Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY143

his habits—

how he loves to

flutter his wings

in the dust—

all attest it;

granted, he does it

to rid himself of lice

but the relief he feels

makes him

cry out lustily

which is a trait

more related to music

than otherwise.

The lyric moment here is after the encounter, with the speaker ponder-
ing its meaning, producing the immediate claim that there is a clear dis-
tinction between “poetic” and “natural” truths. The “poetic truth” of the
sparrow is presumably (and self-reflexively) the meaning we or the poet
attributes to it, as opposed to an objective meaning. But this opposition
quickly slides into confusion. First, the speaker’s careful recollection of
the encounter with the sparrow suggests that he is talking about an actual
sparrow, whose behavior he has observed as it moves from the window to
the ground. Second, the referent for the pronoun “it” becomes ambigu-
ous, suggesting a collapsing of the distinction between poetic and natural
truths, and between the observed behavior of the sparrow and the mean-
ing the poet attributes to it. This confusion also suggests that the bird is
by its nature poetic, and that what poetry does with the animal is as natu-
ral as the bird’s singing, a crying out lustily.
Much of the rest of this long lyric explores these connections between
the sparrow at his window, sparrows generally (the behavior of the spe-
cies that he has witnessed over years), the sounds they make, and the
significance we draw from all this. It documents the poet thinking about
the bird following the encounter, foregrounding the realization that the
individual animal and our moments of perception of it have their own
distinct existence and meaning, and that our ideas about the animal will