70POEMS OF THE ANIMALThe poem offers an ambiguous justification of hunting, but it reveals
genuine conflict over the act of killing based on an idea of affection for
the animal. Paradoxically, the sense that we are also animals, comprised
of flesh, is gained only in the mysterious act of becoming like the ani-
mal, giving up an aspect of consciousness. The poem figures the animal
as kin and other, a contradiction encountered keenly by hunters who
can kill and admire at the same time, though it is not necessary to kill
to appreciate this central contradiction. Perhaps poems about hunting
are a form of amelioration, a way of reflecting and communicating this
mystery without actual killing.
Wendell Berry’s poem “To the Unseeable Animal” finds a religious
intimation of some larger truth in an encounter with an unknowable
and invisible animal. In this poem the “unseeable animal” is a being felt
in the presence of “the oldest sycamores,” “faithful springs,” and deep
woods. The animal here is no particular creature but many possible
ones, a presence simultaneously known and imagined. In that it can be
imagined as watching us, that it is perfectly at home in the natural
world, the animal becomes a synecdoche for God. “That we do not know
you / is your perfection / and our hope.”^32 So too in Denise Levertov’s
well-known “Come Into Animal Presence,” the several specific animals
the poem describes—the serpent, rabbit, llama, and armadillo—have in
common that they appear to our imagination as complete, with “no
blemish.” “No animal / falters, but knows what it must do.”^33 As with
Elizabeth Bishop’s moose, the human response to these animals’ singu-
larity, disregard for “human approval,” and perhaps most of all silence,
is joy. Here too the animal, represented by specific but iconic individu-
als, finally suggests a “holiness [that] does not dissolve.” Regardless of
the religiosity of these poems, or the potential bombast in Dickey’s
attempt to spiritualize hunting, these poems represent the animal as
ultimately mysterious, beyond the grasp of our senses, and connected
to a plane of existence somehow superior to ours. The imagination is
only able to limn possible significance, and poetry presents the results.
These poems present the animal as ultimately pure and other, not just
in the modernist sense identified by Margot Norris and Armstrong as
strongly implying a critique of progressivist notions of culture, but also