Poetry and Animals

INTRODUCTION15

By the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear—

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.^32

This is a fascinating poem, considerably more complex than Costello’s
brief account of its effect suggests. Costello argues that the poem, “by
the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a
way that no one has explained and that no one ever will... , shows us
how to bring the living body into being within ourselves. When we read
the jaguar poem, when we recollect it afterwards in tranquility, we are
for a brief while the jaguar. He ripples within us, he takes over our body,
he is us.”^33 Costello, a novelist who is engaging in philosophy, is cer-
tainly too quick to dismiss the long history of explanations of “poetic
invention” and its effects. The response to the poem that Costello sug-
gests refers only to its final ten lines, in which the pacing jaguar is
described as somehow indifferent to being caged because of the sheer
force of its desire to hunt. “There’s no cage to him” because his instincts,
“the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear,” appear to blind him to
his confinement. That a reader can imagine the physical being of the
jaguar (as Costello says, “bring the living body into being within our-
selves”) results from the poem’s reduction of the animal’s ability to per-
ceive and understand its actual situation, and from the wonderful lines
at the end of the poem that create a forceful sense of the cat’s pacing,
heightened by the contrast to the other inert animals of the zoo. The
poem describes a relatively complex approach to the jaguar, an encoun-
ter made to seem objective by the absence of an explicit narrator of the
description. Like the crowd in the poem, the reader is inexorably led
past the other caged animals to the pacing jaguar. The sudden insight
the poem gives of the individual jaguar’s sheer independence is also an
assertion of an idea of animal being: that its predatory instinct over-
powers its awareness of its immediate environment. It is also possible,