Poetry and Animals

180OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To m y r i g h t ,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year’s horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.^36

Until its final line, the poem is almost a parody of lyric spontaneity—a
speaker-poet in the tradition of Wordsworth and Frost, who defines
himself through a precise and detailed perception of his surround-
ings in the moment, presumably to find some solace and discover the
vitality of his imagination. Or like Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” he appears to construct some kind of
imaginative unity, a sense of place, through a full attention to his vari-
ous senses. With these invocations and conventions, the last line of
the poem comes as a shock—how can such small presences produce the
dramatic conclusion that he has “wasted” his life? This question has
been answered in many ways by readers and critics, but I would like to
suggest that it has something to do with the figuring of animals that
occupies nearly every line of the poem. The world that impinges on him
in this lyric moment, that is carefully set up in the poem’s linguistic
dance, is one of animals always in the background. These animals do not
(as in “Blessing”) have any interest in the speaker or the human world
in general. They are the world, living as they do. They are an expression
of fullness and meaning, of living, that signals a human failing. To be
human in this poem, or at least to be the first-person speaker of a poem,
is to live in language, in a search for meaning. The animals have a home
and know where to be. They produce waste without apparently feeling
the need to produce, and thus without being aware of the failure to pro-
duce (meaning), to have “wasted my life.” The hybridity of this poem,
like that of many other poems in Wright’s book,^37 is in the idea that
the speaker’s longed-for meaning lies in a space that includes animal