28THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORYoffensive not just to those who wish to preserve some sense of the dis-
tinctive power of human being but also to those sympathetic to an idea
of animal difference. In this chapter I want to explore poems that use
animals allegorically to represent something else. My goal is to exam-
ine the category of allegorical animal poems frequently invoked as a
way of distinguishing what “real” animal poetry is. Does such a cate-
gory exist? How can we define the boundaries between poems that use
animals to signal purely human concerns and those that represent ani-
mals in themselves? My argument is that in the early modern history of
English literature, allegorical representations of animals are character-
ized by doubleness and complexity; rather than transparently referring
to a primarily human significance, animal allegories simultaneously hide
and reveal the contested nature of the boundary between human and
animal.
The purely anthropocentric, or allegorical, animal poem has an ori-
gin in the animal fable. This ancient form is not, strictly speaking,
poetic, since animal fables are narratives, though many of these are in
verse. Indeed, animal fables are surprisingly diverse, being expressed
orally, in prose and verse, and having survived in various forms for
millennia. Animal fables involve talking (or otherwise anthropomor-
phized) animals who allegorically reveal an explicit vice or virtue or
some other form of folk wisdom. Fables fulfill the Longinian dictum to
please and to instruct, which is perhaps why they figure so prominently
in literature of the Middle Ages. It is nearly standard wisdom that fables
are not actually about animals and that the allegorical purposes of these
figured beings—their comic and simplistic characters, the fact that they
are made to speak—make them imaginary creations solely in service
of human culture. Joyce Salisbury says about animal fables that “while
these texts seem to be about animals, in fact, the works use animals
to discuss human society, to mirror humanity. When we study these
texts, we learn very little about animals and a great deal about what
medieval thinkers thought about themselves.”^4 Nona Flores argues that
although people of the Middle Ages no doubt were more familiar with
domestic animals than we are, animals were converted into symbolic
meaning through various cultural forms, including animal fables, so