerful as it mounts the outcrop and peers down the hill. Pathetic not to know that it thinks as hard as we do, that it can loathe and empathize. Goat tells me so. I am being literal. It speaks to me and I am learning to hear it speak. It knows where to find water when there’s no water to be found—it has learned to read the land in its own lifetime and will breed and pass its learning on and on if it can. Goat comes down and watches us over its shoulder, shits on the wall of the rainwater tank—our lifeline—and hobbles off to where it prays, where it makes art.2

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Elizabeth Atkins, “Man and Animals in Recent Poetry,” PMLA 51, no. 1 (1936): 263–67. Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 488. E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: Norton, 2005), 5. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 34–35. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 13. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), x. Teresa Mangum, “Narrative Dominion or the Animals Write Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts,” in The Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire, ed. Kathleen Kete (New York: Berg, 2007), 156. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Colleen Glenney Boggs, “Emily Dickinson’s Animal Pedagogies,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 533–41. Marjorie Garber, “Reflections,” in The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 79. David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ix–xv. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6–8. See also Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

19 8 INTRO D U CTIO N

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11. Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 11. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1991). Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 75. Ibid., 231. Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 122. Bate, Song of the Earth, 199. Leonard Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 5. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2–4, 12–13, 55–60. Matthew Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 54. For Calarco and Malamud, the act of finding commonality between nonhuman and human remains a kind of anthropomorphism and “extend[s] the logic and practice of anthropocentrism” by continuing inescapably to preserve the sacredness of the human (Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” 46). I disagree with this absolutism; I have argued elsewhere that there are degrees of anthropomorphism, and that an absolute prohibition against it is both impossible and self-defeating. See Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 65–97; and Frans de Waal, “Are We in Anthropodenial,” Discover 18, no. 7 (1997): 50–53. Randy Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 33–34, 97, 138. Dan Wylie, “Why Write a Poem About Elephants,” Mosaic 39, no. 4 (2006): 35. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 34. Dale Jamieson, “What Do Animals Think,” in The Philosophy of Animal Mind, ed. Robert W. Lurz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 30. Destabilizing structural elements of Coetzee’s novella include the fragmentary nature of its recording of Elizabeth Costello’s lecture and its self-conscious deployment of a character that is easily comparable to Coetzee but still stands at some distance from him. The fullest account of this complexity is Stephen Mulhall’s Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 21–35. Mulhall also gives bracing readings of Hughes’s poems. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 50.

1. TH E ANIM AL IN ALLEGO RY1 99

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 19. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 53. Onno Oerlemans, “A Defense of Anthropomorphism: A Comparison of Coetzee and Gowdy,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40, no. 1 (2007): 181–96. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 23, 33. Ibid., 53. As Carol Kaesuk Yoon argues, biology is now trying to define taxonomic patterns strictly through the evolutionary relatedness of species, using the statistical analysis of DNA similarities to match ancestral histories. Yoon, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (New York: Norton, 2009), 239–68. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 72. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 54. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Bill McKibben (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 212.

1. THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 50. Randy Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 31. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap, 1995); Leonard Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). Joyce E. Salisbury, “Human Animals of Medieval Fables,” in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona Flores (New York: Garland, 1996), 49. Nona Flores, introduction to Animals in the Middle Ages, ix–xvi. Howard Needler, “The Animal Fable Among Other Medieval Literary Genres,” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 426. Howard Bloch, “The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation,” Differences 15 (2004): 71. Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer and His Followers, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 6. Frank Palmeri, “The Autocritique of Fables,” in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth Century British Culture, ed. Frank Palmeri (London: Ashgate, 2006), 84, 86. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of the Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2. Quoted in Fletcher, Allegory, 17. Fletcher, Allegory, 22.

20 0 1. TH E ANIM AL IN ALLEGORY

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington: Shearwater, 1996), 15; E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), passim. See, for instance, Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (New York: Vintage, 1989), 208. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 17. Robert Henryson, The Moral Fables of Aesop, ed. George Gopen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), lines 2707–8. Subsequent citations appear in text; translations are generally Gopen’s. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, Robert Pratt, and F. N. Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), line 2824. Subsequent citations appear in text. Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, 111. David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Bird Song (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Ibid., 121. Beowulf, trans. and ed. Seamus Heaney (New York: Norton, 2001), lines 88–90. Subsequent citations appear in text. Edmund Spenser, “Lyke as a huntsman,” The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, and Ronald Bond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 640. Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso list to hunt.” Tobias Menely, “Animal Signs and Ethical Significance: Expressive Creatures in the British Georgic,” Mosaic 39, no. 4 (2006): 111–27. Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 4, no. 3 (2005): 544. Ibid., 538. Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Stag,” Selected Poems of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, 1998), lines 56–57. Italics in original. Subsequent citations appear in text. For accounts of how romantic-period poetry reflects ideas of animal rights, see Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). In his biography of Gray, Robert Mack explains that Walpole asked Gray to write a poem memorializing his cat, who did indeed drown in a large goldfish bowl. Walpole was so pleased by the poem that he had its first six lines engraved on a plaque he placed near the bowl. Mack argues that the poem in part reflects the good humor that existed between Gray and Walpole, though he also says, mysteriously, that the poem “gently and effectively places the loss of Selima, when viewed from a sympathetic point of  view, in its proper perspective.” Sympathetic to whom, one wonders. Robert L. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 351, 352.

2. POEMS OF THE ANIMAL201

30. 31.

Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 5. Suvir Kaul, “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal,” PMLA 105, no. 2 (1990): 226.

2. POEMS OF THE ANIMAL 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). David Perkins’s discussion of Burns’s poem gives a good history of this tendency. Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7–13. See also Eric Miller, “Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40, no. 4 (2000): 635–57; and Bernhard Frank, “The Grand Delusions of Hughes’s ‘The Jaguar,’ ” Explicator 6, no. 1 (2007): 50–51. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 26. Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1978), and The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Shearwater, 1996). Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 13. Ibid., 14. This is similar to Matthew Calarco’s approach of “indistinction” toward nonhuman animals in which “the human/animal distinction . . . no longer serves as a guardrail for thought and practice.” Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 54. Tim Ingold, introduction to What Is an Animal, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 4. The essays in this book explore various approaches to defining animality more precisely and inclusively. The work of the historian Harriet Ritvo is especially relevant here: The Animal Estate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), and The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See, for instance, George Boas, The Happy Beast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1933), which examines the figuring of animals to reflect a critique of humanity during the French Renaissance. The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998), 36. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1991), 849. Ibid., 868, 890.

2022. P O EM S O F TH E ANI MA L

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 218–19. The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), 268–69. Ibid., 277–79. Frost here echoes the critique of human self-regard we see clearly in the work of Jonathan Swift. See B. J. Sokol, “Bergson, Instinct, and Frost’s ‘The White-Tailed Hornet,’ ” American Literature 62, no. 1 (1990): 44–55, for an interesting reading of the poem, including Frost’s various errors about biology, which Sokol thinks may be a deliberate part of Frost’s strategy of “doubleness.” W.  B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.  B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 197–98. Margaret Atwood, The Animals in That Country (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), 2. “This country” also has zoos, rodeos, marine parks with performing sea mammals, and the slaughter of seals on the ice flows off Newfoundland, all of which are in some circles celebrated aspects of Canadian culture. Atwood has also written the poems “Song of the Fox” and “Bull Song,” about fox hunts and bullfights. See the excellent article by Alison Rieke, “ ‘Plunder’ or ‘Accessibility to Experience’: Consumer Culture and Marianne Moore’s Modernist Self-Fashioning,” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1/2 (2003): 149–70. Rieke argues that Moore’s collecting and displaying of animal goods, including her dress and menagerie, are a complex form of self-fashioning. “These objects came to represent her own peculiar brand of ‘commodity fetish,’ a form of consumption that seemed to accommodate her as a naturalist and poet” (155). The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 40. See Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Although she does not discuss Moore, Norris has identified this desire as a distinctive trait of other European and American modernists. For these writers (e.g., Charles Darwin, Max Ernst, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, and Friedrich Nietzsche) the animal is fully in “the realm of the biological, the real: as a plenum. It is cultural man, rather, who is engendered by an imaginary lack that gives birth to desire, language, intersubjectivity, social life, that is, the entire Lacanian Symbolic Order that is governed by the ‘other’ ” (3). Hunters frequently talk about thinking like the animal or becoming animal in the act of hunting, much of which is self-serving and empty rhetoric. There is no question, though, that hunting can provoke interesting thoughts about the animal and our relationship to it. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2008), 153. James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 78–79. Ibid., 131–32.

