Poetry and Animals

150THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

the case of a pet is also often surprising, its depth revealing finally how
much the life of an animal can matter.
We see these facts about animal elegy reflected in Wordsworth’s great
elegiac ballad “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears.

She seemed a thing that could not feel,

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force.

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks and stones and trees.^50

This poem is not normally read as about an animal, of course. My point
is that it easily can be read as about an animal, in part because the “she”
of the poem, the mourned creature, is left anonymous, in striking con-
trast to the conventions of elegy.^51 The poem is about the shock produced
by the death of another being, and how nearly inexpressible the grief
produced by this loss is. The first stanza sets up the bond between
speaker and the beloved other while she was alive; the second stanza
attempts to reveal the stark facts of her existence now, as a corpse, in the
ground. It is relatively easy to see that the speaker is (or was) a child with
a deep attachment to the other being, and who never considered the
possibility of its death. That the child might be speaking of a beloved
animal is, I think, entirely plausible, if not provable. For instance, the
word “human” in the first stanza is normally read as referring to the
speaker himself, the nature of his fears. But it might also be read as refer-
ring to the being he has no fears about. Especially for a child, the idea of
the mortality of his or her first pet is absent or at least very different
from the fear that other people (parents and siblings, say) might die. A
companion animal is very much a being of the present moment, with
whom a child will share mostly physical experiences. The fear or antici-
pation (that is, the meaning) of the death of a pet seems comparatively