68POEMS OF THE ANIMALpropose that there is something essentially good about it. “For some
of these, / It could not be the place / It is, without blood.”^28 That is, the
heaven of animals, the speaker’s thought experiment on what Platonic
animality might be, is a place of perfect predation, where the moment
of catch “may take years / in a sovereign floating of joy,” while the prey
“feel no fear, / but acceptance... / fulfilling themselves without pain.”
The omniscient speaker of the poem has become an animal in the poem,
glorying in the harsh reality of the nature of nature, recognizing that
killing and being killed are the essences of animal existence—a rather
narrow truth, but one well beyond the bounds of most ordinary human
existence.
Dickey’s haunting poem “In the Mountain Tent” presents the speaker
(presumably a hunter, though here far from the acts of pursuit or kill-
ing) stuck inside his tent because of rain, reaching a kind of romantic
union with the otherness of the natural world by imagining the animals
beyond his perception. The process begins by “hearing the shape of the
rain / Take the shape of the tent”;^29 hearing the rain on the tent allows
the speaker to use immediate sensory experience (the tent actually being
a place of confinement, of sensory deprivation) to imagine and expand
his awareness of the world around him. The situation is both a metaphor
and a means for entering the space occupied by animals by first expand-
ing awareness beyond the confines of the human skull. This is a lyric,
spontaneous process, a “free-falling... / Through the thought-out leaves
of the wood / Into the minds of animals.” Perhaps because the speaker
is a hunter, himself responsible for the deaths of animals, this fantasy is
also a way of imagining death, a loss of identity that allows for a mystical
merging with “the dead, or the beast / Itself, which thinks of a poem.”
The animal here both represents death and is the dead, the bodies of
other beings and of the speaker. This mystical experience of becoming
and rising from the dead needs the idea of the animal, both as part of
the cycles of the natural world and as that being which cannot be known
but is real and of the world, fully inhabiting the space beyond the
human. Becoming animal is also represented in Dickey’s poems “Fog
Envelops the Animals” and “The Rib” as a way of manifesting the more
abstract “unfinished desire / For life, for death and the Other” (“The