Poetry and Animals

142THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

Of forest, each hulk

Lurching, each lifted leg leaving a blackness as though

Of a broken snowshoe partly withdrawn.

The speaker’s highly mediated perception of the caribou still brings
him in close, reflecting our longing to see wild animals. He moves from
seeing the herd to seeing individual creatures, “single, snow dusted.”
The caribou give no sign of responding to the human gaze. They simply
disappear from the speaker’s view. Nonetheless, this attenuated contact
still allows the speaker to conclude that these creatures have a “mission,”
and that “they move through the world and breathe destiny. / Their
destiny is as bright as crystal, as pure / As a dream of zero. Their destiny /
Must resemble happiness.” Though they are a herd, this sense of their
purpose and agency comes from seeing their shared movement as acts
of individual purpose. The happiness of seeing them, the poem suggests,
comes from even just a faint awareness of this agency. We think of a
herd as having some kind of collective will, but the poem suggests that
we might also see this as multiple acts of will, collected.
The great poet of the specific and concrete is William Carlos Williams,
and although he did not write many poems about animals, he does have
a few terrific ones. “The Sparrow” self-consciously reveals much of the
complexity of imagining and representing the individual animal. It is
both an earnest poem of lyric encounter and a subtle parody, a poem
about an individual bird, sparrows in general, and in an oblique way the
poet’s father, to whom it is addressed and for whom it serves as elegy.^35
The poem’s opening lines describe the initial encounter with a bird and
nicely set up its conflicts between the casual and the formal, the trivial
and the profound, and the physical world and the ideas we attach to it.

The sparrow

who comes to sit at my window

is a poetic truth

more than a natural one.

His voice,

his movements,