Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL61

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands

of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.^15

The animal as abstraction stands in as contrast for what seems diseased
or weak about human being and culture, and by implication, for those
values the speaker of the poem wishes to assert for himself. However,
Whitman is one of the great poets of invoking, creating, and dissolv-
ing categories. Thus from this slack generalization about animals, the
speaker of “Song of Myself ” moves to recognize affinities with individ-
ual animals: “Tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their pos-
session.” These deep similarities between him and other specific animals
are “relations,” another broad category of encounter, made concrete in
the thrilling account of riding a stallion that ends this section.

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my

caresses,

Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,

Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,

Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly

moving.

His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,

His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around

and return.

This encounter stands for these broader relations with animals, that we
may find them beautiful and powerful, and in doing so we may merge
with them imaginatively. The passage can also be read as an allegory of
sexual encounter; the contact with the animal body reminds us that
the human body is also animal. More radically, Whitman entertains the
idea that there can be joy in our contact with an animal body.
Many poems follow the strategy of using a single animal to represent
the animal as a category in order to set up a (usually comic) commentary