POEMS OF THE ANIMAL73more fully inhabit the world than humans do; the speaker asserts that
“they do not dream of us” (a dubious claim, I think), though we clearly
dream of animals. The very mysteriousness of animals—that they are
at once wholly accessible, seemingly simple and of the world, and that
their actual being, perception, and understanding of the world remain
inaccessible to us—makes them creatures of poetry.
A final broad purpose of the general animal poem is to alert us to the
idea of a creaturely community, to take us out of the all-too-human
world we mostly inhabit, or to point to intimate connections between
humans and animals. Such poems reflect our need for a kind of respite
from our increasingly urbanized, denaturalized, and environmentally
threatened culture. Imagining the animal and the world of the animal
is now an accessible and extraordinarily common mode of escape, as
evidenced by the popularity of animal films, documentaries, television
channels, and so on. Another motive, more urgent, is to call attention
to the ways we have diminished animals through cruelty, ignorance,
and our own relentless urge to proliferate. The poems by Coleridge and
Blake that I have already mentioned can certainly be read this way, but
more recent poems explicitly reflect a rise of environmental and animal
rights awareness. Poems that focus on animal kinds and encounters
with individual animals also raise these issues, of course, but I am inter-
ested here in poems that attempt to reflect and make sense of our con-
cern for the animal as a category.
Perhaps the simplest and most obvious way that poems suggest ani-
mals are part of a community is by suggesting they are kin, as we have
seen already in several of the poems discussed earlier (such as Kinnell’s
“To Christ Our Lord”). We gain this sense of kinship in different ways.
Most obviously, we are animals and are part of the same natural world,
but animals become kin through our encounters with them, and so they
become a part of our identity. These are distinct ideas, but they are
not mutua l ly exclusive. The poetr y of A. R. Ammons frequent ly ex plores
these connections. “Corsen’s Inlet” and “Four Motions for the Pea
Vines” show animals and humans as part of the same complex natural
system, at once composing larger categories and rhythms and made up
of smaller microscopic orders. The latter poem compares the growth of