THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY149by the “flex and reflex of claws, / gently pricking through sweater to
skin,” an act that suggests both comfort and pain, the cat as pet and
predator. The “tune” of the poem belongs to the cat—its purring and
its identity—the narrator insists, though it is in the language of the
speaker. The cat as cat comes into focus through these rhythms of per-
ception and interaction, playfully suggested in the poem’s final words,
addressed to the cat himself: “I-Thou, cat, I-Thou.” Borrowed from Mar-
tin Buber, the phrase “I-Thou” is about an understanding of self and
other that is dialogic (as is demonstrated in the poem), but Buber devel-
oped his philosophy in thinking about how humans can come to know
each other, overcoming the other’s otherness (“I-It”).^48 Levertov is per-
haps mocking the seriousness of her philosophical claims in the poem of
coming to know her cat, but at the same time the two creatures of the
poem are in a deep bond, with the speaker “looking too long in his pale,
fond, / dilating, contracting eyes.” Especially in the context of Levertov’s
many other poems about animals, the final line can also be read as evi-
dence of the speaker coming to an unironic regard and respect for the
life of the individual animal, of transcending her cat’s otherness. Her
eyes, like those of the cat, “reject mirrors.”^49
My goal in this chapter has been to survey the ways poems can rep-
resent and think about animals as individual beings. I end with a brief
discussion of elegies about animals, since they perhaps most forcefully
acknowledge and honor lives of individual animals. Elegies for animals
are interesting in part because they so clearly test and reveal the degree
to which animals may be thought of as close to us, as worthy of honor-
ing because they are a part of our community. At least since John Mil-
ton’s “Lycidas,” elegy has been marked by artifice—elegies are often not
so much about sincere grief at the death of another person as they are
an explicit way of displaying a commitment to a tradition of poetic con-
vention, of poets acknowledging poets, recognizing that poets do much
of the work of canonization. However, this implicit deal making (think of
Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”) cannot be a part of the
animal elegy, since the individual being remembered and canonized is
clearly not a part of the linguistic transaction. The grief that is a response
to the death of a nonhuman animal has a special meaning—and in