Poetry and Animals

144THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

always wander into varying degrees of anthropomorphism. The “he” the
poem begins with, the individual sparrow that the poem suggests is the
initial object of the speaker’s interest, becomes the totemic sparrow that
is identical to (or the identity of) the species that spans the globe: “Even
the Japanese / know him / and have painted him / sympathetically.”
“He” also becomes other sparrows and groups of sparrows the poet
has seen, as well as images and representations of him. The final long
descriptions of the bird offer examples of “his lovemaking,” which the
speaker has apparently observed firsthand. He gives two examples: one
of courtship, in which the male “throws back his head / and simply— /
yells! The din / is terrific”; and of an instance “I saw once” in which a
female is the aggressor, catching

him

by his crown-feathers

to hold him

silent,

subdued,

hanging above the city streets

until

she was through with him.

In these two examples, an instance of “typical” species behavior is coun-
tered with a description of a presumably unusual event, suggesting that
species identity is a kind of fictional abstraction, countered by the real-
ity of individual beings, or is a kind of collective that consists of all the
moments of behavior of its individual constituents.
Another tension throughout the poem is what it means to compare a
human to a (relatively insignificant) animal. As the poem’s insistence on
behavior (i.e., singing and sex) suggests, both species are driven by fun-
damental desires, which we might call instincts and which yet are “prac-
tical to the end.” These drives produce music, noise, poems, and offspring:
“his innumerable / brood,” the poet himself, and this poem. Further
suggesting a comparison of human to sparrow, the poem is grounded
in an allusion to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew in which God