Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY141

powerful statement of belief in the meaning of the hawk’s life, that it
possessed something that Jeffers might as well have called a soul, even
if he didn’t believe in the concept:

What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river

cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

For most of the poem, the speaker has been arguing for his own tran-
scendence of the human by embracing an idea of the wild animal as
presented by the hawk—that he can now see some aspect of the natural
world that he could not before. At the end of the poem, though, he sug-
gests that the experience with the hawk has made him believe it has itself
transcended reality.
Wildness refers on the one hand to animals that are not
domesticated— not bred and not brought into the home.^33 On the other
hand, it also refers, as Jeffers argues in his poetry, to the antihuman,
that purely biological life that human culture appears to transcend.
Contact with a wild animal can give brief awareness of this life, which
has somehow remained beyond the range of human influence. Robert
Penn Warren’s poem “Caribou” makes a similar argument in response
to a fleeting encounter with a small herd of presumably migrating arctic
caribou that the speaker observes through binoculars from a small air-
craft.^34 Most of the poem’s details emphasize the remoteness of the ani-
mals and the ephemerality of perceiving them.

Shadows shift from the whiteness of forest, small

As they move on the verge of moon-shaven distance. They grow

clear,

As binoculars find the hairline adjustment.

They seem to drift from the purity of forest.

Single, snow dusted above, each shadow appears, each

Slowly detached from the white anonymity