OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID185chain” and is the “sounds now of monks / copying the texts out.” X is
part of a chain, tied to a chain, and itself a chain. It is “the gnawing now
Europe burning.” “Even this favorite beast,” the speaker realizes, is the
“gleaming chain.” The animal epiphany the speaker expects, the sense
that seeing or being animal reveals some connection that exists prior to
language, becomes an awareness instead of a deeper linking to nature
and history’s brutal determinism, what she refers to at the end of the
poem as the world’s fate, connected with death, ice, and darkness rather
than light. This knowledge comes to the speaker not from close obser-
vation of the animal but through language itself, in a series of associa-
tions prompted by the processes of perception, thought, and writing
that produce poetry.
Susan Stewart’s poem “The Owl” makes a similar link between animal
encounter and an essential process of thinking through language, but her
poem begins more self-reflexively with the thoughts that produce poetry
and ends in animal. The first couplet of the poem is “I thought some-
how a piece of cloth was tossed / into the night, a piece of cloth that
flew.”^42 This may reflect the glimpse of an owl or just the imagining of
one. In either case, the incipient moment is not one of animal encoun-
ter but one of supposed human action—human-made cloth, tossed
by a person or by the wind, which the speaker identifies by finding the
right words. Perception produces language and vice versa; poetry pro-
duces the belief that perception is only made real by being articulated
precisely. The poem is self-reflexive about its own creation, about a dark,
nagging idea, which is the need to search for an origin for the sudden
awareness of the cloth, seen through a window on a winter night. The
speaker comes to realize that this image is not produced by “human
hand” or “god.” It is something other, perhaps animal, but it is also
something the speaker instructs her readers to look up and read about
and “the kind / of thing astronomers // look down to write in books.”
Ultimately, however, the speaker names this presence, and the poem,
“the owl,” “the name that, like a key, locked out the dark.” The title refers
to something other that escapes language, the actual bird that the
speaker might or might not have seen.