Poetry and Animals

66POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

were there, the small cats; and the parakeet—

trivial and humdrum on examination, destroying

bark and portions of the food it could not eat.^24

The speaker neatly highlights the trip to the zoo, mixing generalization
and specific detail. She too is a kind of critic, recalling a visit to a zoo
and passing judgment on the animals she sees—the monkeys “winked
too much” and the parakeet was “trivial and humdrum on examina-
tion.” The poem turns suddenly and explicitly allegorical when the
speaker recalls “[the animals’] magnificence” in the past, especially that
of the poem’s other major speaker, “that Gilgamesh among the hairy
carnivora” whom “I shall not forget.” This animal delivers a nearly two-
stanza diatribe against those who have “imposed on us with their pale /
half-fledged protestations, trembling about / in inarticulate frenzy,
saying / it is not for us to understand art; finding it / all so difficult.”
These lines make explicit that this speaking cat (presumably a lion) is,
like the poem’s speaker, a critic telling us how to respond to art. That
the poem offers a critique of criticism itself is not surprising, since this
is a common theme of Moore’s poems. What is striking is that the poem
begins as a description of a zoo, and that animality should be connected
with the cultural self-consciousness represented by criticism. What do
animals have to do with art criticism, and why should Moore’s supreme
critic, her critic of critics, be a lion?
As in “Poetry,” which is both poem and criticism and in which Moore
famously calls for art that gives “imaginary gardens with real toads in
them,” animals in “The Monkeys” are both symbols and examples of
authenticity against which the poem’s speaker measures the artifice and
decline she critiques. Yet the animals of this poem are in a zoo, where
they have become cultural artifacts, objects offered for our inspection
and judgment. Just as the poem foregrounds its own artifice through the
identical syllabic numbers in each stanza and by featuring a talking lion,
its own contradictions are explicit, since the animals are at once human
and nonhuman, beings beyond culture but here fully within culture.
Like art, the poem suggests, animals are wondrous and accessible, open
to the public, as it were, as well as otherworldly. But animals are also