2001. THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY- Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington: Shear-
water, 1996), 15; E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986),
passim. - See, for instance, Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (New York: Vintage, 1989), 208.
- Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Lit-
erature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 17. - Robert Henryson, The Moral Fables of Aesop, ed. George Gopen (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), lines 2707–8. Subsequent citations appear in
text; translations are generally Gopen’s. - Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chau-
cer, ed. Larry Benson, Robert Pratt, and F. N. Robinson (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1987), line 2824. Subsequent citations appear in text. - Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, 111.
- David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Bird Song (New
York: Basic Books, 2005). - Ibid., 121.
- Beowulf, trans. and ed. Seamus Heaney (New York: Norton, 2001), lines 88–90. Sub-
sequent citations appear in text. - Edmund Spenser, “Lyke as a huntsman,” The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed.
William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, and Ronald Bond (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989), 640. - Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso list to hunt.”
- Tobias Menely, “Animal Signs and Ethical Significance: Expressive Creatures in the
British Georgic,” Mosaic 39, no. 4 (2006): 111–27. - Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King,” Studies in Eng-
lish Literature, 1500–1900 4, no. 3 (2005): 544. - Ibid., 538.
- Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Stag,” Selected Poems of Margaret Caven-
dish, Duchess of Newcastle (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, 1998), lines 56–57.
Italics in original. Subsequent citations appear in text. - For accounts of how romantic-period poetry reflects ideas of animal rights, see
Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and
the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). - In his biography of Gray, Robert Mack explains that Walpole asked Gray to write a
poem memorializing his cat, who did indeed drown in a large goldfish bowl. Walpole
was so pleased by the poem that he had its first six lines engraved on a plaque he placed
near the bowl. Mack argues that the poem in part reflects the good humor that existed
between Gray and Walpole, though he also says, mysteriously, that the poem “gently
and effectively places the loss of Selima, when viewed from a sympathetic point
of view, in its proper perspective.” Sympathetic to whom, one wonders. Robert L.
Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 351, 352.