POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE89to 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 pleas-
ing 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 ani-
mals 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 obscu-
rity, 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 morphol-
ogy, vocalization, coloring, and behavior), which is necessarily some-
thing strange to our own human identity and also expressive of our
own animal being, our existence in the natural world. Poetry incorpo-
rates and mimics the otherness of animal being, even as it reveals and
shares it.