3 . P O E TRY AS FIELD GU IDE203

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

Ibid., 85. Galway Kinnell, Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 14. Berry, Selected Poems, 80. Denise Levertov, Poems: 1960–1967 (New York: New Directions, 1967), 23. Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 263. Lawrence Raab, Mysteries of the Horizon (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 22. Susan Stewart, Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 54–57. A. R. Ammons, Collected Poems, 1951–1971 (New York: Norton, 1972), 130. Maxine Kumin, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (New York: Viking, 1982), 6–7. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 45. Maxine Kumin, Looking for Luck (New York: Norton, 1992), 74–75. Wilbur, New and Collected Poems, 274. Ibid., 182. W. S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2005), 137. Ibid., 189. W. S. Merwin, The Moon Before Morning (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2015). The fate of wild animals is particularly dire in Australia, which is besieged by drought, by invasions of other species that are rapidly destroying indigenous populations, and by pioneer attitudes to wildlife in general. Australia, perhaps more than most other nations, also defines its national identity through its unique fauna, so wild animals figure in its culture in significant ways. Several of its best known poets, such as Les Murray and Geoffrey Lehmann, have written many poems about animals, and John Kinsella is an animal activist as well as a poet, novelist, and critic. Geoffrey Lehmann, Poems, 1957–2013 (Perth: UWA, 2014), 259–60. It is worth noting in this context that several American states have passed so-called ag-gag laws, making it a crime to film or record animal abuse on farms or slaughterhouses.

3. POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE 1. 2.

3.

Paul Muldoon, “The Point of Poetry,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 59, no. 3 (1998): 516. According to Carol Kaesuk Yoon, anthropologists have determined that we are capable of making out about six hundred species. Yoon, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (New York: Norton, 2009), 136. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: Touchstone, 1968), 257; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 48.

20 43. P O E TRY AS FIELD GUI DE

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 237ff. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970). Histories of taxonomy show that systems of naming, though they depend on a faith in the fixity of species, also reveal the extraordinary messiness of the project. Harriet Ritvo argues that while the new Enlightenment taxonomic systems conferred power both to “the human position at its head” and the individuals and cultures that undertook the endeavor of classification, the “accumulation of theory and information was not a hegemonic juggernaut, crushing error and dissention in its path” (Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 15, 50). That is, the system of naming had by its very nature to be imprecise, a matter of interpretation. See also my chapter “Romanticism and the Metaphysics of Classification” in Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). See Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination Into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, ed. Donald Favareau, trans. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2008); and Wendy Wheeler, “Postscript on Biosemiotics: Reading Beyond Words—and Ecocriticism,” New Formations 64 (2008): 137–54. Our mimicking of bird and other animal calls to see if they will respond is also, I think, an elemental response to animals—a simple and spontaneous way to make some kind of contact with them. Who is not thrilled by the idea that you might be able to imitate a cuckoo or chickadee or owl and have them respond? Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fart,” accessed August 4, 2017, www.oed.com. Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 151. In this context, it is worth noting that ornithologists have discovered that birds distinguish songs not just between species but also within species. The New York Times reported a study showing that rufous-collared sparrows in Ecuador distinguished between local “dialects” and that females only mated with males whose songs reflected local variations (Sindya N. Bhanoo, “For Certain Sparrows, Love Has a Local Sound,” New York Times, July 5, 2011). Moreover, we also know that many animal species (e.g., penguins and seals) can distinguish the sounds made by individual members of their group, so that parents can find their own offspring in a rookery by the identity of its calls. These are clear signs that animal calls contain a quality (a subtext?) not audible to human ears or analysis. At the same time, learning to recognize birdsong and other animal vocalizations is one of the best ways to come to recognize the presence of kinds of animals. Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 150. Roger Tory Peterson, Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 252. See Dana Phillips’s discussion of the contrast between literary texts and Peterson’s Field Guide in The Truth of Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 173–83.

3. P O E TRY AS FIELD GU IDE205

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

Phillips argues that the field guide offers a practical example of the potential for literary texts to engage readers with the natural world, and he faults literary texts for failing to be “cautionary” in the way that Peterson is in explaining to readers the practical problems of representing and identifying species characteristics. My claim is that lyric obscurity is inherently cautionary. David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 180. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 134. Of course, wild animals have been captured, kept, and exhibited for centuries, and it would have been possible to view an actual tiger in London during Blake’s day. Blake, Songs of Innocence, 148. Thomas Bewick’s description makes clear that the tiger’s most notorious quality is that it preys on human flesh. His long account of the tiger begins by describing it as “the most rapacious and destructive of all carnivorous animals. Fierce without provocation, and cruel without necessity, its thirst for blood is insatiable: Though glutted with slaughter, it continues its carnage, nor ever gives up so long as a single object remains in its sight: Flocks and herds fall indiscriminate victims to its fury: It fears neither the sight nor the opposition of man, whom it frequently makes its prey; and it is even said to prefer human flesh to that of any other animal.” Bewick, A General History of Quadrupeds, ed. Yann Martel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 206. Billy Collins, introduction to Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, ed. Billy Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3. Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) gives remarkable evidence of this. White’s letters show that he is fascinated by ornithology and views studying bird behavior, flight, and song as essential parts of being a naturalist. For a good overview of the history of birds and birdsong in poetry and English romanticism’s special interest in birdsong, see Frank Doggett, “Romanticism’s Singing Bird,” Studies in English Literature 14, no. 4 (1974): 547–61. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 99–101. See Alice A. Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), which traces some of the links between the representation of animals, melancholia, and muteness. See David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Bird Song (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 130. It is curious that nightingale song is often represented as “jugging.” This is because it often contains a few distinct unmusical sounds that can be represented by the sound of “jug jug” (as Coleridge does in his poem), revealing something of how reductive our attempt to identify species’ songs can be. Rothenberg also reports that nightingales, like many songbirds, learn their songs and perform

20 6 3 . P O E TRY AS FIELD GUI DE

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

them in a kind of dialogue (theme and variations) with the songs of other birds (136– 40), which is not unlike how humans learn to speak. Elizabeth A. Lawrence, “Melodious Truth: Keats, a Nightingale, and the Human/ Nature Boundary,” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 6, no. 2 (1999): 21–30. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 279–82. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 78. William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 533–34. John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 346. John Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 213. Ibid., 214–15. John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 5, 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 391. Gilbert White’s letter of August 7, 1778 (number 42), is very similar: “A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape. . . . For, though it must not be said that every species of birds has a manner peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.” He then lists several dozen species and some identifying characteristics of their flight. In the next letter he says the same thing about bird vocalizations, which he describes as “language . . . adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feelings.” White, Natural History of Selborne. Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Birds” is very similar—a short compendium of observations of multiple species of raptors, “for a poem / Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous.” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002), 103. Clare, Major Works, 159. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 26. For a good account of the importance of birdsong to Clare, see Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, “Listening with John Clare,” Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 3 (2009): 371–90. Jonathan Skinner, “Birds in Dickinson’s Words,” Emily Dickinson Journal 20, no. 2 (2011): 107. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 271. Aaron Shackelford, “Dickinson’s Animals and Anthropomorphism,” Emily Dickinson Journal 19, no. 2 (2010): 59. It was standard practice for ornithologists to shoot the birds they were studying so that they could describe them in detail, a practice that probably contributed to the extinction of such birds as the ivory-billed woodpecker.

3 . P O E TRY AS FIELD GU IDE207

42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 10. Cristanne Miller and Elizabeth Joyce read this poem, and the creature it celebrates, as symbolizing African people and their subjugation by various conquerors. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 139–40; Elizabeth Joyce, Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998), 105. In fact, the jerboa is a common name for desert jumping mice, of which there are about three dozen species. Moore was probably writing about the Lesser Egyptian Jerboa. Especially outside the realm of birds, poets rarely get to the precision of scientists. Joanna Feit Diehl reads the poem, and the animal, as symbolic of the poet’s own defense of self, an attempt to construct the self as ideally inviolable. Diehl, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993), 59. Moore, The Complete Poems, 117. Because pangolin flesh is considered both a delicacy and of medicinal value in Asia, several species are now endangered, and all are rare. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1991), 341. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2008), 149. J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello notes that even as she admires the physicality of the animal in Hughes’s poem “The Jaguar,” it is still “about jaguarness embodied in this jaguar. . . . There remains something Platonic about it.” Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 53. Daniel Hoffman, “Talking Beasts: The ‘Single Adventure’ in the Poems of Ted Hughes,” in Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, ed. Leonard Scigaj (New York: Hall, 1992), 147. Most readings of Hughes’s poetry focus on the archetypal or totemic meaning of the animals in his work. See, for instance, Chen Hong, “Hughes and Animals,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, ed. Terry Gifford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 40–52. Quoted in Leonard Scigaj, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 58. Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 609. Ibid., 720. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 190. Hughes, “Nightingale,” Collected Poems, 612; “The Moorhen,” 613; “Treecreeper,” 613; “Mice Are Funny Little Creatures,” 1082; “Gulls Aloft,” 55; “Weasels at Work,” 631. Don McKay, Field Marks, ed. Meira Cook (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006), 19.

