THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY129mode of the genre are John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Both are undoubtedly inspired by actual
encounters with real birds, are addressed to single birds, and reflect the
fact that many birds (especially the small reclusive songbirds these poets
write about) are mostly heard rather than seen. I think David Perkins is
right that though the birds of these central romantic poems are not nec-
essarily humanized, the poems nonetheless “transform natural behav-
ior of the birds into metaphors of human desires,”^18 though resisting
this tendency can only ever be a matter of degree. The actual encounter is
overweighed by the requirements of high literary art, so that the poems
ultimately reflect more about the poet and his imagination than the
being that inspired it. It is as though the poets are still too encumbered
by literary and cultural conventions about the animal, or even by embar-
rassment, to allow the animal to be the poem’s central topic.
I have been arguing that we can find in the romantic period the ori-
gins of the lyric of animal encounter. I have also suggested that it evolves
into a form that ultimately allows the animal a more central place in the
poem and in our culture. An old-fashioned historicist genealogy of the
genre would explore who among later poets read Wordsworth’s encoun-
ter lyrics, including the ones on animals, and took them as a serious
model for their own work. I suspect later works are a refashioning or
evolution of the models created by Wordsworth and Keats, produced
not simply by a literary desire to imitate previous authors and genres but
by the desire to represent meaningful experience with a literary form
suited to express the meaning of that experience. The romantic lyric
allows for the reflection of the immediacy of the encounter, signals the
importance of it, and because lyric is inherently a kind of fragment,
leaves the meaning of the event and of the animal itself unfixed.
A paradigmatic and influential example of the lyric of animal
encounter is Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” which I repro-
duce here in its entirety.
A Bird, came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—