THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY127and ethical topics.^14 Other romantic poets, especially William Word-
sworth, 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 impor-
tance 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 “Anec-
dote 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 para-
dox 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 bound-
ary 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 High-
land 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 occa-
sion for his lyrics, but his few animal poems follow a similar pattern.
The best example is the “Boy of Winander” passage in The Prelude (a lso
published as “There Was a Boy”). Even when the speaker or the boy of