Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL59

Though not without its charms, and while it is certainly about a kind
of experience that many readers will believe to be real and universal,
the poem reenacts the romantic cliché of escape to the natural world
through the simplifying trope of the animal as emblematic of stasis,
as though these animals are still tangibly a part of Eden. Despair is
presented as an inevitable condition of human existence, while “wild
things” exist in their shallow beauty, their seeming placidness and
immediacy, and most of all their lack of awareness—in short, in the ways
they differ from being human.
W.  H. Auden’s amusing poem “Natural Linguistics” begins by
asserting that “every created thing has ways of pronouncing its own-
hood,” suggesting the idea that ever y creature participates in a kind of
universal linguistics of existence and communication with the world
around it. However, the poem also describes the animal as a way of
negatively defining the human condition.

If they have never laughed, at least they have never talked drivel,

never tortured their own kind for a point of belief,

never, marching to war, inflamed by fortissimo music,

hundreds of miles from home died for a verbal whereas.^13

Auden is working against the idea of the animal as beast: degraded,
uncultured, and thus perhaps intrinsically evil: the beast as a figure for
the absence of the good that makes us human. “He behaved like an ani-
mal” normally means something bad. Here again, though, the animal
means simplicity, a kind of blank existence without meaning, morality,
or foresight. Auden has several wonderful poems about animals and
does not use them only to comment on human self-delusion. In “Talking
to Mice” he amusingly notes that in thinking about animals we tend to
class all “those animates which we call in our arrogance dumb” as “either
Goodies or Baddies. So spiders and roaches and flies we / excommuni-
cate as—ugh!—all irredeemably evil.” His sardonic poem “Address to the
Beasts” celebrates animal innocence and mocks human pretension in
neat triplets, as though acknowledging the Hegelian logic of repeatedly
comparing ourselves to the animal world.^14