Poetry and Animals

60POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

Your own habitations

are cosy and private, not

pretentious temples.

Of course, you have to take lives

to keep your own, but never

kill for applause.

............ . 

And, though unconscious of God,

your Sung Eucharists are

more hallowed than ours.

The heavy-handedness of the critique of humanity is tempered by the
humor created through the brevity of the lines and stanzas and the
respect implied by speaking directly to the animals. Auden is not speak-
ing for animals but imagining that animals might be spoken to, and that
this is a morally preferable stance. “Our poets are right in assuming /
all would prefer that they were rhetorized at than about,” Auden writes
self-referentially in “Natural Linguistics.” Addressing animals is a first
step in giving them moral standing; it is both a trope representing moral
seriousness and an act that can be understood literally.
Walt Whitman begins section 32 of “Song of Myself ” with a broad
categorization of animals that similarly inverts human self-regard.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid

and self-contain’d

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of

owning things,