Poetry and Animals

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY147

For an hour

we are incorruptible.

This is a way of becoming animal very different from that imagined by
Deleuze and Guattari, but one the poem shows as common and power-
ful. The poem describes a moment of contact with another animal that
is based not in thinking but in a kind of shared reverie, in the speaker
imagining what the horse is dreaming. The poem’s power comes from
the suggestion that dream and imagination are animal sensibilities of
the body (“heart and bone”) that allow for the possibility of love between
creatures. This is a kind of becoming animal only possible with a com-
panion and when both human and animal can take physical and spiri-
tual pleasure from extensive contact.
James Wright’s well-known poem “A Blessing” also celebrates the
transformative power of contact with horses, in this case “two Indian
ponies” that come to “welcome my friend and me” by the side of the
road.^41 The poem is typically read as reflecting the neediness of the
speaker or even as an example of neosurrealism, interpretations that
undermine the possibility that an encounter with an animal can be
meaningful in itself.^42 Certainly the speaker of the poem is effusive in
imagining the animals’ emotions; he leaps from identifying the place
of the encounter in the first line to the effect of the encounter in the
second, expressed through the personification of the “twilight” that
“bounds softly forth on the grass.” The yearning the speaker feels in and
for the horses seems to spread into the landscape, a sign of how trans-
formative this sudden bond with another creature can be. The animals
themselves, “those two Indian ponies,” are already in some way famil-
iar to the speaker simply as horses and because of the geographical con-
text. The reality the poem aims to describe is of the power of this desire
of man and horse for mutual contact. The speaker expresses this at first
by insisting on full knowledge of what the horses feel, and that this can
only be joy, rather than, say, hunger: their eyes “darken with kindness”;
“They have come gladly”; “They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain
their happiness / that we have come.” That “they love each other” and
“there is no loneliness like theirs” succinctly expresses that the speaker