Poetry and Animals

170OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

There are also poems that represent hybridity not as an implied over-
lap of human and animal but as an explicit combination of them, as
Kafka has done in several stories, including “The Metamorphosis” (man
turned to insect) and “Report to the Academy” (ape turned to human).
This hybridity is about crossing over and reporting from the other side
rather than overlap. James Dickey’s well-known poem “The Sheep
Child” imagines this doubleness with two speakers—a first-person
human narrating about his childhood and a sheep child who speaks
from within a bottle of formaldehyde in an Atlanta museum. This trans-
gressive poem invites readers to think of the sheep child as both fan-
tastical and possibly real, a legend “farm boys wild to couple / With
anything” tell each other to “keep themselves off / Animals.”^24 It is a
story the narrator has “heard from somebody.” It goes without saying
that dead infants cannot speak, let alone a sheep child “pickled in
alcohol,” so the italicized section of the poem in which the preserved
creature speaks after death, remembering his one day of life, is a wild
imagining indeed. And yet many boys are wild with sexual desire,
and some boys and men have had sex with farm animals, a reminder
that the human body is animal and acts on desires as other animals do.
This is the power of the hybrid myth that the poet-narrator remembers
and why he dares to make it speak now in the poem. The sheep child’s
monologue gives a somewhat explicit account of the sexual encounter
and his own birth. The poem’s strongest lines are about the creature’s
brief life, an explicit representation of the human-animal hybrid.

I woke, dying

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes

Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment

The great grassy world from both sides,

Man and beast in the round of their need,

And the hill wind stirred in my wool,

My hoof and my hand clasped each other,

I ate my one meal