136THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYA small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.^27That the speaker never identifies the bird suggests that he is more inter-
ested in it as a single creature than as a member of a species. He also
does not see it or know it well enough to identify it, perhaps thus ironi-
cally suggesting that the speaker is ultimately more interested in him-
self than the bird. The speaker’s obsessive self-consciousness (that is, his
awareness of his own identity and its purpose and agency) is indeed one
of the ironic themes of the poem as a whole. And yet the bird does hold
his careful attention, and the speaker’s seemingly casual anthropomor-
phizing of it allows him to project or symbolize his own solipsism. This
remarkable and deceptive passage in fact gets at much of the complex-
ity of our attempts to approach and know the single animal. In the first
place, it shows how the speaker’s (and our) interest in the animal is
nearly automatic and unremarkable. That the speaker notices the move-
ment (and not the sound) of the bird, and follows it with his gaze, is
presented as natural. Indeed, the speaker continues to report that he
pays attention to the bird even after he dismisses it by saying “I forgot
him.” It also shows the naturalness of the bird’s apparent interest in him.
The poem thus suggests that any two individual creatures alone together
pay each other attention, regard each other as having possibly malevo-
lent agency, regardless of species difference. Both bird and speaker, after
all, take “Everything said as personal to himself.” The most delightful