20 83. P O E TRY AS FIELD GUI DE

58. 59.

James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 273–75. Paul Muldoon, Poems, 1968–1998 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 22.

4. THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

Les Murray, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 407–8. Tom Regan argues that “to be the subject-of-a-life is to be an individual whose life is characterized by . . . beliefs and desires[,] perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them.” Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 243. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 240, 244. Ibid., 239. In another example of the broad resistance to thinking about the individuality of animals, Aaron Gross argues in his introduction to Animals and the Human Imagination that “the challenge of animal studies and of this volume is to think anew and in an interdisciplinary manner about the kind of being that members of the species Homo sapiens are and the kind of being represented by every other species.” Thinking about the animal, according to Gross, is always a way of thinking about the human, and always too at the level of the species rather than the individual. Yet he also argues that animal studies challenges us “to rethink our identity in the most radical sense by refusing to assume from the outset the usual categories of thought.” Gross, “Introduction and Overview,” in Animals and the Human Imagination, ed. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3. The tension between seeing animals as individuals and as groups is reproduced in ideologies having to do with the human. It is also reproduced by debates about the mechanisms of evolution, where interestingly the dominant view is that natural selection operates on individual animals rather than on groups. See Stephen Pinker, “The False Allure of Group Selection,” Edge, June 18, 2012, https://www.edge.org. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 9. For an explicit and forceful critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming animal, see Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 26–29. Derrida explicitly tackles the topic of Deleuze’s insistence that animals cannot have individuality in his transcribed lecture “The Transcendental ‘Stupidity’ (‘Betise’) of Man and the Becoming-Animal According to Deleuze,” in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 35–60.

4 . TH E IND IVID UAL ANIM AL IN POETRY209

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Derrida critiques the notion of the individual as a psychoanalytic idea of “ideal ego,” and therefore as human, as opposed to an awareness of “the divisibility, multiplicity, or difference of forces in a living being, whatever it may be. It is enough to admit that there is no finite living being, human or nonhuman, that wouldn’t be structured by this differential of forces between which a tension, if not a contradiction, cannot not locate or be located in different instances, apparatuses, if you will, one resisting others, one repressing or suppressing others, or trying to put forward or make prevail . . . the reason/right of the strongest” (59). There are of course many thinkers who do pay considerable attention to the status of the individual animal and think of it as a valuable moral category, animal rights theorists Tom Regan and Peter Singer foremost among them. The relatively recent rise of critical animal studies is in part a response to the absence of moral urgency in animal studies more broadly. As the founders of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies have put it, the new movement “has emerged as a necessary and vital alternative to the insularity, detachment, hypocrisy, and profound limitations of mainstream animal studies that vaporizes their flesh and blood realities to reduce them to reified signs, symbols, images, words on a page, or protagonists in a historical drama, and thereby utterly fail to confront them not as ‘texts’ but as sentient beings.” Steve Best et al., “Introducing Critical Animal Studies, 2007,” http://www.critical animalstudies.org. Some animal-oriented literary criticism has also been attentive to the status of the individual animal. Marian Scholtmeijer’s book Animal Victims in Modern Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) is one of the first of these and still one of the best. While acknowledging the profound limitations of human understanding and representation of the animal, she also makes a case for why and how it matters that fiction has tried to “articulate the vital inner experience of animals” (89). Jonathan Burt, “Review of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal,” Society and Animals 13, no. 2 (2005): 168. Haraway, When Species Meet, 32. “Jubilate Agno” was written between 1758 and 1763, while Smart was confined in an asylum for the insane, and consists of four fragments totaling 1177 lines of poetry. Owing in part to its strangeness, it was not published until 1953. The section on Jeoffry comprises just seventy-three lines of fragment B. All quotations from the poem are taken from The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, vol. 1, Jubilate Agno, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). See also Rebecca Price Larkin, “Christopher Smart’s Sacramental Cat,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11, no. 3 (1969): 1191–96. She argues that the whole poem might be thought of as linking the human and animal at many levels; the title itself means to “rejoice in the lamb,” and animals figure throughout the entire work. See Matthew Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 41–60. Calarco argues that extending notions of similarity between humans and nonhumans is always bound up with anthropocentrism, necessarily involving the extension of human abilities and characteristics to some

2 10 4. TH E IND IVID UAL ANIM AL I N POETRY

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

animals. However, it seems simply factual that many animals do actually possess abilities once thought to be only human, and that imagination plays a vital role in uncovering these similarities. David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Frederick Garber, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 39, 29. Ibid., 63. William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 533. Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights, 146. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005), 163. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 219. Jimmie Killingsworth has argued for the importance of seeing the ways Whitman aligned himself with animals. He notes too that Whitman’s attempts to articulate animal being move from the relative inarticulateness and silences of “Song of Myself” (the “ya-honks” and “yawps”) to full ventriloquism in “Out of the Cradle.” Killingsworth, “As If the Beasts Spoke: The Animal/Animist/Animated Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 28, no. 1–2 (2010): 19–35. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 388–91. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 150. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Skylark,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), 228. That Hardy was interested in the fate of individual animals is reflected too in such poems as “The Blinded Bird” and “The Caged Goldfinch.” See John Hughes, “Hardy and the Life of Birds,” Thomas Hardy Journal 14, no. 3 (1998): 68–77. The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1979), 1. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 338. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 360. The Poetry of Robert Frost, 229. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 169–73. Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002), 165–66. Since we are now in the Anthropocene age, in which our activities have profoundly altered the entire globe and thus every animal habitat, one could argue, pace Bill McKibben, that there is now no such thing as a wild animal.

4. TH E IND IVID UAL ANIM AL IN POETRY21 1

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Robert Penn Warren, New and Selected Poems, 1923–1985 (New York: Random House, 1985), 8–9. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 2, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), 291–94. The poem was written nearly forty years after the death of Williams’s father. Though, ironically, Jesus’s point here is ultimately that because God knows even of the death of a sparrow, “fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:31. Poems about pet dogs and cats are numerous and popular. There are anthologies full of them. Maxine Kumin, Looking for Luck (New York: Norton, 1992), 24. Maxine Kumin, “Brushing the Aunts,” Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (New York: Viking, 1982), 137. Kumin, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 133. James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), 143. James Dickey sees Wright’s whole oeuvre as “soft at the core,” filled with domestic animals. However, Dickey’s lovely “A Dog Sleeping on My Feet” also describes the profound effects of physical contact with his dog, which he expresses care for by refusing to move for fear of disturbing the dog. The poem describes the dog’s sleep as slowly spreading through the speaker, becoming a poem, and giving him access to the dog’s dream of chasing a fox. James Dickey, “Give-Down and Outrage: The Poetry of the Last Straw,” Southern Review 27 (1991): 430–37. Denise Levertov, Poems, 1960–1967 (New York: New Directions, 1967), 23. See, for instance, Deborah L. Wells, “Domestic Dogs and Human Health: An Overview,” British Journal of Health Psychology 12 (2007): 145–56. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “pet,” accessed July 9, 2015, http://www.oed.com/. The OED shows the noun and verb forms of the word are inextricably linked. Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse” explores this idea even further, the meeting of lips giving the speaker contact with “a world that meant no harm.” Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2006), 170. Levertov, Poems, 190. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970). Levertov’s poetry about animals represents them as part of God’s community of creatures and, like humans, expressions of God’s being and love, at once symbols and bodies. See, for instance, “Moon Tiger” and the beautiful “Ce bruit de la mer,” which imagines what the sound of the sea means for a wild horse. Wordsworth: The Poems, 364. Critics have suggested a host of possibilities for whom “she” refers to: Wordsworth’s mother, a lover, the “Lucy” of several of his other lyrics, and his own lost childhood. My evidence for my argument is that after the death of my first dog, this poem came forcefully to mind as expressing my own grief, and I still cannot teach or talk about this poem now without fully remembering that most surprising and shocking grief.

