Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL69

Rib”).^30 The speakers of each of these poems is explicit in his inability
actually to define the animal, to represent it, though this doesn’t stop
him from imagining the animal as that category of being that enables
human celebration of death and killing.
Like Dickey, Galway Kinnell has written many poems about animals
and our relations with them. Kinnell’s poem “To Christ Our Lord”
depicts the mystery of the animal through the perspective of a young boy
hunting at Christmastime. This smart and subtle poem centers on a boy’s
experience of shooting a bird and then having that act blessed in a grace
before the Christmas meal made from the bird. Both experiences are
filled with unresolved conflict. During the hunt,

He had not wanted to shoot. The sound

Of wings beating into the hushed morning

Had stirred his love, and his fingers

Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,

Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.^31

Like the mariner in Coleridge’s poem, that he fires is a mystery, an act
that is at once willful and without will, as though some instinct has taken
over. Also like that poem, Kinnell’s poem meditates on the idea that the
animal body can at once be sacred and beyond the scope of divinity. Like
Christ, animals are of the body of God and sacrificed by God, given
away for and to humans. At the dinner “the grace praised his wicked
act.” In eating the animal, he must make another decision, as “the bird on
the plate / Stared at his stricken appetite.” In this conflict too all he can do
is “surrender / To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.”
Both acts are in a sense naturalized by the fact that the boy knows, and
the narrator tells us, that others animals hunt, kill, and eat as well.

The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust

And wolves floated lightfooted on the land

Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen.

Indoors snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted

A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.