Poetry and Animals

178OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

it sel f, d rive t hem onto t he shores of awa reness? The repet it ion of “ hu ma n”
in the opening lines suggest that human consciousness is isolated,
remote, and different from the world it inhabits: that the sea is capable of
“roaring elegies to birds” but not to poets. But the poem presents the
speaker as moving from this “human” isolation toward something more
“Dionysian,” a breakthrough toward language that connects to the world
or awareness without language, truer to the world and thus better (hence
the sardonic title of the poem). And this progress comes through seeing
“a hundred gulls,” and from them “a single naked gull” that “shadows
a depth in heaven for the eye.” It is these living bodies of birds, and the
single one that rises above them, that interrupts his song and then
moves it forward. “Gulls ensnare me here,” the speaker says, under-
mining his “cold lucidity of heart” and his desire to map out the “care-
ful rules of song.” The animal here is of course a symbol, a word, a dead
image that comes from previous poems (particularly Whitman’s mock-
ingbird); but it is also the opposite of all these things, the kind of life
that the poet and the poem yearn for but cannot represent or access
directly, the poet’s experience of the bird. The bird has no voice in the
poem, and the speaker cannot become the bird, yet the bird manages to
signal to the speaker the failure of his ambitions.

Openly she soars,

A miracle out of all gray sounds, the moon,

Deepening and rifting swell and formal sky.

Woman or bird, she plumes the ashening sound,

Flaunting to nothingness the rules I made.

.................................
I let all measures die. My voice is gone.

The paradox here is that the speaker yearns for a voice like that of the
bird, and its seemingly direct relationship with the physical world, but
knows he cannot have it. The animal takes away his voice, though
he actually keeps speaking. And yet his poem, his desire for poetry,
has been altered by his encounter with the gull, producing a kind of