2 124. TH E IND IVID UAL ANIM AL I N POETRY

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

In “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth refers to his own youth as a period characterized by “glad animal movement.” Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 214. Wordsworth wrote a pair of elegiac poems for a friend’s dog, “Fidelity” and “Tribute: To the Memory of the Same Dog,” that explicitly note the powerful and surprising nature of grief for a dog. Lord Byron also wrote a surprisingly sincere poem in memory of his dog. Mark Doty’s memoir Dog Years (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008) is an extraordinary account of his grief over the death of several of his companion dogs, specifically in the context of the death of his lover. Doty also has several great elegies on his dogs. W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2009), 53.

5. OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

Vanessa Guignery, “Introduction: Hybridity, Why It Still Matters,” Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Vanessa Guignery, Catherine PessoMiquel, and Francois Specq (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 1–9. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1982); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). The only example I can find in literary criticism about human-animal hybridity is on Kafka’s animal stories. See Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri, eds., Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). There are many reasons animals might attempt to mate across species boundaries. It can result from the power of the sex drive, the genetic similarity of many species, and human interference. Siv Kristoffersen, “Half Beast—Half Man: Hybrid Figures in Animal Art,” World Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2001): 261–72; Michel Lorblanchet, “From Man to Animal and Sign in Paleolithic Art,” Animals Into Art, ed. Howard Morphy (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 109–43. Mark Wallace, “Against Unity,” The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays Into Contemporary Poetics, ed. Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2011), 121. See also David St. John and Cole Swenson, eds., American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (New York: Norton, 2009). Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 262. Ibid., 20–25. The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (New York: Penguin, 2003), 122–24. This hybridity is suggested too by the poem’s title, which comes from Philip Melanchthon, a colleague of Martin Luther, who changed his name from Schwarzerd,

5 . O F H YBRID ITY AND TH E H Y B R I D21 3

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

which means “black earth,” the first name Moore gave to the poem. “Melanchthon” was the name she gave to a carved elephant she possessed, perhaps because the word sounds like a combination of “melancholy” and “mastodon.” The poem’s title suggests “tendrils” of connection between human, animal, earth, and language. See Bethany Hickok, Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905–1955 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 53. Whitman’s poem is also a hybrid, of course, with a lyric portion in which the poet remembers his encounter with a single bird, and a speaking animal portion, italicized, which the poem presents as the youthful poet’s interpretation of this animal’s calls. The entire poem is made strange by this combination of voices, although the poem makes it fairly easy to see the bird’s “speech” as the youthful poet’s own longing projected onto the bird. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 81. Cf. Helen Lambert, who argues that for Murray, “regarding nature as a foreign ‘language’ allows his poetry to become other than itself.” Lambert, “The Australian Language Forest: Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World,” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique 19 (2010): 44. Les Murray, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 355. See also Murray’s introduction to the poem on the Poetry Archive website, where there is also a wonderful recording of Murray reading the poem: http://www.poetryarchive.org /. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50. Lambert, “The Australian Language Forest,” 51. Murray, New Collected Poems, 358. Ibid. Ibid., 376. See Bernd Heinrich, Mind of the Raven (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 191–203, on raven vocalizations and their meanings. Jane Springer’s three “Dear Blackbird” poems, from Dear Blackbird (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), reverse the situation of Murray’s raven. Her poems are in the form of letters from a scarecrow to a blackbird and are also, in part, an attempt to imagine an artificial form and space in which language might cross from human to animal. Murray, New Collected Poems, 366, 367–68. These poems are reminiscent of Philip Levine’s “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” which presents the thoughts of a proudly resistant pig as it is led to market and imagines its own slaughter. From Not This Pig (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 79. A. R. Ammons, Collected Poems, 1951–71 (New York: Norton, 1972), 11–12. Pattiann Rogers, Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001 (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2001), 344–45. James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 248–49.

2145 . O F H YBRID ITY AND THE HYB R I D

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

Ibid., 273–75. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 50. Ibid., 53. Levi-Strauss’s account links the wolverine and the eagle and refers to the wolverine as “carcajous,” as Dickey does in the poem. The wolverine also figures as a creature at once human and strangely unknowable in Barry Lopez’s great essay “Landscape and Narrative,” in Crossing Open Ground, ed. Barry Lopez (New York: Vintage, 1989), 61–72. Marion Hodge, “Aspects of Invention in James Dickey’s Poems,” South Carolina Review 42, no. 1 (2009): 132–42. Galway Kinnell, The New Selected Poems (New York: Mariner, 2001), 59–61. The method of killing the bear the poem describes is, as John Hobbs notes, rooted in fiction rather than anthropology, taken from an adventure novel by the Swiss writer Hans Ruesch about Inuit life. Hobbs, “Galway Kinnell’s ‘The Bear’: Dream and Technique,” Modern Poetry Studies 5, no. 3 (1974): 237–50. The poem may also be read as an allegory of the discomfort caused by the cultural appropriation of Inuit culture it appears to enact. The brilliant documentary film Diet of Souls by Canadian filmmaker John Houston shows interviews with Inuit elders who reveal that “the great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls.” Dealing with this peril is the heart of their religious practice. Living where they do, in the high arctic, the only available food is other creatures who must be hunted. And for the Inuit to hunt them successfully, they must observe, follow, and understand these animals to an extraordinary degree. In seeking to kill them, they come to respect and admire them. Kinnell’s poem “Porcupine,” also published in Body Rags, similarly moves from a human account of the porcupine to a dream vision of being and speaking for one. James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 60–61. By “bare hybridity” I mean a hybridity rooted in biology and physical being, as in Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life.” See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 1998). Elizabeth Dodd argues that “in his most radical poems, Wright is asserting two, sometimes conflicting, powers of language: reference to the world outside the mind, and enactment of the mind’s receptive participation in a larger than human world. From the principle of reciprocity arises his most powerful poetic transcendence.” Dodd, “Green Places: James Wright’s Development of a Biocentric Aesthetic,” ISLE 13, no. 2 (2006): 30. See also Andrew Elkins, The Poetry of James Wright (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 48–50. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), 16.

CO DA215

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

See, for instance, “Fear Is What Quickens Me,” “In Ohio,” “Two Hangovers,” “Two Horses Playing in the Orchard,” “From a Bus Window,” and “Arriving in the Country Again.” Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 42. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975–1984 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2001), 246. Robert Creeley, Collected Poems: 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 94. Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974–1994 (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1995), 144–47. Susan Stewart, Red Rover (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3–5. Charles Simic, Selected Poems, 1963–83 (New York: George Braziller, 1985), 100. Frans De Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 3. Simic, Selected Poems, 27, 168. Ibid., 169. Quoted in Lee Upton, “Structural Politics: The Prose Poetry of Russell Edson,” South Atlantic Review 58, no. 4 (1993): 101–15. Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1994), 76. Ibid., 118. Russell Edson, The Reason Why the Closet-Man Is Never Sad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 11. Russell Edson, The Tormented Mirror (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 21–22.

CODA 1. 2.

Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 442. John Kinsella, “Goat,” in The Best Australian Poems, 2010, ed. Robert Adamson (Collingwood: Black, 2010), 148.

