138THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYlooking for nothing in particular.^30 There they encounter their version
of an animal echo—a doe and a buck, each of whom meets their gaze
and passes on “unscared. / Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke
from.” Here as well the individual animals are elemental and symbolic.
The encounter produces in the couple “a great wave... / As if the earth
in one unlooked-for favor / Had made them certain earth returned their
love.” Interestingly, though the man and woman travel as a pair, the doe
a nd t he buck arrive a nd depar t separately, suggesting t hat what is echoed
here is not necessarily the love between the man and the woman but
love between creatures as individuals—each encounter is a powerful
confirmation of the idea that there may be happiness when we peacefully
meet the gaze, and address the existence of, another individual creature.
Poets are drawn to reflect on encounters with animals because these
experiences are deeply meaningful, and because that meaning is neces-
sarily difficult to articulate, since it involves some attempt to understand
the animal. Focusing on an individual animal induces one to wonder
about the sentience of that animal and its singular perception of its world.
Poems of encounter suggest the reality of the individual being rather
than the species. Moreover, all of the poems I have examined offer the
possibility of transcending one’s individual humanity through contact
with a nonhuman animal. This transcendence is one way, as Frost sug-
gests in all three of the poems I have just looked at, of overcoming our
isolation, not just as a species, but as conscious individuals. Contact with
an animal produces a shock of surprise, recognition, joy, or fear, which is
ultimately why this is such a consistent topic of poetry (and art in general).
Our visceral experience of proximity, of narrowing the gap that sepa-
rates us, is what it means to come in contact with the individual animal,
rather than with ideas about animals or species. Such contact also pro-
duces in the human perceiver a sense of wonder and care and provides
evidence that our own bodies yearn for contact with, or at least direct
awareness of, other bodies, including those of nonhuman animals.
There are hundreds of modern poems that depict the thrill of encoun-
tering other animals, many of them already familiar, though critics tend
to read them as primarily about human self-exploration rather than as
about the significance of animals. An important and powerful example is