OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID177that the category of the human is in large part defined by our language,
and that we cannot escape its bounds to imagine beyond the human.
We can posit and identify nonhuman languages, but we cannot speak
them or use them to represent ourselves or other animals.
James Wright’s “The Morality of Poetry” is an important example of
how thinking about poetry as an art form that roots around in the par-
adoxes of language can also lead to the question of the animal. This gor-
geous poem presents itself as a romantic lyric in the vein of Shelley’s
“Ode to the West Wind” or Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking,” with the poet- speaker meditating on the sea before him,
wondering about the purpose and origins of poetry.
I stood above the sown and generous sea
Late in the day, to muse about your words:
Your human images come to pray for hands
To wipe their vision clear, your human voice
Flinging the poem forward into sound.
Below me, roaring elegies to birds,
Intricate, cold, the waters crawled the sands,
Heaving and groaning, casting up a tree,
A shell, a can to clamber over the ground:
Slow celebration, cluttering ripple on wave.^33The speaker is addressing other poets (especially Whitman), the sea, and
language itself. There is a powerful tension in this opening stanza
between the too-human voice removed from the physical world of the sea
and gulls (ineffectually flinging words “forward into sound,” or uselessly
into the ocean) and yet taking in the flotsam of the world to produce
something ordered and meaningful. The poem’s formality, expressed in
its rhyming and insistently iambic lines, and the epigram from Whit-
man signal that the question the speaker addresses is ancient and funda-
mental, “dithyrambic,” as the speaker says at the end. Where do poetic
images come from? the speaker asks. What relation do these words, any
words, have to the world? Can individual consciousness summon and
control the words and images that come to it, or does the sea, the world