OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID159“serpent dove,” “butterfly or bat,” “air plant,” “alligator,” “bird-reptile,”
“interchangeably man and fish,” “fire eating into air,” and so on. It is the
same as, but different from, “the Malay Dragon” and “the Tuatera,” liz-
ards from other parts of the world, complex descriptions of which
interrupt the description of the basilisk. In the second stanza one of the
basilisk’s distinctive attributes—that it can run on water—is described
as “he leaps and meets his / likeness,” which is an account both of the
lizard jumping onto his reflection and of the poem’s central trope, of
“likeness” as doubleness. The basilisk is a “king with king” in multiple
ways: because he has a reflection on water, because his running on water
makes him like Jesus Christ, and because this beast is sovereign: “He
runs, he flies, he swims, to get to / his basilica.” His name has anointed
him king, and the roots of the word “basilica” somehow link the strange
power of dangerous animals and kings. Yet the basilisk is also king in
the sense of being uniquely adapted, surviving by avoiding capture
through its ability to spring across land and water.
In another of the poem’s hybrid metaphors, the basilisk’s tail’s painted
stripes, though seemingly painted “as by a Chinese brush,” suggest a
musical “octave,” which becomes a cue for a long description of a jungle
symphony that the poem’s hidden speaker imagines the basilisk hear-
ing with delightful precision, presumably because of its oversized ears
(which the narrator never directly describes). The poem celebrates this
creature as magically superior to our prior imaginings of it yet only fully
apprehended through art, so that its real character is hybrid. In perhaps
the poem’s weirdest metaphor, the basilisk is “our Tower-of-London /
jewel that the Spaniards failed to see,” suggesting both its rare beauty
and that it is again linked with the sovereign and destructive power of
human desire represented by the mythical basilisk. So too it is “inno-
cent” and “gold-defending,” and in the poem, readily visible and quickly
gone as it falls in the final line “into the sheath / which is the shattering
sudden splash that marks his temporary loss.”
Another version of animal-hybridity that Moore explores is the talk-
ing animal. A talking animal is always hybrid, of course, made partially
human. It is a fairly common feature of children’s literature, animated
films, and even novels, but, as I have noted before, surprisingly rare in