Poetry and Animals

188OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

who is also like a trained dog, “always studying the rules.” This impli-
cates poetry directly, since pastoral poetry has long foregrounded the
artifice of its own conventions.^45 The poem “Crows” explicitly presents
the animal as both empty and overdetermined signifier.

Just so that each stark,

Spiked twig,

May be even more fierce

With significance,

There are these birds

As further harbingers

Of the coming wintery reduction

To sign and enigma:

The absolutely necessary

Way in which they shook snow

Out of their wings,

And then remained, inexplicably

Thus, wings half-open,

Making two large algebraic x’s

As if for emphasis,

Or in the mockery of...^46

The crows’ existence, their being perched on a branch, the position of
their wings, are “fierce / With significance” because of the presence of
the human observer. They are signs of the “wintery reduction” of the
world to black and white, life and death, and most of all, the realm of text
itself. The poem flirts with the idea that this encounter is real, that these
intelligent birds know something we do not (which they surely do), that
they are sending us a warning. Yet the signs of the birds are also random,
indifferent to and separate from human existence, empty “x’s.” The
actual animals, which the poem points to but exist only outside it, mock
those in the poem and the human observer. The poem is also just words,