Poetry and Animals

14INTRODUCTION

and representing animals, a claim consistent with what Coetzee has
written in other places. Costello’s argument is presented explicitly as a
fragment, its introduction cut short by the fact that the novella’s actual
protagonist (Costello’s son), who relates events from his perspective,
arrives at his mother’s lecture at least half an hour late. Elizabeth Costello
has begun her lecture by identifying “that kind of poetry [in which]
animals stand for human qualities,” which is to say, poetry that is not
about animals but uses them allegorically to represent entirely human
concerns.^31 The difficulty of actually identifying or defining poems only
seemingly about animals is suggested by the fact that Costello never
attempts to do so. Nonetheless, Costello opposes allegorical poetry to
two poems by Ted Hughes, which she suggests represent what poetry at
its best can do for animals.
The first poem she discusses, which the narrator explains is in a
handout passed around in the lecture, but which Coetzee himself does
not reproduce in his text, is Hughes’s poem “The Jaguar,” which I quote
here in full:

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut

Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.

Fatigue with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil

Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or

Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.

It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives

At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,

As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged

Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—

The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,