Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY131

understanding—the bird needs to know that the speaker means no
harm. The speaker’s approach fails, as does the initial humanizing atti-
tude of the speaker to the bird. The bird refuses the encounter, and the
speaker has paid it special attention. Yet the bird’s flight offers a new
occasion for the poem, a new act of observation. The suddenly more
artful language, the sumptuous metaphors of swimming and rowing in
air, highlight the bird’s difference from the speaker and signals the real
epiphany of the poem, produced by the sudden awareness of the bird’s
difference and independence. At the same time, this language expresses
the speaker’s awe at the bird, a sense that the bird has revealed some-
thing of itself, and that the speaker’s act of attention has been rewarded
after all.
Walt Whitman has also powerfully represented encounters with
individual animals in his poetry. Section 32 of “Song of Myself,” like the
“Boy of Winander” section of Wordsworth’s Prelude, presents an exam-
ple how such encounters produce lyric moments within larger narrative
poems. The section begins in abstraction, with the speaker describing
animals in general as a way of making a broad critique of the human
condition: animals “are so placid and self-contained.... / They do not
sweat and whine about their condition.... / They do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God.” From this simple idea of the animal as
the not human, the speaker approaches the animal, choosing a single
companion from the collective—a movement also from the idea of the
animal to the actual body of an animal.

Myself moving forward then and now and forever,...

Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on

brotherly terms.

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my

caresses,

Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,

Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,

Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly

moving.