Poetry and Animals

THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY47

His Heart so heavie grew, with Griefe, and Care,

That his small Feet his Body could not beare.

(115–22)

The stag goes down “shedding some teares at his owne funeral.” The
weeping stag is a Renaissance motif, interesting because it suggests the
animal both understands and feels his fate, just as a human might. As
the stag experiences the chase and its impending death in human terms,
so too the hunters are animalized, the dogs and humans becoming a
kind of single predator described from the inside out.

The Dogs their To n g u e s out of their Mouths hung long,

Their Sides did beat like Feaverish Pulse so strong,

Their Short Ribbs heave up high, then fall downe low,

As Bellowes draw in wind the same to blow.

Men tawny grew, the Sun their Skins did turne,

Their Mouths were dry, their Bowels felt to burne.

(71–76)

In the end this poem is clearly about animals, protesting the cruelty of
the hunt, while only obliquely an allegorical account of the death of
Charles I. Only readers familiar with Cavendish’s royalist sympathies
will find the allegorical meaning readily available. Curiously, even as the
poem’s fluidity helps to create sympathy for both animals and king, it
also gives its author protection both from those who see concern for ani-
mals as unworthy of rational argument or poetic treatment (because it
is merely a feminine concern, for instance) and from the antiroyalists
in power in England when the poem was published in 1653.
Cavendish’s poem shows how allegory remains a mode for the repre-
sentation of animals in early modern English poetry. By the time that
concern for animals became a topic of political and public discussion,
in the form of anticruelty laws in the late eighteenth century, allegory’s
resonance as ancient and artificial gave explicit cover for those concerns.
Virtually all of the important poems about animals in the romantic
period allow themselves to be read as allegories and, indeed, have been