Poetry and Animals

160OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

serious poems about animals. The speaker of Moore’s poem “Melanch-
thon” (first published as “Black Earth”) is an elephant ruminating on
what it means to be an elephant. The poem begins as though we are
overhearing the speaker midlecture, addressing the animal directly and
answering the question, What, exactly, are you?

Openly, yes,

with the naturalness

of the hippopotamus or the alligator

when it climbs out on the bank to experience the

sun, I do these

things which I do, which please

no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-

merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

in view is a

renaissance.^9

There is obvious comedy in a talking animal, at least initially. The par-
ticular comedy here is that the elephant speaker is highly articulate and
philosophical as it tries to explain its essential nature. It is who it is
because it does the things it does, an embodied view of existence that
points to a fundamental similarity between human and animal. The
poem’s elephant speaker submerges itself in mud: “Do away / with it and
I am myself done away with,” which can mean that the elephant needs
mud and water to survive the heat, that this is an activity that partially
defines elephant behavior, and that the encrusted mud (its new surface)
is now a part of the elephant. The poem here also poses the question of
what defines being—learned or instinctive behavior, its actions or its
body, culture or genetics. Being elephant is inhabiting “elephant-skin,”
as the speaker says in the fifth stanza. The speaker spends most of the
first half of the poem explaining that skin is both definitive and some-
thing that “I inhabit,” a covering for the self. The poem is also about the
paradox that although this animal reveals so much about itself—it is