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INDEX

Abbey, Edward, 84–85 Abram, David, 116 “Address to the Beasts” (Auden), 59–60 “Advice to a Prophet” (Wilbur): destruction of planet in, 76; kinship in, 77 Aesopic tradition: in Medieval literature, 29; “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and, 33; “The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb” and, 36 Agamben, Giorgio, 25, 54 Allegory, animal as, 190; animal sympathy and, 47, 50–51; anthropomorphism and, 27–28, 51; evolution of, 24; Fletcher on, 30; hierarchy in, 31; Hughes and, 14–15; human-animal distinction and, 30, 31; interpretation and, 53; as mode of representation, 30–31; in “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat,” 21, 48–49; projecting meaning and, 27; in Renaissance sonnets, 43–45; in romantic period, 47–48; in “Song of Myself,” 61; species and, 29–30; symbol and, 31; in “To a Skylark,” 21, 129. See also Elizabeth Costello (fictional character); Fables, animal; “Nun’s

Priest’s Tale, The” (Chaucer); “Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb, The” (Henryson) “Amanda Dreams She Has Died and Gone to the Elysian Fields” (Kumin), 146–47 Ammons, A. R.: “Corsen’s Inlet” by, 73; “Four Motions for the Pea Vines” by, 73–74; “Turning” by, 167–68 “Animal, The” (Creeley), 181–83 “Animal Acts” (Simic), 186–87 Animal and environmental rights and causes, 78, 203n49; anticruelty laws and, 47; comparing, 86, 120; factory farm animal and, 82; in “For a Coming Extinction,” 77; individual animal poetry and, 120–21, 123; in poetry, 73; Regan as animal rights activist, 121; romantic period and, 200n28; species poem and, 117; sustainable poetry and, 8 Animal poetry: animal welfare and, 4; ape in, 189–91; Atkins on literal, 1–2, 4; bear in, 62, 173–76; caribou in, 141–42; cats in, 21, 48–51, 125, 148–49, 200n29; cows in, 82, 165–66; deer and, 43–45, 137–38; dog and, 30, 153; elephants in, 13, 160–62, 212n10; examples of poets and,

228 IND E X

Animal poetry (cont.) 4–5; fox in, 29, 30; goat in, 195–96; hedgehog in, 83, 118, 151–52; hornet in, 62; horses in, 131–32, 146–48; interpretation of animals and, 12; jerboa in, 108–10, 207n44; lamb in, 33–36, 91; lion in, 30; monkeys in, 65–66; moose in, 70, 138–40, 148; pangolin in, 110–12, 207n47; pig as, 30, 165–66; purpose of, 9; sheep in, 170–71; stag in, 45–48; tiger in, 91–92, 205n19; turtle in, 168–69; in Victorian period, 1; volume of, 192–93; whale in, 77; wolf in, 30, 33–36; wolverine in, 171–73. See also Birds; Birdsong Animals: categorization of, 19–20; in cave paintings of Chauvet, 7; culture and, 2, 195; extinction of, 2–3; factory farm, 82; fish as, 3, 120–21; habitats of, 64; hierarchy of, 31, 36, 55, 85; human boundaries with, 193; in Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4; threat to, 2–3. See also Human-animal distinction Animals, as poetry category, 22, 202n26; “Address to the Beasts” by, 59–60; “The Animals of That Country” by, 62–64; “The Bear” (Frost) and, 62; comic commentary on humanity and, 61–62; community and, 25; Dickey and, 67–69; divinity and, 70–71; “For the Animals” and, 71–72; “Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals” and, 72–73; human error and, 62; Inuit culture and, 56; “The Monkeys” and, 65–67; moral consideration and, 52; “Natural Linguistics” and, 59, 60; “The Peace of Wild Things” and, 58–59; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and, 57–58, 69, 71, 124; “Song of Myself” and, 60–61; “Talking to Mice” and, 59; “To Christ Our Lord” and, 69–70, 73; “To the Unseeable Animal” and, 70; unknowable and, 71–73; “White-Tailed

Hornet” and, 62. See also Community, animals as “Animals, The” (Lehmann): animal companions in, 79–81; wild and domesticated animals in, 81–82 Animal slaughter: “The Cows on Killing Day” and, 82, 165–66; in The Lives of Animals, 166–67; “Pigs” and, 165–66 “Animals of That Country, The” (Atwood), 62; categorization paradox in, 64; Old and New World culture in, 63–64 Animal studies: absence of poetry in, 3–4; boundaries between human and animal in, 5; critical analysis and, 13; cultural theory and, 6; Elizabeth Costello on, 4, 13–14; human-animal distinction in, 5; interdisciplinary, 2; in philosophy, 4, 7–8; taxonomy and, 18 Anthropomorphism, 52, 193, 198n24; allegory and, 27–28, 51; Calarco on, 11; classical forms of, 31; extreme, 27–28; in fables, 29; in “For the Animals,” 71–72; individual animal poetry and, 126; Malamud and, 11; “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and, 37; in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 133; “The Sparrow” and, 143–45; speaking animals and, 167; Stewart on, 9, 10; subjectivity and, 6 Anticruelty laws, 47 Ape: “Ape,” 190–91; “Ape and Coffee,” 189–90 “Ape” (Edson), 190–91 “Ape and Coffee” (Edson), 189–90 Aristotle, 55 Armstrong, Philip, 70–71; on Hughes, 113; on therio-primitivism, 67 “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” (Kumin), 146 Atkins, Elizabeth: on literal animal poetry, 1–2, 4; “Man and Animals in Recent Poetry” by, 1–2

IND EX 229

Atwood, Margaret, 62–64 Auden, W. H., 5; “Address to the Beasts” by, 59–60; “Natural Linguistics” by, 59, 60; “Talking to Mice” by, 59 Audubon, John James, 87 “Auguries of Innocence” (Blake), 71 Authorial identity, 20–21 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 154 Basilisk, 157–59 Bate, Jonathan, 8 Bats, 163–64 “Bats’ Ultrasound” (Murray), 163–64 “Bear, The” (Frost), 62 “Bear, The” (Kinnell), 173–74, 176; death in, 175 “Beasts” (Wilbur), 71 Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Norris), 202n25 Bekoff, Marc, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 162 Beowulf, 42, 156 Berger, John, 3 Berry, Wendell: “The Peace of Wild Things” by, 58–59; “To the Unseeable Animal” by, 70 Bestiaries, 29 “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand” (Simic), 186–87 Bhabha, Homi K., 154 Biopower, 5 “Bird Came Down the Walk, A” (Dickinson), 126, 129–31 Birds, 206n33; allegory and eagle, 30; in “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” 126, 129–31; “The Blackcap” and, 100–2; “Crows” and, 188–89; “The Cuckoo Song” and, 87–89, 112–13; in “An Event,” 75–76; in “The Flight of Birds,” 103–4; in “The Green Linnet,” 99–100, 128; “History” and, 183–85; in “Hurt Hawks,” 140–41; in “Message to Po Chu-I, A,” 77–79; “The Morality of

Poetry” and, 177–79; in “The Nightingale’s Nest,” 100, 101, 102–3, 195; in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (Whitman), 132–34, 161; “The Owl” and, 185–86; Perkins on, 129; “Raven, Sotto Voce” and, 165; in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 57–58, 69, 71, 124; in romantic period, 93; rooster in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 38, 40; “Shrike” and, 114; in “The Sparrow,” 142–45; in “Telling the Barn Swallow,” 75; “Tern” and, 114–15; in “To Christ Our Lord,” 69; “The Wood-Pile” and, 135–37; in “The Wryneck’s Nest,” 102; in “You’ll know Her—by Her Foot—,” 105–7 Birdsong, 204n7, 204n10, 205n25; “The Darkling Thrush” and, 134–35; “The Green Linnet” and, 99–100; meaning in, 98–99; in “The Nightingale,” 93–96, 98; “Ode to a Nightingale” and, 95, 96–98, 129, 134–35; in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 132–33, 161; in “The Progress of Rhyme,” 104–5 Bishop, Elizabeth, 70, 138–40, 148 “Blackcap, The” (Clare), 100–2 Blake, William, 73; “Auguries of Innocence” by, 71; “The Lamb” by, 91; “The Tyger” by, 91–92 “Blessing, A” (Wright), 147–48 Bloch, Howard, 29 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 33 “Boy of Winander” (Wordsworth), 127–28, 131 Branch Will Not Break, The (Wright), 179 Calarco, Matthew, 10, 209n13; on anthropomorphism, 11 “Caribou” (Warren), 141–42 Carson, Elizabeth, 45–48 “Cat as Cat, The” (Levertov), 148–49

