Poetry and Animals

132THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,

His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around

and return.^20

This is also a movement from philosophy to lyric, from thinking to
being and acting. Typical of Whitman, the speaker also moves quickly
from observation to physical contact. Though it is always possible to
think of riding a horse as a form of domination and mastery, Whitman
evokes it here as a quasi-sexual union of rider and horse, producing
mutual pleasure (as in Philip Sidney’s ironic sonnet, discussed in chap-
ter 2). Riding the horse expresses the speaker’s desire to be in contact
with the single animal, and the fullness of experience and meaning that
contact gives. This passage is also a way for Whitman to express alle-
giance to his own animal body.^21
Whitman’s most ambitious lyric of animal encounter is “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” It is one of his best-known poems, perhaps
because it is in some sense also his most conventional—a romantic lyric
that finds in birdsong a trope for the poet’s own creativity. It is impor-
tant for this chapter because it depicts one of the world’s greatest poets
making the case that his poetic imagination has its origin in an encounter
with a single bird. In this most Wordsworthian of Whitman’s poems,
the adult speaker, inspired by hearing a mockingbird song, recalls a
summer when as a boy he paid special heed to a particular mocking-
bird. The speaker tells the story of the boy’s encounters with the bird,
through which the boy learns of the bird’s loss of its mate. He recalls
that “every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, /
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating” the bird’s singing and nest-
ing. When the “she-bird” fails to return to the nest, “nor ever appeared
again,” the boy continues to observe and hear the male bird: “all sum-
mer in the sound of the sea... / I heard at intervals the remaining one,
the he-bird, / The solitary guest from Alabama.”^22 The speaker insists
on this connection with the single bird, whose song and story “I of all
men know,” including his guess that the bird has migrated from Ala-
bama (which is unlikely). That he has “listen’d long and long” to the bird’s
remarkable singing leads to the poem’s most audacious trope: the