Poetry and Animals

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE103

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 pre-
cision 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,