128THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYWinander 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 meta-
phors 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.^17Though 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 ani-
mal 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 rec-
ollection of many encounters.
It seems clear to me that Wordsworth is genuinely interested in ani-
mals 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