- POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE207
- Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 10.
- Cristanne Miller and Elizabeth Joyce read this poem, and the creature it cele-
brates, as symbolizing African people and their subjugation by various conquerors.
Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Ca mbridge: Ha r va rd
University Press, 1995), 139–40; Elizabeth Joyce, Cultural Critique and Abstraction:
Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press,
1998), 105. - In fact, the jerboa is a common name for desert jumping mice, of which there are
about three dozen species. Moore was probably writing about the Lesser Egyptian
Jerboa. Especially outside the realm of birds, poets rarely get to the precision of
scientists. - Joanna Feit Diehl reads the poem, and the animal, as symbolic of the poet’s own
defense of self, an attempt to construct the self as ideally inviolable. Diehl, Elizabeth
Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press 1993), 59. - Moore, The Complete Poems, 117.
- Because pangolin flesh is considered both a delicacy and of medicinal value in Asia,
several species are now endangered, and all are rare. - The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939 (New York: New
Directions, 1991), 341. - Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008), 149. - J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello notes that even as she admires the physicality of
the animal in Hughes’s poem “The Jaguar,” it is still “about jaguarness embodied in
this jaguar.... There remains something Platonic about it.” Coetzee, The Lives of Ani-
mals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 53. - Daniel Hoffman, “Talking Beasts: The ‘Single Adventure’ in the Poems of Ted
Hughes,” in Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, ed. Leonard Scigaj (New York: Hall, 1992), - Most readings of Hughes’s poetry focus on the archetypal or totemic meaning
of the animals in his work. See, for instance, Chen Hong, “Hughes and Animals,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, ed. Terry Gifford (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 40–52. - Quoted in Leonard Scigaj, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 58. - Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir-
oux, 2003), 609. - Ibid., 720.
- David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 2010),
- Hughes, “Nightingale,” Collected Poems, 612; “The Moorhen,” 613; “Treecreeper,” 613;
“Mice Are Funny Little Creatures,” 1082; “Gulls Aloft,” 55; “Weasels at Work,” 631. - Don McKay, Field Marks, ed. Meira Cook (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 19.
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