48THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORYread as allegories about primarily human affairs, or otherwise ignored,
until the rise of animal-oriented criticism in the past decade. The most
interesting of these are Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Mouse’s Petition”;
William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” “The Lamb,” and “The Tyger”;
Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse”; John Clare’s “The Badger” and many oth-
ers; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “To a
Young Ass”; and John Keats’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s great bird
poems. Like Cavendish’s poem, these poems depend on reader sympa-
thy for actual animals for their allegorical potential—that is, unlike
traditional fables, these poems are literally about concern for or interest
in animals, so that their hidden allegorical meanings (about matters
of class or spirituality) depend upon the reader seeing through a seem-
ingly trivial interest in an animal. That these poems also reflect real
concern for actual animals is so obvious that it ought to be surprising
that the “surtext” of animal sympathy has been ignored by criticism for
so long.^28 Indeed, collectively these poems show the end of a strict for-
mal opposition of human and animal; that concern for the animal isn’t
allegorical for some other kind of concern but, in Coleridge’s terms,
symbolic of it, an example of a kind of imagination that reaches out for
other beings.
I will end this chapter with a final example that demonstrates the
complexity of allegorical poems about animals. Thomas Gray’s “Ode
on the Death of a Favorite Cat” shows that sympathy for animals is not
a prerequisite for a poem that appears to be about an actual animal.
Indeed, Gray’s poem is one of the cruelest animal fables I have encoun-
tered. It tells a story not about a generic cat but of a particular favorite
cat, identified explicitly as “Selima” in the poem. It is an ode in the sense
of being a memorial, but the title is ironic, since the poem is really a
fable that presents the cat as an allegorical example of the follies of
young women. That the poem is based on a particular cat (one owned
by Gray’s friend Horace Walpole) is revealed by the seemingly lovingly
detailed description of the cat in the second stanza.^29
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,