POEMS OF THE ANIMAL71as connecting with an ancient tradition that links the animal to the
divine and unfallen. That the mystery of animals should be connected
with divinity might seem like a modern phenomenon since it turns the
pre-Darwinian chain of being on its head, with the “lower creatures” as the
most divine and humanity as fallen, beast-like. Richard Wilbur’s poem
“Beasts” makes this point, with the “beasts in their major freedom /
Slumber[ing] in peace” under the full moon.^34 Even the werewolf,
returning to beast, finds contentment in the darkness, while people find
evening “painful,” “making such dreams” that will convince them that
nature is full of horror instead of peace. But the “peace of wild things”
(to quote Berry again) has long had a hold on our imaginations, even as
we feared, hunted, domesticated, and heaped abuse of various kinds on
animals, and even as orthodox religious belief asserted human excep-
tionalism. Ancient cave paintings, revealing animals as forms of more
distant omniscient powers, and Christ as lamb are two obvious exam-
ples of the animal linked to the divine. The anonymous medieval lyric
“Cuckoo” associates the animal with spring, rebirth, and rejoicing. Wil-
liam Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” presents animals as entirely of the
realm of innocence, always divine, and the cruelty and pain we inflict
upon them as signs of the corruption of our individual imaginations
and collective culture. It is not implausible that Coleridge’s apparent
sympathy for animals in “The Young Ass” and even “Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” has to do with his pantheism, the belief in “the one Life within
us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,” as he
puts it in “The Aeolian Harp.” The romantic yearning for perceptions of
a consciousness in the physical world—confirmation that our own being
is connected to the divine—can find in animals the most concrete (but
still finally unknowable) sign of that other consciousness.
A more clearly modern problematizing of the animal occurs in Law-
rence Raab’s poem “For the Animals,” which puzzles over the problem
of the animal as word even as it subtly satirizes the warm feelings of
sincerity that words and images of animals may create. The duality of
the poem is signaled in part by the fact that the poem’s epigraph is “for
my mother,” whom the speaker of the poem acknowledges as having
given him the names of the animals. That the mother created a sense of