Poetry and Animals

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE105

least approaching the reality of the song of this species. While reminis-
cent 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 founda-
tion for his own understanding of what poetry can do. Indeed, Clare
insists on the deep connections between words and music that bird-
song 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, ani-
mality, 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 will-
ingness 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 Emer-
son’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—