OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID171Of milk, and died
Staring.This is a modern version of classical myth, which represents hybrids of
god, man, and animal, a glimpse of the “more than human.” This virtu-
ally embodied hybrid speaks from a simultaneously debased and ideal-
ized perspective, briefly rendering a vision of human being prior to
civilization, language, or some other fall from a more natural condition.
Its perspective is also that of the pastoral (of which the poem is also a
satire), offering a brief but impossible harmony of human and animal.
Like Robinson Jeffers and Ted Hughes, Dickey is no doubt inviting read-
ers to recognize and even embrace the animal in us, our connection to
the natural world, which is made explicit in the poem’s satiric final mor-
alizing about how the legend of the sheep child keeps most boys safely
masturbating while they wait for marriage and then “raise their kind.”
In “The Sheep Child” Dickey revels in the grotesqueness of the
human-animal hybrid. The sheep child is a monster, a horrifyingly
unnatural creature. The poem traffics in the shock value of bestiality, of
imagining and detailing an actual crossing of human and animal, and
human to animal. The poem poses the question of how this crossing can
be at once desired (physically by the father of the sheep child, and figu-
ratively by the human narrator, who embraces the memory of the story)
and disgusting and debasing, flesh in a bottle. This hybrid forces us to
confront what is discomforting about the human-animal divide. Some-
thing about the animal—the body and the physical world—disgusts and
troubles us. We escape, control, and destroy it while some other part
of us loves and desires it, recognizes the animal as us. Dickey’s poem
makes us fully aware that the idea of the human depends upon a con-
tinual suppression of our animality, and that the concept of the animal
is a receptacle for those parts of us that disgust.
Dickey’s wonderful poem “For the Last Wolverine” imagines hybrid-
ity from the perspective of Native American myth about the wild ani-
mal. The poem begins with the announcement that “they will soon be
down / To one,” that the endangered wolverine, like all species headed