58POEMS OF THE ANIMALabout the mariner himself, the compulsion of his action, his storytelling,
his grip on his audience, and that he never realizes or accepts forgive-
ness for his unexplained crime. That the wedding guest wanders away
forlorn, a wiser and sadder man, also makes the poem’s possible animal
rights message appear inconsequential. Indeed, an equally plausible
reading of the poem is that its collective figuration of animals (the inno-
cent albatross, the beautiful sea snakes, the skylarks’ “sweet jargoning”)
suggests that human self-consciousness, our awareness of death and
evil, prevents us from experiencing the simpler and holier existence of
the other creatures and thus separates us from them. We exist in a world
that remains permanently mysterious to us, and the other animals are a
part of that mystery. Though presumably like the other animals in lack-
ing free will, the human characters of the poem have enough awareness
to know that life is ultimately tragic and meaningless.
Defining the animal as a way of defining the human is as old and
common as beer.^11 And because we may choose to read any poem about
animals as allegorical, we may read any poem that figures the animal
as a category as ultimately about how humanity does or does not fit this
category. As always, though, there are degrees. Some poems invoke the
animal explicitly as a way of remarking upon or defining humanity,
while others make explicit their actual interest in animals. Most inevi-
tably do both. Wendell Berry’s well-known poem “The Peace of Wild
Things” is somewhat cloyingly on the anthropocentric end of this scale:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.^12