23 0 IND EX

Categorization, 53–54, 194; animals and, 19–20; in “The Animals of That Country,” 64; Coetzee on, 20; Elizabeth Costello on, 18, 20; of poetry, 19; problem of, 23–24; racism and sexism and, 20; species poem and, 84; taxonomy and, 18–19; time period as, 21; Whitman and, 61. See also Allegory, animal as; Animals, as poetry category; Authorial identity; Hybridity; National identity; Platonic ideal; Individual animal poetry Cats: in “The Cat as Cat,” 148–49; “Jubilate Agno” and, 125; in “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat,” 21, 48–51, 200n29 Cavendish, Margaret, 45–48 Cave paintings, prehistoric: animal as divine in, 71; of Chauvet, 7; hybridity in, 155; realistic animals in, 7, 32 Charles I: allegory of, in “The Hunting of the Stag,” 45, 47; fall of, 45 Chaucer, Geoffrey. See “Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The” Chauvet, cave paintings of. See Cave paintings, prehistoric Clare, John, 206n33; “The Blackcap” by, 100–2; “The Flight of Birds” by, 103–4; natural beauty and language for, 105; “The Nightingale’s Nest” by, 100, 101, 102–3, 195; “The Progress of Rhyme” by, 104–5; “The Wryneck’s Nest” by, 102 Close reading, 193, 194 Coetzee, J. M.: on categories, 20; on human-animal distinction, 16–17; The Lives of Animals by, 4, 13–17, 82, 166–67; Platonic ideal of, 21–22; on selfconsciousness, 17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 73; “The Nightingale” by, 93–96, 98; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by, 57–58, 69, 71, 124; on symbol and allegory, 31

“Come Into Animal Presence” (Levertov), 70 Community, animals as, 25; “Advice to a Prophet” and, 76–77; animal and environmental rights and causes and, 73, 77–78, 82; “The Animals” and, 79–82; animals as companions and, 79–80; “An Event” and, 75–76; “Four Motions for the Pea Vines” and, 73–74; individual animals and, 124; kinship and, 73, 77; Kumin and, 74–75; Merwin and, 77–79; in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 40–41 “Corsen’s Inlet” (Ammons), 73 “Cows on Killing Day, The” (Murray), 82, 165–66 Creaturely Poetics (Pick), 3 Creeley, Robert, 181–83 Critical analysis: animal studies and, 13; flexible and hybrid, 24; specific poets and, 13 “Crows” (Simic), 188–89 “Cuckoo Song, The” (anonymous), 87, 112–13; anonymity and, 88–89; spring in, 88 Culture: animals and, 2, 195; “The Animals of That Country” and, 63–64; Australian, animals and, 203n47; cultural theory, 6; in “The Monkeys,” 66–67; otherness in, 5; poetry and, 5–6; species and, 86, 91; survival advantage and, 32 “Current, The” (Merwin), 77 “Darkling Thrush, The” (Hardy), 134–35 Darwin, Charles, 19, 86 Darwinian revolution, 1, 2 Death: artistic creation and, 173; in “The Bear” (Kinnell), 175; elegies of animals and, 149–53; in “History,” 185; in “In the Mountain Tent,” 68; in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 133–34; of pets, 151–52; in “Rime of the

IND E X 231

Ancient Mariner,” 57; in “To Christ Our Lord,” 69–70. See also Animal slaughter Deer: agency for, 45; in “The Most of It,” 137; in “Two Look at Two,” 137–38; woman as hunted, in “Lyke as a huntsman,” 43–45 Deleuze, Gilles, 121–23 Derrida, Jacques, 25, 181, 208n8; humananimal distinctions and, 18, 43, 54, 56, 191; individual animals and, 123; new categories of discourse for, 54–55; on philosophy, 7 De Waal, Frans, 186, 198n24 Dickey, James, 117, 211n42; animals as poetry category and, 67–69; becoming animal and, 68–69; “For the Last Wolverine” by, 171–73; “The Heaven of Animals” by, 67–68; “In the Mountain Tent” by, 68; multihybrid for, 172–73; “The Sheep Child” by, 170–71; therioprimitivism and, 67 Dickinson, Emily: “A Bird Came Down the Walk” by, 126, 129–31; literal animal poetry influence of, 1; naturalism and, 105; “You’ll know Her—by Her Foot—” by, 105–7 Divinity: animal as poetry category and, 70–71; cave paintings and, 71; “Jubilate Agno” and, 125; “The Lamb” and, 91; Levertov and, 211n49; in “The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb,” 34, 35 Dog: allegory and, 30; “Dream of Koa Returning” and, 153; “A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal” and, 151 “Dream of Koa Returning” (Merwin), 153 Ecocritics, 27 Edson, Russell: “Ape and Coffee” by, 189–90; “Ape” by, 190–91; “Where Charity Begins” by, 191 Elegies, of animals, 149; criticism for, 152–53; “Dream of Koa Returning” as,

153; “The Mower” as, 151–52; “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” as, 150–51 Elephants: in “Melanchthon,” 160–62, 212n10; Wylie on, 13 Elizabeth Costello (fictional character), 198n30; on allegory, 27; animal studies and, 4, 13–14; on categorization, 18, 20; on human-animal distinctions, 16–17; on “The Jaguar,” 14–18; on kind and species, 17 Environment-poem, 8 “Event, An” (Wilbur), 75–76 Extinction, 173; in “For a Coming Extinction,” 77; rate of, 2–3; Wilson on, 3 Fables, animal: allegory and, 28; anthropomorphism in, 29; Flores on, 28–29; in Middle Ages, 29–30; Needler on, 29; Palmeri on, 30; Renaissance sonnet and, 43; Salisbury on, 28; speaking animals in, 32; state power and, 29; success of, 32; wisdom of animal and human in, 32–33. See also “Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The” (Chaucer); “Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb, The” (Henryson) Factory farm animal, 82; “Pigs” and, 165–67 “Feeding Time” (Kumin), 74 Fish: collapse of, stocks, 3; hierarchy of animals and, 120–21 Fletcher, Angus: on allegory, 30; on environment-poem, 8 “Flight of Birds, The” (Clare), 103–4 Flores, Nona, 28–29 “For a Coming Extinction” (Merwin), 77 “For the Animals” (Raab), anthropomorphizing in, 71–72 “For the Last Wolverine” (Dickey), 171–73 “Four Motions for the Pea Vines” (Ammons), 73–74 “Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals” (Stewart), 72–73

23 2IND EX

Fox, 29; allegory and, 30 Frost, Robert: “The Bear” by, 62; “The Most of It” by, 137; “Mower” poem of, 151–52; “The Pasture” by, 135; “Two Look at Two” by, 137–38; “White-Tailed Hornet” by, 62; “The Wood-Pile” by, 135–37 Garber, Frederick, 127 “Goat” (Kinsella), 195–96 Graham, Jorie, 183–85 Gray, Thomas, 21, 48–51, 200n29 “Green Linnet, The” (Wordsworth): as individual animal poem, 128; song of, 99–100 Grendel (fictional character): humananimal distinction and, 42; as hybrid, 156 Gross, Aaron, 208n5 Guattari, Felix, 121–23 Haraway, Donna, 19 Hardy, Thomas, 134–35 “Heaven of Animals, The” (Dickey), 67 Hedgehog: “The Hedgehog,” 83, 118; “The Mower” and, 151–52 “Hedgehog, The” (Muldoon), 83, 118 Henryson, Robert, 33–36 Hierarchy, 55, 85; in allegory, 31; in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 36 Hip-hop, 6 “History” (Graham), 183–84; death in, 185 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 116 Hornet, 62 Horses: “Amanda Dreams She Has Died and Gone to the Elysian Fields” and, 146–47; in “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem,” 146; “A Blessing” and, 147–48; in “Song of Myself,” 131–32 Hughes, Ted, 22; allegory and, 14–15; “The Jaguar” by, 14–18, 67; predatory creatures of, 116; primitivist tradition of, 113; “Shrike” by, 114; species poem

and, 113–16; symbolism and, 114; “Tern” by, 114–15 Human-animal distinction, 10, 53; allegory and, 30, 31; in animal studies, 5; Coetzee on, 16–17; Derrida on, 18, 43, 54, 56, 191; Edson and, 191; Grendel and, 42, 156; Judeo-Christian tradition and, 43, 54; resistance to allegorize, 30; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and, 57 “Hunting of the Stag, The” (Cavendish), 48; animalizing of hunters in, 47; Charles I allegory in, 45, 47; as overdetermined, 46; sins of stag in, 45–46; violence of hunt in, 46–47 “Hurt Hawks” (Jeffers), 140–41 Hybridity, 23; “Animal Acts” and, 186–87; “The Animal” and, 181–83; “Ape” and, 190–91; “Ape and Coffee” as, 189–90; Bakhtin on, 154; “Bats’ Ultrasound” as, 163–64; “The Bear” (Kinnell) and, 173–76; Bhabha and, 154; biological roots of, 155; cave paintings and, 155; “Crows” and, 188–89; Dickey and multihybrid, 172–73; “For the Last Wolverine” as, 171–73; Greek epic poems and, 155–56; Grendel and, 156; “History” and, 183–85; Kafka and, 170; limitations of categorization and, 26; in literature, 156; “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” and, 179–81; “Melanchthon” as, 160–62, 212n10; Moore and, 156–57; “The Morality of Poetry” and, 177–79; origin of, 154–55; “The Owl” and, 185–86; “The Plumet Basilisk” as, 157–59; power of poetry and, 176–77; “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” as, 163; The Savage Mind and, 172; “The Sheep Child” as, 170–71; “Teaching a Sea Turtle Suddenly Given the Power of Language, I Begin by Saying” as, 168–69; thinking through language and, 185;

IND EX 233

understanding and representation in, 183–85; “Where Charity Begins” and, 191. See also Speaking animals Individual animal poetry, 23, 194, 208n5, 209n9; “Amanda Dreams She Has Died and Gone to the Elysian Fields” as, 146–47; animal rights and, 120–21, 123; anthropocentrism and, 123, 124; anthropomorphism and, 126; antihuman in, 141–42; “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” as, 146; “A Bird Came Down the Walk” as, 126, 129–31; “A Blessing” as, 147–48; “The Cat as Cat” as, 148–49; communities and, 124; “The Darkling Thrush” as, 134–35; Derrida and, 123; elegies of animals and, 149–53; “The Green Linnet” as, 128; “Hurt Hawks” as, 140–41; “Jubilate Agno” as, 125–26, 209n12; lyric poem and, 26; “The Moose” as, 70, 138–40, 148; moral status and, 120; “The Most of It” as, 137; “Ode to a Nightingale” as, 129, 134–35; “On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals” and, 119–20; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” as, 132–34, 161; pack or herd and, 122–23, 142; “The Pasture” by, 135; pets and, 123, 145–46, 148; romanticism of, 25; romantic period and, 129; “Song of Myself ” and, 131–32; “The Sparrow” as, 142–45; “To a Skylark” as, 129; “The Wood-Pile” as, 135–37; Wordsworth and, 127–28 Infidel Poetics (Tiffany): “Cuckoo Song” in, 88–89; on obscurity of lyric poems, 89 Ingold, Tim, 55 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society: Minding Animals (2009), 3 “In the Mountain Tent” (Dickey), 68 Inuit culture, 214n31; animals and, 56; “The Bear” (Kinnell) and, 173–76

“Jaguar, The” (Hughes), 67; animal being in, 15; Elizabeth Costello on, 14–18; kind and species in, 17–18; misreading in, 15–16; otherness in, 16 Jamieson, Dale, 12 Jeffers, Robinson, 140–41 Jerboa, 207n44; “The Jerboa,” 108–10 “Jerboa, The” (Moore), 108–10 “Jubilate Agno” (Smart), 126, 209n12; soul in, 125 Judeo-Christian tradition: human-animal distinction and, 43, 54; soul as individuality in, 125; “The Tyger” and, 92 Kafka, Franz, 170 Keats, John: negative capability of, 7, 195; “Ode to a Nightingale” by, 95, 96–98, 129, 134–35 Kinnell, Galway: “The Bear” by, 173–76; “To Christ Our Lord” by, 69–70, 73 Kinsella, John, 195–96 Kumin, Maxine: “Amanda Dreams She Has Died and Gone to the Elysian Fields” by, 146–47; animal connection for, 74–75; “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” by, 146; “Feeding Time” by, 74; “Telling the Barn Swallow” by, 75 Lamb: in “The Lamb,” 91; in “The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb,” 33–36 “Lamb, The” (Blake), 91 Lambert, Helen, 164 Larkin, Philip, 151–52 Lehmann, Geoffrey, 79–82 Leopold, Aldo, 84–85 Levertov, Denise, 211n49; “The Cat as Cat” by, 148–49; “Come Into Animal Presence” by, 70 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 172 Linnaeus, Carl, 55; taxonomic project of, 85–86, 105 Lion, 30

23 4IND E X

Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee), 4, 15–17, 82; animal slaughter in, 166–67; categorization in, 20; complexity of form in, 13–14. See also Elizabeth Costello (fictional character) Lopez, Barry, 33, 214n28 “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (Wright), 179–81 “Lyke as a huntsman,” sonnet 67 (Spenser), 43; woman as deer in, 44–45 “Lyrebird” (Murray), 164–65 Lyric poems, 23; as autobiographical, 53; “The Cuckoo Song” as, 87–89, 112–13; individual animal poetry and, 26; obscurity and, 89; romantic lyric form and, 6 Malamud, Randy, 27, 198n24; on Moore, 11; Poetic Animals and Animal Souls by, 11–12; respect to animals and, 13 “Man and Animals in Recent Poetry” (Atkins): animal-oriented criticism in, 2; literal animal poetry in, 1–2 Mangum, Teresa, 3 Marvell, Andrew, 151 McHugh, Susan, 2 Medieval literature: Aesopic tradition in, 29. See also Henryson, Robert “Melanchthon” (Moore), 212n10; comedy in, 160; instability in, 161–62 Melville, Herman, 121–22 Menely, Tobias, 45, 46 Merwin, W. S.: “The Current” by, 77; “Dream of Koa Returning” by, 153; environmental and animal causes of, 77–78; “For a Coming Extinction” by, 77; “A Message to Po Chu-I” by, 77–79; The Shadow of Sirius by, 153 “Message to Po Chu-I, A” (Merwin), 77–79 Middle Ages, 29–30

Misogyny, 39, 51 Moby Dick (Melville), 121–22 Modernism, 18, 112 Monkeys, 65–66 “Monkeys, The” (Moore), 65; culture and art in, 66–67; zoo and, 66–67 Moore, Marianne: abstraction and, 65; hybridity and, 156–57; “The Jerboa” by, 108–10; Malamud on, 11; “Melanchthon” by, 160–62, 212n10; “The Monkeys” by, 65–67; “The Pangolin” by, 110–12; “The Plumet Basilisk” by, 157–59; speaking animal for, 159–60; species poems of, 107–8 “Moose, The” (Bishop), 70, 138–39, 148; emotion and encounter in, 140 “Morality of Poetry, The” (Wright), 177–79 “Most of It, The” (Frost), 137 “Mower, The” (Larkin), 151–52 Muldoon, Paul: defining species for, 84; “The Hedgehog” by, 83, 118 Murray, Les: “Bats’ Ultrasound” by, 163–64; “The Cows on Killing Day” by, 82, 165–66; “Lyrebird” by, 164–65; “On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals” by, 119–20; “Pigs” by, 165–66; “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” by, 163; “Raven, Sotto Voce” by, 165; translations of, 162 Nagel, Thomas, 163, 192 National identity, 20–21 “Natural Linguistics” (Auden), 59, 60 Needler, Howard, 29 Negative capability, 7, 195 “Nightingale, The” (Coleridge), 93–94, 98; animal signs and, 95; emotional response to birdsong in, 96 “Nightingale’s Nest, The” (Clare), 100, 195; human threat in, 102–3; misidentification of gender in, 101

INDEX235

Norris, Margot, 70–71; Beasts of the Modern Imagination by, 202n25 Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4 “Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The” (Chaucer): animal as indefinable in, 37; animalizing in, 38–39, 40, 41–42; anthropomorphism in, 37; blurring human-animal boundaries in, 41, 42; community in, 40–41; dream in, 37–38; general animality in, 56–57; hierarchy and authority in, 36; in iambic pentameter, 37; rooster in, 38, 40; self-delusion in, 40; sex in, 38–39; women blamed in, 40 “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” (Gray), 200n29; allegory in, 21, 48–49; misogyny in, 51; voyeurism in, 50; women as cats in, 48–50 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 95, 96–98; as individual animal poem, 129, 134–35 “On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals” (Murray), 119–20 Otherness: broadening scope of, 13; in culture, 5; in “The Jaguar,” 16; in species poem, 89 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (Whitman): anthropomorphism in, 133; birdsong in, 132–33, 161; death understood in, 133–34; speaking animal in, 161 “Owl, The” (Stewart), 185–86 Palmeri, Frank, 30 Pangolin, 207n47; “The Pangolin,” 110–12 “Pangolin, The” (Moore), 110–12 “Pasture, The” (Frost), 135 Patriarchal oppression, 44 “Peace of Wild Things, The” (Berry), 58; despair in, 59 Perkins, David, 126–27; on animal poetry in romantic period, 4; on bird poetry, 129

Pets, 3; “The Cat as Cat” and, 148–49; death of, 151–52; emotional impact of, 148; individual animal poetry and, 123, 145–46, 148. See also Cats; Dog; Elegies, of animals Philosophy: animal studies in, 4, 7–8; Derrida on, 7 Pick, Anat, 3 Pig: allegory and, 30; “Pigs,” 165–66 “Pigs” (Murray), 165–66 Platonic ideal: Coetzee and, 21–22; poems in, 22. See also “Jaguar, The” (Hughes) “Plumet Basilisk, The” (Moore), 157, 159; doubleness in, 158 Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Malamud), 11–12 Poetry: absence of literary animal studies in, 3–4; as anti-anthropocentric, 11; Bate on, 8; culture and, 5–6; ecological awareness and, 8; Fletcher on, 8; hip-hop and, 6; reproduction and, 9–10; Williams on, 6–7. See also specific topics Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Stewart), 9 Pound, Ezra, 78 “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” (Murray), 163 “Progress of Rhyme, The” (Clare), 104–5 Raab, Lawrence, 71–72 Racism, 5; categorization and, 20; in “For the Animals,” 72 “Raven, Sotto Voce” (Murray), 165 Regan, Tom, 121, 208n2 Renaissance sonnet: “Lyke as a huntsman” as, 43–45; women in, 44–45 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 69, 124; death in, 57; human-animal distinction in, 57; pantheism in, 71; self-consciousness in, 58

23 6 IND EX

Rogers, Pattiann, 22; “Teaching a Sea Turtle Suddenly Given the Power of Language, I Begin by Saying” by, 168–69 Romantic period, 1, 4; allegories in, 47–48; animal rights and, 200n28; birds in, 93; individual animal poetry and, 129; species poem in, 90, 93 “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), 63 Salisbury, Joyce, 28 Savage Mind, The (Levi-Strauss), 172 Scigaj, Leonard, 8 “Sea-Elephant, The” (Williams), 112–13 Self-consciousness: Coetzee on, 17; in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 58 self-knowledge, 17–18 Sexism, 20 Sexual desire, 39, 212n4; sexual allegory in “Song of Myself,” 61; in “The Sheep Child,” 170 Shackelford, Aaron, 107 Shadow of Sirius, The (Merwin), 153 “Sheep Child, The” (Dickey): as myth, 171; sexual desire in, 170 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 21, 129 Shepard, Paul, 54 “Shrike” (Hughes), 114 Shukin, Nicole, 5 Simic, Charles: “Animal Acts” by, 186–87; “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand” by, 186–87; “Crows” by, 188–89; “Strictly Buccolic” by, 187 Skinner, Jonathan, 105 “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (Wordsworth), 150–51 Smart, Christopher, 125–26, 209n12 “Song of Myself” (Whitman), 60; individual animal poetry and, 131–32; quasi-sexual union in, 132; sexual allegory in, 61 “Sparrow, The” (Williams), 142; absurd and profound in, 145;

anthropomorphism and, 143–45; poetic truth in, 143 Speaking animals, 52, 133; animal slaughter poems and, 82, 165–67; anthropomorphism and, 167; “Bats’ Ultrasound” and, 163–64; Benjamin and, 162; children’s literature and, 159–60; comedy and, 160; “The Cows on Killing Day” and, 82, 165–66; in fables, 32; instability and, 161–62; “Lyrebird” and, 164–65; “Melanchthon” and, 160–62, 212n10; Moore and, 159–60; in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 161; “Pigs” and, 165–66; predation and, 168; “Raven, Sotto Voce” and, 165; “Turning” and, 167–68 Species: biologists on, 84; culture and, 86, 91; environmentalism compared to animal rights for, 86; Genesis and naming of, 85; hierarchy and, 85; member recognition for, 118. See also Taxonomy Species poem: animal and environmental causes and, 117; animals categorizing animals and, 84; bird poems in romantic period, 93; birdsong and, 93–99; “The Blackcap” as, 100–2; characteristics and, 87; “The Cuckoo Song” as, 87–89, 112–13; cultural knowledge and, 91; essence of the species in, 22–23, 83; “The Flight of Birds” as, 103–4; “The Green Linnet” as, 99–100; “The Hedgehog” as, 83, 118; Hughes and, 113–16; human threat in, 102–3; “The Jerboa” as, 108–10; “The Lamb” as, 91; of Moore, 107–8; motivations for, 117; “The Nightingale” as, 93–96, 98; “The Nightingale’s Nest” as, 100, 101, 102–3, 195; observation and, 86; “Ode to a Nightingale” as, 95, 96–98, 129; otherness in, 89; “The Pangolin” as, 110–12; in romantic

IND E X 237

period, 90, 93; “The Sea-Elephant” as, 112–13; taxonomy and, 83, 84, 85–86; “Tern” as, 114–15; “The Tyger” as, 91–92; “The Wryneck’s Nest” as, 102; Yoon and, 84; “You’ll know Her—by Her Foot—” as, 105–7 Spenser, Edmund, 43–45 Stag, 45–48 State power, 29 Stewart, Susan: on anthropomorphism, 9, 10; “Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals” by, 72–73; “The Owl” by, 185–86; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by, 9; on reproduction and poetry, 9–10 “Strictly Buccolic” (Simic), 186–87 Subjectivity, 55, 123, 127; “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and, 192 Sustainable poetry, 8 “Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb, The” (Henryson), 33; Aesopic tradition and, 36; categorical meanings in, 35–36; communion in, 34; divinity in, 34, 35; law in, 35; tyrants in, 34 “Talking to Mice” (Auden), 59 Taxonomy, 204n5; arbitrary patterns and, 19; categorization and, 18–19; Linnaeus and, 85–86, 105; species poem and, 83, 84, 85–86 “Teaching a Sea Turtle Suddenly Given the Power of Language, I Begin by Saying” (Rogers), 168–69 “Telling the Barn Swallow” (Kumin), 75 “There Was a Boy” (Wordsworth), 105 therio-primitivism, 67 Thoreau, Henry David, 21 Tiffany, Daniel, 88–89 Tiger, 205n19; in “The Tyger,” 91–92 “To a Skylark” (Shelley), 21; as individual animal poem, 129 “To Christ Our Lord” (Kinnell), 73; conflict and death in, 69–70

“To the Unseeable Animal” (Berry), 70 “Turning” (Ammons), 167–68 Turtle, 168–69 “Two Look at Two” (Frost), 137–38 “Tyger, The” (Blake), 91; Judeo-Christian tradition and, 92 Uexküll, Jacob von, 52 Vendler, Helen, 97 Walden (Thoreau), 21 Warren, Robert Penn, 141–42 Whale, 77 “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (Nagel), 163, 192 Wheatley, Edward, 29 “Where Charity Begins” (Edson), 191 “White-Tailed Hornet” (Frost), 62 Whitman, Walt: categories and, 61; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” by, 132–34, 161; “Song of Myself” by, 60–61, 131–32 “Why Look at Animals” (Berger), 3 Wilbur, Richard: “Advice to a Prophet” by, 76–77; “Beasts” by, 71; “Event, An” by, 75–76 Williams, Williams Carlos, 183; on poetry, 6–7; “The Sea-Elephant” by, 112–13; “The Sparrow” by, 142–45 Wilson, E. O., 3 “Windhover, The” (Hopkins), 116 Wolf: allegory and, 30; in “The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb,” 33–36 Wolfe, Cary, 5 Wolverine: “For the Last Wolverine,” 171–73; in The Savage Mind, 172 Women: as cats in “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat,” 48–50; as hunted animal, 43–45; in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” 40; in Renaissance sonnets, 44–45 “Wood-Pile, The” (Frost), 135–37 Woolf, Virginia, 88

238 IND E X

Wordsworth, William, 6; “Boy of Winander” by, 127–28, 131; consciousness for, 128; “The Green Linnet” by, 99–100, 128; individual animal poetry and, 127–28; “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” by, 150–51; “There Was a Boy” by, 105 Wright, James: animal as a sign for, 181; “A Blessing” by, 147–48; The Branch Will Not Break by, 179; “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in

Pine Island, Minnesota” by, 179–81; “The Morality of Poetry” by, 177–79 “Wryneck’s Nest, The” (Clare), 102 Wylie, Dan, 12; on elephants in southern Africa, 13 Yeats, W. B., 63 Yoon, Carol Kaesuk, 84, 199n37 “You’ll know Her—by Her Foot—” (Dickinson), 105–6; misidentification in, 107